The work, released in 2010 in Italian and in English, has two precise intentions. The first is to safeguard and pass on the memory of a period when advertising was synonymous with art; the insurance industry, with the help of the great masters of poster design, was at the forefront in transmitting the message of the importance of free social security. The second is to gather in a single publication, contributions from the archives of the various companies already active in the 19th or first half of the 20th century, and then merged into the Generali Group.

Posters, flyers and calendars produced over more than half a century alternate with the biographies of the leading illustrators (Metlicovitz, Beltrame, Dudovich, Boccasile, etc.) and “snapshots of history” that recall the context in which these works of art came into being: an overview introduced chapter by chapter by texts written by Pietro Egidi, the book’s scientific editor, which illustrates not only the works that are part of the artistic heritage of the Group, but also those found in the Salce Collection – the most significant national collection of advertising posters – and other public or private collections.

Two other chapters are dedicated respectively to the so-called “small ads” and to contributions of some of the Group’s foreign companies, mostly from France and Spain. There is also space for an “extra” dedicated to comics, cartoons and logos produced from 1985 onwards by artists such as Milo Manara, Marco Biassoni and Giorgio Forattini to promote a number of insurance products.

The image. The Generali Group and the art of advertising / Generali. Circolo aziendale; [Group in-house editorial communication; edited by Elisabetta Delfabro, Peter Egidi, Annamaria Miot, Roberto Rosasco]

[Trieste]: Generali. Circolo aziendale, 2010 (Pordenone: Sa. Ge. Print) 207 pp. ill.; 24 cm