Category: Cars

Zagato at it again: Maserati GS Zagato – Autoblog

There is a term in the Design world called “Zeitgeist”, which is a German word roughly translated as “Spirit of the Time”. I saw the photograph of the custom Zagato-bodied Maserati on Autoblog and I first thought it was a new Jaguar XK, or maybe an Aston-Martin. Both of the latter were designed by Ian McCallum, not Zagato.

Then I remembered Zeitgeist.

Think back to the any era in automobiles and there are thematic elements that strongly identify the cars from that era. Spats, Fins, Curves, Wedges. There, I just defined the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s for you. 😉

Picasso said it so well, “Bad artists copy, and good artists steal.” Artists and Designers have been copying and stealing from each other since the dawn of time, so the ‘alikeness’ of some things is to be expected. Only rarely do objects appear that are BOTH revolutionary in appearance AND immediately appreciated. Usually when confronted with the revolutionary we reflexively reject it, as it is TOO different. This is true of all avenues of human expression, art, music, cars, movies, fashion, etc.

Think about that old Jaguar I have in the barn. It appeared in 1961 and literally caused a sensation. There was a lot about it that seemed “revolutionary” at the time, but in reality it was just an evolutionary step that was logical in nature. Disc brakes everywhere, independent rear suspension, “supercar” performance at a reasonable price… and of course the styling… all had been previewed before in bits, just never rolled into a mass-produced package. You can see the influence of the very successful D-type Jaguar race cars in the lines of the E-type. It was just smoothed out into something less pugnacious and more elegant. The result was stunning.

You can see its influence (or as Picasso would say, its felonious reappearance) across a broad spectrum of machines that all appeared within two years of the E-type’s debut in Geneva. They span the range from the Ferrari 250 GTO, to the Chevrolet Corvette. You could even say it became such an iconic shape as to have echoes a decade later, with such machines as the Datsun 240Z.

So I expect that the comment whiners all over the Web will complain about the sameness of this design (which by the way the SECOND time I looked at it seem to me to have paternal lineage in the Aston/Jag camp, and maternal links to the new Alfa Romeo 8C) but not realize that this was a one-off, for a customer, who shelled out big bucks, er… Euros, for it. As such it was built to meet HIS needs, not yours. People don’t buy revolutions, they buy comfort.

Does it remind me of other cars? Of course! Does that bother me? Nope.