RIP Severino Baraldi

 

Gazzetta di Montova

November 25, 2023

 

Farewell to Severino Baraldi, he also illustrated Salgari and Stevenson

The doyen of Italian illustrators, born in Sermide in 1930, was 92 years old: he died last Tuesday in Milan

The ugly duckling and Cinderella, but so does the Bible. It ranged from fairy tales to the Holy Scriptures. And of course, from the last of the Mohicans to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table to the conquest of the West and the pirates. And again: Pinocchio, Tom Thumb, Aladdin, the Iliad, Kim; from Salgari to Kipling, from Stevenson to Giambattista Basile's "Lo cunto de li cunti", and then schoolbooks and encyclopedias.

Severino Baraldi - doyen of Italian illustrators, born in Sermide in 1930, he was 92 years old - died last Tuesday in Milan, where he had moved in 1955, hired by an advertising studio. In 1956 he was entrusted with the task of illustrating the Bible for Messaggero di Sant'Antonio, a publishing house in Padua. A very long career of satisfactions and goals achieved in an art that is always renewed over time, but that perhaps in the past decades, before the internet and virtual reality, had found its golden age, with that didactic, pedagogical flavor, which today seems to have vanished. Baraldi's success was not only with the public but also with critics: he was one of the great illustrators, together with Achille Beltrame and Walter Molino.

In 1981, in Tokyo, he was awarded the Shogakukan Prize. From 1985 to the summer of 2022, he drew the column "Fatti del giorno" of the weekly "Famiglia cristiana". In 1994 Fratelli Fabbri publishers commissioned him to illustrate the Bible edited by Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi. It is difficult not to fantasize how the pirates of Malaysia were not the ones he imagined as a child and as a young man boarding some barge on the Po di Sermide.

BARALDI, Severino

Born: 12/10/1930, Sermide, Lombardy, Italy

Died: 11/21/2023, Milan, Lombardy, Italy

 

Severingo Baraldi’s westerns – illustrator, artist:

Far West

Tex Willer

Last of the Mohicans

Capitan Miki