Artistic Heritage as Engineering Edge

“world. Ettore Bugatti foresaw this, and was one of those who helped to make it possible. Yet to the end of his days he re- mained a figure of another age—an age in which the conveyor belt had not yet eliminated craftsmanship, when the search for the best was not subject to the demands of mass produc- tion, and when individual imagination could have free rein. It has been said that fundamentally Ettore Bugatti was an artist. The paradox is that he was an artist in a field which no one had considered to be artistic until he came on the scene, and in which he started to work just because he did not believe himself to be a true artist.”

“Carlo Bugatti and his environment had a great influence on his two sons, especially on Ettore, who learned from him to regard art as a flowering of one’s personality and not as a means of earning money. Ettore also learned that artistic effort is of no use unless one is gifted, and that everything is justifiable in an artist except mediocrity. This was the cause of his change of ambition quite early in life.”