Silhouette (pronounced sil-oo-et)
(1) A two-dimensional representation of the outline of an
object, as a cut-out or representation drawing, uniformly filled in with black,
especially a black-paper, miniature cut-out of the outlines of a person's face
in profile.
(2) The outline or general shape of something.
(3) Any dark image outlined against a lighter background;
the outline of a solid figure as cast by its shadow.
(4) To show in or as if in a silhouette; to cause to
appear in silhouette.
(5) In printing, to remove the background details from (a
halftone cut) so as to produce an outline effect.
(6) In motorsport, a category which limits modifications which
change a vehicle’s side-silhouette.
1759: From the French à la silhouette, named after Étienne de Silhouette (1709–1767), controller general (1759) in the French government. The surname was a gallicized form from Biarritz in the French Basque country and the southern Basque spelling would be Zuloeta, Zulueta, Ziloeta or Zilhoeta, the construct being zulo (hole, cave) + the suffix -eta (abundance of). The word came widely to be applied to the artwork (which had existed since 1743 and sometimes called figure d'ombre (shadow figure) in 1859. The rare alternative spelling is silhouet and the verb dates from 1876, derived from the noun. Silhouette is a noun & verb and silhouetted & silhouetting are verbs; the noun plural is silhouettes.
Jeanne Antoinette
Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour (1721–1764 and usually referred to as Madame de
Pompadour), was a member of the French court of Louis XV (1710–1774; King of
France 1715-1774) and the king’s official chief mistress (that how things then
were done) between 1745-1751 and a court favorite until her death. One way the estimable Madame de Pompadour used
her influence was in appointments to government offices. While some of this was little more than
nepotism and the spreading around of sinecures, one substantive position in the
Ancien Régime was Controller-General (the
treasurer or finance minister) and to this, de Silhouette, long recognized in
France as something of a “wizz kid” in economics, was appointed early in 1759 with
the concubine’s support. The powers of
controller-general made whoever held the job powerful but also vulnerable, the
task of limiting the expenditure of the king not one likely to be popular in
the Palace of Versailles but given the state of the royal exchequer after years
of war, the need for reform was urgent. Modern
economic historians seem to regard the job he did as competent and orthodox example
of rationalizing public finances and he managed both to reduce expenditure and
institute a system of taxation which was both simpler to administer and more
effective although probably more far-reaching were the long-overdue efficiencies
he introduced in internal trade.
Silhouette of the Manhattan skyline.
Despite his success however, his budget for 1760
projected a huge deficit and a rising cost in debt servicing. Seeing no alternative, he suggested adopting
some of the methods of the detested English which involved collecting some tax
from the previously exempt aristocracy, landed gentry and the richest of the
clergy (of which there were a remarkable number. That was his downfall and after less than
nine months as controller general, De Silhouette retired to the country
although, such was the urgency of things, his later successors were compelled
to follow much the same course.
Why his name endures to
describe the two-dimensional black-on-white images we know as silhouettes is
obscure but there are two competing theories. One is that his methods in finance and
administration were all about simplifying what had over the centuries become a
system of labyrinthian complexity so, a silhouette being about the simplest form
of visual art, the association stuck. A
less sympathetic view is that he was thought an austere and parsimonious fellow
so his name was linked to the simple, cheap black & white portraits which
had since 1843 been popular with those unable to afford more elaborate forms
such as an oil painting. There’s also
the suggestion the minimalist art was named as an allusion to his brief tenure
as controller-general and finally, although there’s no evidence, some maintain de
Silhouette decorated his office with such portraits. Whatever the reason, the portraits gained
their name in 1859, the year of de Silhouette brief ministerial career.
Silhouette of Mercedes Benz SLC (C107; 1972-1981, left) and 1979 450 SLC 5.0 in competition under the FIA’s silhouette rules (right).
Silhouette racing was introduced essentially because it
was simple to administer. There had been
a variety of classes for “modified production” cars which permitted changes to
bodywork to improve aerodynamic or allow wider wheels & tyres to be used but
formulating and enforcing the rules was difficult; the regulations becoming increasingly
precise, subject to variations in interpretation and cheating was rife. What the introduction of a baseline
silhouette for each competing vehicle did was provide a simple, literal template:
if the car fitted through, it was lawful and if manufacturers wished to change
a silhouette and produce a sufficient number of identical models to homologate the
car for whatever competition was involved, that was fine. Sometimes with variations, the silhouette formula
has been widely adopted from classes as varied as series production to quite
radical constructions with space frames or carbon-fibre monocoques and drive-trains
unrelated to road-cars, the attraction always that the external skin continues
to bear more than a superficial resemblance to a production model, something important
to both manufacturers wishing to maintain a tangible link to their consumer offerings
and an audience prepared willingly to suspend disbelief.
1972 Lamborghini P250 Uracco (left), 1977 Lamborghini Silhouette (centre) & 1984 Lamborghini Jalpa (right).
Despite the name, the Lamborghini P300 Silhouette (1976-1979) wasn’t designed with competition in mind; it was an attempt to produce an open-top model which could be certified for sale in the lucrative US market, then a market in which the company had no offering. The Silhouette was Lamborghini’s first targa-top and was based on the P300 Uracco (1972-1979), a mid-engined, V8-powered 2+2 which was intended to compete with the Porsche 911 and Ferrari’s Dinos. Neither the Uracco nor the Silhouette went close to matching the volume of either of its competitors and only 54 of the latter were made but both contributed to the company’s survival in the difficult 1970s, something which at times seemed improbable. The Silhouette’s successor was the P350 Jalpa (1981-1988), the final evolution of the Uracco. Lamborghini was now more stable and the Jalpa was a much improved product (although the interior always attracted criticism) which sold in reasonable volumes and, more importantly, was profitable.
Although the Silhouette was the factory’s first targa to enter series production, a decade earlier, the factory had shown one exquisite creation in that vein. The modern convention is to distinguish between a roadster (with a roof which wholly can be removed or folded back) and a targa (with a removable panel about the seats (a cat with left & right panels being a “T-top”)) but in what now seems a linguistic quirk, Lamborghini in 1968 displayed a (sort of) targa it called a Roadster. It would be the only convertible Miura of any type the factory would build. Although the P400 Miura's rolling chassis had generated much interest (and some scepticism from engineers who understood the implications of installing its mid-mounted V12 engine transversely) when displayed at the 1965 Turin Auto Show, when a pre-production prototype was used for the car’s debut at the Geneva show, it created as much of a sensation as the Jaguar E-Type (XKE, 1961-1974) arrival in the same city half-a-decade earlier. The Miura is the spiritual ancestor of the “supercars” and “hypercars” of recent decades but while undeniably beautiful, at high-speed (it could exceed 170 mph (275 km/h)) the aerodynamic properties were dubious and the transverse engine induced handling quirks even experts found challenging to master. Still, with close to 800 made over three series (P400, 1966-1968; P400 S, 1968-1971; P400 SV 1971-1973), it was a great success and the most desirable are now multi-million dollar machines. It was quite an achievement for a concern which between 1948-1963 had built only well-regarded tractors and although the Miura wasn’t the company’s first car, it was the one which gained the marque the credibility to ranked with Ferrari and indeed greatly it influenced the mid-engined Ferraris and Maseratis of the 1970s as well as encouraging lower-cost imitators such as De Tomaso’s Mangusta (1967-1971).
Perhaps counterintitutively the sensuous Miura was named after a breed of bull but it was one prized in bullfighting for its aggressive qualities so one can see the connection. While a few claim to be cooks who helped stir the broth, the Miura’s lovely lines usually are credited to Marcello Gandini (1938–2024), a designer working at Giuseppe "Nuccio" Bertone’s (1914-1997) Turin-based Carrozzeria Bertone. The one-off Miura roadster wasn’t exactly the first mid-engined coupé in a targa configuration, Ford building in 1965 five such GT40s (1964-1969) but these were pure racing cars and the first appeared a few weeks before Porsche in 1965 released the 911 Targa so it’s not surprising Ford dubbed the things “roadsters”. The Fords were actually rolling test-beds for components and featured a number of differences from the more numerous coupés but nor was the Miura Roadster simply a coupé pulled from the assembly line and then de-roofed. What Bertone did was a significant re-engineering, the roofline lowered by 30 mm (1¼ inches) with the rollover hoop lowered to reduce drag, the angle off the windscreen made more acute and the rear bodywork re-shaped with larger air-intakes for the V12, a more pronounced spoiler fitted to the rear deck, the tail-pipes re-routed and revised taillights were fitted. Unseen were structural changes which reinforced the chassis, the box-section side members strengthened to compensate for the loss of rigidity created by removing the roof. Inside, there were detail changes to the trim and switchgear.
The reaction when the roadster was displayed at Brussels was little less enthusiastic than at Geneva two years earlier and dealers and the factory at once received enquiries about price and delivery dates. Unfortunately, what the designers knew was that stunning though it looked, what the roofectomy had done was so compromise the structural rigidity that not even the strengthening done to the platform had been enough to make the Roadster a viable production car. To achieve that, the whole shell would have had to be re-engineered and Lamborghini’s engineers knew that though achingly lovely, the shape and the transverse mounting of the V12 which made it possible were both flawed concepts and the future lay in longitudinally-positioned power-plants within an angular wedge. Those conclusions would be rendered in physical form when the prototype Countach appeared at Geneva in 1971 and its lines can be seen still in twenty-first century Lamborghinis.
So the Roadster was destined to be a one-off curiosity but the show car subsequently had an interesting life. In 1969 it was purchased by the New York-based ILZRO (International Lead Zinc Research Organization) which wanted something eye-catching with which to promote the use of the metals in automotive use. Renamed ZN 75, it became a demonstration platform for zinc and lead applications in automotive engineering; it was repainted in an iridescent green, and various components were recast in zinc and lead-alloys, including trim, bumpers and even engine parts. On the periodic table, the chemical element zinc has the symbol “Zn” while the “75” was a reference to 1975, the year the ILZRO and other industry groups were lobbying the regulators to set as the date by which new automotive materials and corrosion-resistance standards would become widespread. The ILZRO’s campaign emphasis was on galvanization and anti-corrosion technologies, with the argument that by the mid-1970s, manufacturers would need extensively and more systematically to use zinc and such to meet with expectations of durability and comply with legislative dictate. During the 1970s, was shown around North America, Europe, and Asia becoming one of the more widely seen Miuras and decades later, was restored to its original appearance. Whether it even should be referred to as a targa is debatable because Bertone didn’t include a removable roof panel but over the years some Miuras have been converted to targas (with a removable panel) so the pedants can designate the original roadster as being “in the targa style”.
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