Anatomy of Design

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ANATOMY OF DESIGN

“Discover all that you don’t usually see” is an ostensibly benign slogan

introduced in a 2005 advertising campaign for L’Espresso, the Italian newsweekly.

For a magazine that prides itself on getting behind news stories, the slogan is

also rather predictable and pedestrian. What sears these words unforgettably

into the public’s consciousness is the startling imagery that accompanies it.

Each full-page or double-spread advertisement features an eerie version

of a famous Renaissance religious painting that looks like it was put through an

X-ray machine. However, what is revealed is not the underpainting or drawing

usually seen when for purposes of restoration an old painting is exposed to

X-rays; instead, what materializes is a precise human skeleton, as though the

figure in the painting was actually made of skin and bone. Of course, a classic

painting like

The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, one (of many) where the figure is

shown tied to a tree and shot with arrows, is just an oil-on-canvas depiction of

a man, not a real man with a real skeleton. But this campaign shows what

might be possible if iconic depictions were, in fact, of real people.

The campaign is actually kind of creepy while at the same time

gripping—odd but beautiful—in large part because most people are endlessly

fascinated by transparencies, especially skeletons. Whether at Halloween or in

horror films, the bony armatures are ominously gruesome yet comfortingly

familiar. They are also the great human equalizer. No matter how we appear in

our birthday suits—beautiful or plain, black or white, scarred or pristine—as

skeletons we are reduced to the same fundamental component; the thighbone is

indeed connected to the hipbone, which is the only aesthetic that matters.

These advertisements seem to be saying that behind all the art and

artifice, even these saints, madonnas, martyrs, and angels are composed of

the same basic stock. That’s one reason why no matter how peculiar the

paintings appear in their X-ray state, it is difficult not to appreciate them as

works of art in their own right. But just in case the viewer doesn’t understand

the concept or has never seen the original paintings, small reproductions of

the originals appear at the bottom of the ads.

The

L’Espresso campaign liberally borrows from various sources, not

least the common loan of classical art in advertisements for all kinds of

products. Some ads show an exact reproduction of say, the

Mona Lisa, while

others involve transforming the art to look bizarrely contemporary, estranged

from original context, like the one here of a photograph of Vincent van Gogh

wearing current men’s fashion and posing like his famous self-portrait, which

he is holding. Famous paintings are ready-made eye-catchers because the

majority of viewers know the references but are pleased by the slight or

radical skewering of icons. However, it may not be possible to be more radical

than the

L’Espresso ads.

X-raying the paintings is unique to this campaign, but X-ray art or

photography in advertising and editorial illustrations has been used repeatedly

and for different reasons. While MRIs and CAT scans have overtaken the X-ray

for precise body imaging, the translucent look of fluoroscopic film strikes a

sense of mystery on the one hand and is stunningly decorative on the other.

What’s more, thanks to Superman, we all wish we had the power of X-ray

vision. As illustrations, X-rays exude a kind of complexity that would seem dated

if it were straight realism. In the

L’Espresso ads, the X-ray somehow

modernizes these venerable paintings.

This campaign succeeds not because it is a clever marriage of word and

image but because the average viewer is persistently fascinated with skulls. As

gruesome as they are made to appear in horror film posters and paperback

mystery book covers, the skull is not entirely grotesque but rather possesses a

curious symmetrical beauty that comes through in the

L’Espresso ads.

L’Espresso

Designer: Massimo Verrone, Lowe Pirella Agency

2002 Discover everything you usually can’t see. L’Espresso reveals all the

secrets of paintings by famous artists, campaign

ad: Massimo Verrone cw: Paolo Platania p: Paolo Franco s: Lowe Pirella, Milan

Campaign for a series on art in magazine “L’Espresso.”

Go to the masters

Human x-rays

Fascination with skulls