GIARDINO

VITTORIO GIARDINO JONAS FINK Una Vita Sospesa, Rizzoli Lizard 2018 Original cover. This illustration was also published in the complete Jonas Fink series by Casterman in 2020. Signed. India ink and watercolor on paper 35 × 47 cm (13.78 × 18.5 in.) This image was created for the cover of the complete Italian edition of Jonas Fink, which brings together the three previous volumes. My idea was to recall, with a few variations, the cover of the first volume, as if to close a circle begun more than 20 years earlier. On the cover of the first volume, Jonas crosses the Charles Bridge to the left, in a sense "entering" the pages of the book. On the cover of the complete edition, by contrast, Jonas on the Staroměstské Náměstí walks to the right, definitively "exiting" the book, thus marking the end of the story. But in both, snow descends in Prague. Vittorio Giardino Jonas Fink is one of the major series on the Jewish world in comics. This is all the more remarkable given that Vittorio Giardino hails from the land of Hugo Pratt and Primo Levi. It's also one of the most remarkable depictions of the Communist world in Mitteleuropa in the 1950s. Here we see his hero, the young Jew Jonas Fink, in Prague's Old Town Square, with the Church of Our Lady of Týn perched on the horizon and the famous astronomical clock of the Town Hall on the left. All Giardino's qualities are to be found here: a subtle sense of light and color that accurately renders the Prague winter sky, and that flawless precision of detail that makes the Bolognese artist his country's most brilliant exponent of Ligne claire.