Italian designer Flaminio Bertoni is widely regarded as one of the 20th century's most gifted automotive designers. He was responsible for designing the bodywork of such classic cars as the functional "2CV". His most alluring work, the Citroën DS 19, was presented to the public 50 years ago this week.



Bertoni was born in Masagno, a small town in northern Italy, on January 10th in 1903. He began to attend technical school but had to leave the school after his father's early death in 1918. It now was him who had to earn money to support his family - and he soon found a job as an apprentice joiner at Carrozzeria Macchi, a carmaker in Varese. In his spare time, he studied sculpture. By 1924 he was head draughtsman at Macchi but, five years later, he resigned after a row with the management and set up his own sculpture studio.



Bertoni’s studio flourished until in 1931 he fell in love with Giovanna Barcella and his mother forbade him to marry her. Bertoni responded by closing his studio in Varese and moving to Paris with Giovanna, whom he made his wife. The following April their son, Leonardo, was born and two days later Flaminio Bertoni was offered a job at Citroën. The car company was at that time renowned as the world’s most innovative carmaker with an obsessive commitment to research and development. Its chevron-shaped corporate symbol was modelled on the gears designed by its founder, André Citroën.



Bertoni was asked to develop an all-metal body for the company’s next new model, the Traction Avant, which would make the car lighter than the partially wooden vehicles of the day. He produced a car in which weight was evenly distributed and air flowed freely to increase speed. The final component was the shape of the vehicle, its "lines" which Bertoni is said to have created in a single night. When launched in 1934, the Traction Avant was described as: "so new, so bold, so full of original ideas". However, Traction Avant's development had been so expensive that Citroën was ruined financially and, only months after the launch, was taken over by tyre maker Michelin. Flaminio Bertoni remained in the company.


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His next project was to commission a "very small car" which was to be Citroën’s equivalent of Volkswagen’s Beetle. It was because of the war that Citroën had to postpone the presentation of the car and secretly bury the prototypes to make sure the Germans wouldn't discover it. The car was finally presented as the 2 CV at the 1948 Paris Motor Show. Initial orders were slow but, over the next forty years, Citroën was to manufacture more than 5 million 2 CVs.

And then there was the DS 19, Bertoni's most alluring work. Citroën wanted it to be "the world’s best, most beautiful, most comfortable and most advanced car". And the result turned out to be exactly what had been asked for: the DS 19 was soon to be called 'Goddess’ (Déesse means Goddess in French). The car was the sensation of the 1955 Paris Motor Show. Excited crowds flocked to the Citroën stand to gain a first glimpse of the new car, and the company took orders for 750 cars in the first 45 minutes and for a total of 12,000 by the end of the first day. Only nine years later, Flaminio Bertoni died.

He is of course well remembered among car lovers and developers. And so, for the iconic DS's 50. birthday last week, some 80 models - including a DS Safari first owned by Sir Alec Guinness and a DS 19 shipped over specially from Australia - came together at Citroen UK’s Head Office in Slough, just down the road from the site of the old Citroën factory where the D-Series rolled off the production line between 1956 and 1966. The event also saw the return of ‘Buttercup’, a unique DS 19 built at Citroen’s Slough factory in 1957 before being shipped to Australia.

The Golden Anniversary of the DS occurs as the company now prepares to launch the latest in a long line of large, executive Citroëns. The new C6 with its head-turning, aerodynamic styling, its high levels of refinement and a use of innovative technology that includes the latest generation hydropneumatic suspension and swivelling headlamps is perfectly placed to follow in the steps of the DS.




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