The Overlooked, Honored: A Moody Rat Portrait in the Italian Poster Style
He is beautiful, and the portrait knows that is an argument it has to win. Head raised, nose lifted to the light, one long whisker trailing down his chest like a plumb line, the rat receives the most dignified staging in our Italian Poster Style series, the full aperitivo poster treatment of darkness and lamplight, and rises to it completely. This is the series' founding wager in its purest form: that the stage makes the sitter, that any creature, given Cappiello's darkness and a raking warm light, will show you the portrait it was carrying all along.
The rat has waited longest for the invitation. Every other animal in the menagerie has some lobby, some fable, some calendar. The rat has a reputation written by his enemies. The portrait is his right of reply, and he delivers it simply by holding still and being, at monumental scale, undeniable.
From the Collection
Vintage Rat Wall Art Print, 1920's Italian Poster Style
A rat's head raised in monumental profile, whiskers long, lit in cream and rust on velvet black.
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VIEW THE PRINTPrint Details
- Archival matte paper, 189 g/m², with pigment inks
- Unframed: 12″ × 18″, 20″ × 30″ or 24″ × 36″
- Framed in Black, Red Oak or White Ayous wood, ready to hang
- Printed on demand; allow 5 to 12 business days for delivery
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The Posters Behind the Series
The poster was always the art of the overlooked thing made glorious. A bitter liqueur, a bicycle tire, a brand of pasta: the Italian poster age took commodities nobody daydreamed about and, with a dark ground and a single glowing figure, made them unforgettable, the transformation we celebrate in the Maccheroni poster. The rat is that tradition's ultimate test case, the subject with the worst publicity in the animal kingdom, handed the best stage in Italy.
He also fits the poster's secret requirement, that the figure be pure character. Whatever else the rat is, he is never bland. Two seconds of a pedestrian's attention, the old formula says, and the rat, like the jester and the devil before him, spends both of them completely.
Reading the Portrait
The pose is an orator's: muzzle up, throat open, caught at the top of a sniff that seems about to become a statement. The eye is a black pearl with a bright window in it, intelligent and entirely without apology, and the ear, thin as a shell, glows rust at its rim where the light comes through. Around the muzzle, the whiskers radiate in fine pale strokes, and one champion whisker descends the whole length of the chest, a single drawn line that gives the portrait its strange elegance, like the string of a instrument left sounding.
The fur is the series' most honest hatching, grey deepening to charcoal on the back, warming to cream and rust where the lamplight takes the throat and chest. Nothing is softened. The rat's narrow, clever head keeps its shape, and the shape, at this scale, in this light, turns out to have the lines of a greyhound, a thoroughbred of the drains.
The Rat in Italy
Italy and the rat have history, and it is not all dark. Venice, which suffered the plague as a port suffers weather, answered with the world's first quarantine stations on its lagoon islands, a system that changed medicine forever, and the rat was its unwilling teacher. In the centuries since, the animal has been the shadow citizen of every Italian city, Naples and Rome and Genoa, living the parallel life in the walls and drains, too intelligent to evict and too useful, as scavenger and survivor, to wholly curse.
Italian even keeps a tenderness for his small cousin: the mouse is topo, and Topolino, little mouse, is the name Italy gave Mickey Mouse, whose Italian comics became a national institution. The rat portrait stands in that softened line. Given the stage and the light, the shadow citizen turns out to have a statesman's profile.
Velvet and the Engraved Line
The rat's coat is short and close, and the portrait builds it from the densest hatching in the series, fine parallel strokes that stream over the head and neck like water over a stone, gathering into darkness at the spine and breaking into light at the throat. It is engraving as weather, and it gives the animal a sheen, the polished look of a creature perpetually in motion even while posed.
On the scratched velvet ground he reads at first as pure silhouette, then the details arrive: the ear's ember rim, the bright eye, the long white whisker. The portrait rewards the second look more than any other in the menagerie, which is, the rat would want us to note, exactly his experience of the world in reverse.
One of a Menagerie
The rat keeps company with the rest of the series, the honored dog and the monumental pigeon, the cats and the kings, all staged on the same dark ground, a menagerie introduced in Italian-Inspired Animal Prints: Quiet Drama with a Graphic Edge. He is its most argumentative picture and, we find, its most discussed. The whole company is in our 1920's Italian Poster Style collection.
