Guncraft

Every day from the third-floor window of his home and studio in Gardone, Val Trompia, Gianfranco Pedersoli gazes at a scene that scarcely has changed in decades. The mountain out back still climbs into the Italian sky as it always has; just across the road, his boyhood home remains much the same as in his youth.
Yet from a vise perched on a bench at window’s edge, Pedersoli has created engraving that has not only transformed the embellishment of best guns worldwide but also helped alter the nature of gunmaking itself.

Pedersoli, now 62, is not tall, but he is still trim, and his head is topped with a tousle of hair that, had it not gone silver, belongs on a man 30 years his junior. His brown eyes sparkle when he greets you—“they are almost ‘naughty’ but in a good way,” said Italian gun-trade translator Elena Micheli-Lamboy. Daniela, Pedersoli’s wife of 35 years, is quick to offer visitors coffee and sweets; Pedersoli himself shakes his head and declines both.
“For me, no smoking, no alcohol, no coffee,” he says. “OK, sometimes coffee, but not much.” It could make his hands unsteady.
Unsteady hands could never produce what is clamped in the vise behind him. Spinning his chair to the window, he faces a sidelock over/under action. He takes a graver in his right hand and a jeweler’s loupe in his left. Like a boxer ducking a jab, he hunches over the vise, brings the loupe to his eye and attacks the action with a series of quick, staccato flicks of his graver. Pop-pop-pop—the sound of steel on steel is audible. Under the graver’s tip, a partridge bursts into flight from a swirl of scroll and foliage. Pop-pop-pop...
Pedersoli removes the action from the vise and passes it to me. My hands tremble just to take it. Even under the loupe I can barely discern the innumerable tiny dots and lines that comprise the partridge and scrolls. How many incisions will he cut before the engraving is complete? He pauses for a moment. “Millions,” he replies. “For sure, millions!”
Bulino is a tool, and shorthand for the technique perfected by Pedersoli and by Italy’s other great gun engravers. In Italian, “bulino” means “graver,” the sharpened instrument engravers use to cut micro lines and dots in the metal’s surface. Using hand pressure alone, the engraver varies the depth and number of incisions to influence how light interacts with the metal: The more dots and lines and the closer and deeper they are, the darker the shading effect; the farther apart and shallower, the lighter the gray tones. In talented hands, bulino produces images of near-photographic realism. In hands such as Pedersoli’s you almost can hear the wingbeats in one of his flushing pheasants; in his portrait of a goddess you can feel the breeze through the gauzy folds of Diana’s chemise.
A full-blown commission can take the engraver as many as 1,000 hours to finish. It will cost as much as or more than the $100,000 gun it adorns.
In Northern Italy today there are dozens upon dozens of highly talented, highly skilled engravers plying their trade. Only a handful, however, can claim the title Maestro Incisore—Master Engraver. Pedersoli’s rank amongst this élite belongs on the first couple of fingers of that hand.
Superb Italian engraving is of course nothing new in a nation where art flourishes as verdantly as olive groves and vineyards. Since the Middle Ages, weapons have been made north of Brescia in Gardone, Val Trompia, and there long have been artisans to embellish them. In the modern era, however, engravers of sporting shotguns have worked under an ideal the British established in the early 19th Century: A fine gun is foremost a tool and only distantly second an aesthetic object. Even on “best” guns engraving costs were normally 10 to 20 percent of a gun’s total price. Until the 1970s many Italian engravers rarely signed their work, were barely known outside their country, and usually worked on conventional scroll, floral and ornamental motifs dictated by centuries of tradition.
Pedersoli learned his craft from one of these old-style masters—Giulio Timpini, who took the 14-year-old Pedersoli under his wing for 4-1/2 years after recognizing the latter’s artistic talents. Always fond of drawing and art, Pedersoli soon mastered the traditional hammer & chisel technique—punta e martello—that dominated at the time. In 1970 Timpini became the head of Beretta’s engraving department and took his young protégé in tow. But five years at Beretta engraving rote patterns left Pedersoli yearning for more.
Befriending two men—engraver Firmo Fracassi and gunmaker Mario Abbiatico—in the mid-’70s changed Pedersoli’s life. Fracassi (along with Angelo Galeazzi) was a pioneer and innovator in the emerging bulino engraving style, whereas Abbiatico, co-founder of gunmaker Abbiatico & Salvinelli (FAMARS), had a knack for not only recognizing budding engraving talents but also convincing rich American patrons to take a chance on these talents and to commission “high-art” engraving where money was literally of no object. Pedersoli learned from Fracassi’s and Galeazzi’s bulino styles and embraced Abbiatico’s commissions. Freed from the strictures of the past and from budgetary restraints, Pedersoli and other talented colleagues took techniques and embellishment styles to new levels. Thus dawned the Age of the Italian Engraver.
Pedersoli eventually left Beretta to work full-time for FAMARS until Abbiatico’s untimely death in the early ’80s. His skills developed and reputation assured, Pedersoli then began a high-profile freelance career that remains highly influential to this day.
Barry Lee Hands, a talented Montana-based engraver, is a student of engraving history and has met and interviewed many of the world’s finest practitioners, including Pedersoli. “Today Pedersoli’s influence is seen in the production on new best guns everywhere,” Hands said. “He was one of the first to pull together fantasy and baroque styles with his use of traditional patterns of ornament with more modern themes and figures. The neo-classic movement in postmodern engraving, in which he was a leader, was taken even further by engravers such as Manrico Torcoli and engraving houses such as Cesare Giovannelli and Creative Art.”
Pedersoli now considers himself “retired”—but this really means he is cutting back on work, not quitting. Reflecting on his life, he says his engraving has been marked by three major stylistic periods: landscapes and small ornamental motifs from 1980 to ’85; floral patterns from ’85 to ’94; and grotesques from ’94 to ’98. Today he concentrates on ornamental scroll and lavish game scenes.
Though many in Italy have attempted to imitate his style, there is no mistaking a Pedersoli engraving, regardless of its period. All are characterized by intertwined motifs that are often disparate in individual subject matter yet harmoniously blended into a composition that is greater than the sum of its parts. That nothing ever seems incongruous is the mark of Pedersoli’s genius.
Pedersoli’s aesthetic vision no doubt reflects the Italian love of Spoletto—or visual spectacle—and his stated intent is to generate emotions in the viewer. His mastery with shading and highlighting sets the mood for each piece. “Light is everything in my engraving,” Pedersoli noted. “The light and movement you see creates feelings, which is the purpose of engraving.
“Italian engraving is all about beauty, balance, light and details.”
It is also about old-fashioned handwork. Unlike American engravers who routinely employ machine-assisted tools, Italians work almost exclusively with hand tools. Beside Pedersoli’s vise are only a few gravers, a sharpener for them, a hammer and a couple chisels, and a loupe or two. “The bulino is like an extension of an Italian engraver’s hand,” Pedersoli said.
He works by natural light—hence his workstation at the window—and engraves eight to nine hours per day; after dinner he will sketch and trace. About 85 percent of his engraving is performed with the hand-held gravers, the remainder with hammer & chisel. His dexterity with a graver is astounding; so too the intensity with which he works. Barry Hands writes of him engraving with a bulino tool “so quickly that it sounded like he was using a machine.”
Ultimately, though, it is what is in Pedersoli’s head rather than the tools in his hands that have garnered his reputation. “I think imagination is more important than technique,” Pedersoli said. “Imagination and creativity are really the keys to great engraving.”

The rise of superstar Italian engravers such as Pedersoli has transformed not only engraving but also gunmaking in the past three decades. It is evident in the designs of the guns themselves: So-called pinless sidelocks are now the norm on many best-quality guns. “Our guns have been designed and built to make the engraver’s work easier,” noted Tullio Fabbri, of Italy’s most esteemed maker of best-quality over/unders. “This is demonstrated by the elimination of the pins and external screws that otherwise would restrict an engraver’s imagination.”
The maker’s reputation and name itself, formerly sacrosanct in establishing a firearm’s value, sometimes play second fiddle to the engraver’s name signed on the gun. No longer primarily a tool for killing, a best gun often serves equally now as a canvas for an artist whose medium happens to be steel.
Good engravers have become plentiful as demand for their talents has increased. When Pedersoli was a boy, there were no schools in the Val Trompia training engravers; today there are two. Moreover the bulino techniques perfected in Italy have spilt over national borders, and there are now stunning practitioners in the US, Austria, Germany, France and Belgium.
Even the once-staid British—whose august classicism dominated engraving for so long—today embrace exuberant techniques that would make any Colonel Blimp blanch. Philip Coggan belongs in the vanguard of the renaissance that swept British engraving in the early 1980s. “I became aware of Pedersoli around 1983,” Coggan said. “I had just started to engrave, and I was told there was an Italian engraving book I should see. When I bought it, I couldn’t believe the engraving therein—I’d never seen anything like it. The engravers that really stood out for me were Fracassi and Pedersoli.”
Although Coggan—today renowned for his gold inlays—developed his own tools and techniques largely by experimentation, he credits Pedersoli for inspiration: “Pedersoli was just one of a handful of engravers who gave me enthusiasm for my future work.”
In an age when the engraver’s skills often overshadow the gunmaker’s, Pedersoli, by contrast, always respects his medium—his compositions always complement the guns. “Gianfranco’s work carries with it the highest sensitivity to form and function, with impeccable layout and design,” Barry Hands said. “There’s always an innate sense of decorum and balance that enhances the lines of metal and wood and never exceeds the bounds of taste and artistic integrity.”
Tony Galazan, founder of Connecticut Shotgun Manufacturing Co., is one of the few non-Italian gunmakers who Pedersoli has worked with. “Pedersoli is a true artist,” Galazan said. “He understands the proper flow that the engraving needs to follow with the gun.”
Pedersoli is picky about the gunmakers he engraves for—Fabbri, Piotti, Flli. Rizzini, Beretta and Galazan are among a select group. The makers must take special care when finishing the guns so none of the engraving is worn off. “The guns never lay on sharp edges,” Galazan said.
Each Pedersoli engraving is unique, another characteristic that distinguishes Pedersoli from more commercial engravers. “I never execute the same engraving on two guns,” he said. “I don’t agree with repetitive engraving.” He also normally works on only one gun at a time, preferring to focus his imagination on the sole task at hand.
Is he an artist or artisan? Centuries ago art critics would have lumped engraving in with other crafts. As the boundaries between art and craft blurred in the 20th Century, however, the critics’ easy categorizations no longer stand on such solid ground, especially in the case of pathfinders such as Pedersoli.
The engraver himself broaches no doubt on the subject: “There is no question in my mind that engraving is an art just like painting or sculpting, but the recognition is not there yet. What I can do in metal is no different than what a master painter can do on canvas.”
Perhaps this is why he rarely collaborates with other engravers. In the past Pedersoli has worked with Fracassi and Torcoli—who are his friends—on individual guns but, he said, “The integrated nature of my engraving makes it difficult to work with others.”
According to Douglas Tate, author of British Gun Engraving: “Goethe once said, ‘Individuality of expression is the beginning and end of all art.’ If you doubt this, imagine the Sistine Chapel as collaboration between rivals Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. We would be looking at a whitewashed ceiling.”
Elena Micheli-Lamboy describes Pedersoli as a “gentle soul,” and this, I think, is reflected in his best work: scenes that evoke a certain state of innocence and the shimmering wonder of nature where the hunter and death seem far, far away. Does he ever feel a tension between this sort of engraving and the practical purposes of a gun?
“The gun is just a canvas,” Pedersoli said. “It could be a plate or a piece of jewelry and it would not make any difference. Most of my customers feel the same way.”
How the world of guns has changed.

Author’s Note: A special thanks is due Elena Micheli-Lamboy for translating during my visits to Italian engravers and for invaluable research assistance. Images and some quotes for this article are courtesy of Blue Book Publications, Inc., publisher of Gianfranco Pedersoli: Master Engraver, by Dag Sundseth and edited by S.P. Fjestad and Elena Micheli-Lamboy.

An Homage to Pedersoli
Gianfranco Pedersoli: Master Engraver is the most impressive engraving book I have ever encountered; 212 full-color pages that detail Pedersoli’s life, engravings and techniques (see Book Review, July/August ’08). Designed in Italy by Enzo Bertuzzi and expertly translated into English by Micheli-Lamboy, this book sets a new standard for pictorial gun books. The production values are simply stunning, and the book is a must-have for gun and engraving connoisseurs. It is the first in a series dedicated to Italy’s master engravers, and a volume on Firmo Fracassi is to follow. Publisher Fjestad deserves commendation for an obvious (and obviously expensive) commitment to top quality. A regular edition costs $65; a special limited edition $150. For more information or to order a copy, contact Blue Book Publications; 800-877-4867; www.bluebookinc.com. —V.V.