Austro-Italiche, 1831.

Generali was born in a port city of the Austrian Empire. It was established on 26 December 1831 in Trieste as the Imperial Regia Privilegiata Compagnia di Assicurazioni Generali Austro-Italiche, the “Imperial and Royal Privileged Company for General Austrian-Italian Insurances”, and its promoter was Giuseppe Lazzaro Morpurgo, a businessman from Gorizia, according to Wikipedia and the insurance trade magazine Atlas Magazine, which published a history of the company in May 2013.

The start was not straightforward. Atlas Magazine reported that Morpurgo first founded a company earlier in 1831, but that internal conflicts led its first general assembly to dissolve it; a month later, in December 1831, the Austrian-Italian company was set up in its place.

Both halves of the name described a business plan. The word “Generali”, or general, referred to cover across all the branches of insurance — fire, life, hail, and sea, land and river transport — at a time when, Wikipedia says, most Trieste insurers dealt only with marine transport. Atlas Magazine gave the same explanation: the company set out to sell fire, land transport and other classes of business alongside marine and flood policies, and so the adjective “Generali” was attached to its name.

The words “Austro-Italiche” described a company with two centres. Wikipedia says the main office in Trieste handled the company’s affairs and relations with the Habsburg monarchy, while a management office in Venice oversaw the Lombardy-Venetia region and the Italian peninsula. Atlas Magazine reported that subsidiaries and agencies opened rapidly, in France in 1832 and Switzerland in 1835 among others, and that the company later followed shipping routes east, opening offices in Greece, Lebanon, Tunisia, India, Sri Lanka, China and Hong Kong between 1879 and 1882.

The company’s clerks once included a writer. Wikipedia says the writer Franz Kafka worked at Generali’s office in Prague for nearly nine months, between 1 November 1907 and 15 July 1908; Atlas Magazine also recorded his hiring at the Prague agency.

An eagle, then a winged lion.

The first emblem belonged to an empire. The company says that a little more than a year after its foundation, in 1833, it gained permission to use the double-headed eagle of the House of Habsburg on its documents. Wikipedia describes the Habsburg eagle as a nod to Trieste’s place within the Austrian lands.

Revolution brought the lion. In 1848, after the uprising that established the Republic of Venice, the company removed “Austro-Italiche” from its name to better reflect its Italian identity and adopted the Lion of St Mark as the symbol for its Italian business, the company says. Atlas Magazine likewise reported that only in 1848 did the company take the name Assicurazioni Generali, choosing the lion of St Mark, a symbol of power and justice in Venice, as its logo. Wikipedia dates the replacement of the eagle by the Venetian lion to the 1860s, as the Risorgimento ended Austrian rule in much of Italy, and the Museo del Marchio Italiano, an online museum of Italian trademarks, dates it to 1861.

The lion has been redrawn many times since. The company says that in 1881, its 50th anniversary year, it replaced the various versions in use with a single lion facing right; around 1910 the classic lion facing left returned, imposing and statuesque, and after Trieste became Italian in 1918 it was gradually used by the head office too. That version, with minor changes, stayed in use for over fifty years, the company says.

The Museo del Marchio Italiano describes the traditional lion in heraldic detail: winged, with a halo, a sword drawn in defence of an open Gospel, and the inscription “pax tibi Marce evangelista meus”.

Modernisation came in the 1970s. The company says that in 1971, as its marketing changed, the traditional lion was no longer in line with modern taste and was profoundly restyled, and the updated lion was paired with the Generali logotype. The Museo del Marchio Italiano credits that restyling to the designer Bob Noorda. A group trademark followed in 1978 and was redesigned in the 1990s, with the words “Gruppo Generali” translated into English, French, German and Spanish, the company says; the museum credits the 1991 rework to Publicis Étoile of Paris.

Insurance names, symbols and colours.

Insurance identities have an unusual job: they sell a promise that may not be called on for decades, so the visual language tends to signal permanence rather than novelty. Many of the long-established houses reach for heraldry — eagles, lions, shields and robed allegorical figures — borrowing the vocabulary of civic seals and coats of arms to suggest that the company will still be standing when a policy matures. Over time, many of those emblems have been simplified, flattened and redrawn for screens, often keeping a single recognisable silhouette while losing the fine engraving of the originals.

A second family of marks reduces the name to a single letter or a short set of initials, which travels across languages and reads at small sizes on an app icon. Blue recurs across the sector because it is widely read as calm and dependable, though reds and deep greens also appear. Sponsorship adds another layer: stadium and arena naming rights, shirt deals and long-running mascot or character campaigns have put insurance names in front of audiences who never read a policy document, and the end of such a deal can be as visible as its start.

One lion for the whole group.

The 2014 redesign made the lion the group’s single symbol. Since January 2014, the company says, a more modern and dynamic lion has identified the entire group worldwide. The redrawn face gives the lion a sharper profile, the restyled wings reproduce better at small sizes, and the paws and tail are simpler. The Museo del Marchio Italiano says the restyling was entrusted to Landor, and that the Gospel text was reduced to lines so that the mark would render clearly at small dimensions.

The lion has also reached buildings and pitches. Wikipedia says Generali sponsors two football stadiums, the Stadion Letná in Prague, home of Sparta Prague, and the Franz Horr Stadium in Vienna, home of Austria Wien, and lists the Prague ground as Generali Arena from 2009 to 2020 before later name changes. Wikipedia also says the company has sponsored the Barcolana sailing regatta in the Gulf of Trieste for more than four decades, and lends its name to half marathon and marathon races in Berlin and Munich.

The company’s Italian structure has been renamed as well. In 2013 the Italian branch of Assicurazioni Generali was incorporated into INA Assitalia to form Generali Italia, effective from 1 July 2013, bringing in names such as Toro Assicurazioni, Lloyd Italico and Augusta Assicurazioni, Wikipedia says. Philippe Donnet, who led that company, became chief executive of the group in March 2016.

Venice remains part of the story. Wikipedia says the group’s foundation, The Human Safety Net, is based at the Procuratie Vecchie, Generali’s historic offices on St Mark’s Square in Venice, restructured in 1914; Atlas Magazine reported that a palace on St Mark’s Square was bought during the modernisation of the late nineteenth century.

For a design guide, Generali shows how a company can replace an early eagle with the lion of St Mark and then keep redrawing that lion so that it reproduces at small sizes. Compare Allianz, another European insurer with a heraldic bird in its history, and Barclays, a financial brand built around an eagle. For this guide we use a lion red, a deep red and ink with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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