Flavio Costantini, Italian painter and illustrator (b. 1926)

Flavio Costantini (21 September 1926 – 20 May 2013) was an Italian artist. 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 and 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.