Flavio Costantini

Flavio Costantini was an Italian painter and illustrator. Costantini created portraits of writers and artists for newspapers, and illustrated several novels. His early works were inspired by the novelist Franz Kafka, and by literary, utopian, and anarchist ideals. His later work presented a pessimistic view of civilization. He created series of paintings exploring historical themes: anarchy, the wreck of the Titanic, alchemy, Mozart, the French Revolution and its victims, Yekaterinburg, and the murder of Nicholas II and his family. His last series offered a dark reading of Pinocchio, which he considered one of the three or four greatest Italian novels.