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I didn’t know anything about Italian artist Antonio Rubino (1880–1964) until I went searching for information about this book’s creator. Wikipedia describes Rubino as an illustrator, cartoonist, animation director, screenwriter, playwright, author and poet who was also the most prolific comics illustrator in Italy before the First World War. Versi e Disegni is a product of those pre-war years, being published in 1911, a collection of the artist’s poetry with illustrations that range from the grotesquely comic to careful delineations reminiscent of later drawings by Wallace Smith and Dugald Stewart Walker.

The title page sets the mood with its picture of an elegant woman surrounded by a tangle of orchids, fungi, small animals and disembodied eyeballs. The uneven tone continues inside, veering from mythological scenes that feature a surprising quantity of tentacles, to cutesy fare of a type closer to the illustrations from Rubino’s cartoons and children’s books. Not everything in the drawings is to my taste—I’ve never found pictures of gurning gnomes delightful—but it’s all very assured and well-presented, with decorative borders that vary from page to page. Given Rubino’s later successes it’s unlikely there’s much more like Versi e Disegni in his oeuvre but if there is I’d like to see it. His first illustration commission from 1905, for the libretto of Alberto Colantuoni’s operatic adaptation of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, may be seen here, with the artist confusingly credited by his other forename, Augusto.

• Further reading: The dreamy illustrations of Antonio Rubino

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