Vintage Poster Archives
Cappiello Vermouth Cora 1920s | Vintage Advertising Poster
Cappiello Vermouth Cora 1920s | Vintage Advertising Poster
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A grinning red devil sits cross-legged in mid-air, bat wings spanning the full width of a deep crimson ground, both hands raised around an amber bottle of Cora vermouth, a straw at his lips. Cappiello rendered the figure in flat cadmium orange-red, the wing membranes translucent and streaked with darker veins, the horned head lit with an inner warmth against the near-black flanks of the composition. Bold yellow capitals carry 'VERMOUTH' across the lower-left; 'CORA' in larger display type anchors the lower-right. The Vercasson printer mark and French visa stamp 8075 sit at the base.
Leonetto Cappiello (1875–1942) designed this poster for Vermouth Cora of Turin around 1920, lithographed by Vercasson of Paris. It belongs to the strand of his work that used a single fantastical figure isolated against a saturated ground: the same logic as his 1906 Maurin Quina green devil, his 1911 Longines pocket-watch demon, and a series of Italian aperitif commissions through the 1910s and 1920s. Cappiello's reduction of an advertisement to one bold character against near-darkness was a structural break from the decorative Belle Époque affiche and proved to be one of the most copied ideas in twentieth-century commercial lithography.
Vermouth Cora was produced in the Piedmont, the region that had centred Italian vermouth production since the late eighteenth century. The poster survives in the Museo Nazionale Collezione Salce in Treviso, one of Italy's principal holdings of advertising lithography.
Reproduced here as an archival print on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper. The design is from c.1920; the print is freshly produced.
