A page from Look & Learn showing Baraldi's mastery of the historical painting. Courtesy of Bookpalace.com

Italian artist Severino Baraldi is a very private man, and not very much is known about his life. Which is pity as he is also a very fine draughtsman. Whilst he would probably consider himself to be an artist rather than a comic illustrator per se, he has certainly contributed to the genre, although his true metier is the historical painting.

Baraldi was working for the Fleetway publishers in the 1960's - possibly via the D'Ami studios - where he created large and colourful historical pieces for Look and Learn, like the one shown here.

In 1996 he returned to Bonelli to illustrate the Italian comic Il Mistro.

John Colter hiding from the indians. Look & Learn original board

He has now left the comic area to concentrate on several projects including the illustrations for various fairy story book collections (Pinnocio, Sleeping Beauty, Anderson and Grimm fairy stories as well as Tolstoy's Three Bears and the Little Match Girl). He has illustrated various books on such diverse subjects as the history of the automobile, to the Spanish history book Los hombres y la civilzación. His latest projects are a number of illustrations for various Tarot cards: Ramesis and Journey to the Orient (the journey of Marco Polo). Each of these sets contain 78 magical - and historically researched - cards .

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