IL GRANDE PIANO

oward Burke, the illustrator who produced this amazingly detailed depiction of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s military aims on the eve of Italy’s entry into as the sixth property in what would become the nation’s largest newspaper chain. By 1932 Burke had become the ’s art editor, and in that role he was occasionally called on to advance Hearst’s mercurial and sometimes extreme political views. In 1937, for example, in keeping with Hearst’s fearmongering inclinations, he produced an eerily prescient full-page pictorial map that portrayed a hypothetical Japanese attack on the West Coast of the United States, with Japanese planes “crippling or annihilating” the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor and going on to bomb Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other cities.