IL MAESTRO'S MASTERWORKS

Stephen Bayley takes us on a journey through cars as art, via the Alfa Romeo Giulia, Iso Grifo, Lotus Esprit and Fiat Panda

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Opera is dead. And has been for quite a long time. I don't care what anybody says about Poulenc and Prokofiev, I cannot be persuaded that any listenable music theatre has been written since Puccini. (His Turandot, unfinished at his death, had its first performance at Milan's La Scala on 25 April 1926.) Dopo? Niente!

Car design is dead, too. I don't care what anybody says about all that stuff you see on the streets, you cannot convince me that any beautiful cars have been made since Giorgetto Giugiaro's ItalDesign was sold to Lamborghini Holdings SpA in 2015. (Lamborghini is, of course, a Volkswagen brand and this was a financial device to consolidate German business in Italy.)

Opera and cars are art forms at which the Italians always excelled, since extravagant drama and beauty are involved in each. But no more, they are both defunct. Huge historical forces are at work. Long ago, the disappearance of the chassis (to which an artist-craftsman might attach a tailored body) undermined 'coachbuilding'. And, more recently, the gradual accumulation of in-house expertise in the motor industry made all but the very best design consultants redundant. The exception was Giugiaro.

ItalDesign, Giugiaro's creation, was, from 1968 to its sale 47 years later, the outstanding independent design studio, outperforming – both artistically and financially - the traditional carrozzerie of Bertone and Pininfarina, which were presenting symptoms of exhaustion.

Historically, if Pininfarina with its handsome and sustained work for Ferrari and Lancia had established a reputation for elegance, then Bertone was better-known for adventurous shape-making. Think of the 1953 Berlina Aerodinimica Tecnica (BAT) cars: bravura demonstrations of aesthetic audacity, if not of technological mastery of the science of airflow.