On the side of the angels

Vittorio Scarpati lay dying in Manhattans Cabrini Medical Center for five months before finally succumbing to Aids in 1989, one of the thousands of New Yorkers to fall victim to the epidemic that ravaged the cityand the wider worldin the 1980s and 1990s.
In those months, Scarpati, a 34-year-old cartoonist and artist from Italy, filled notebooks with hundreds of felt-tip pen drawings that illustrated his plightthe collapse of both lungs, the pneumonia, the gurgling suction machinery inserted into