Scenography

German, 17th century, male.

Active in Innsbruck.

Draughtsman.

He designed stage sets in Innsbruck.

Italian, 17th century, male.

Engraver (etching).

A page in the service of Cardinal Carlo di Toscano, he produced several etchings for Ipermnestra, an 'entertainment' staged in Florence in 1658.

Italian, 17th century, male.

Born in Brescia.

Painter. Decorative artist.

Arighini spent thirty years as a theatre set designer in the service of Duke Georg Wilhelm of Brunswick. In 1676, he was entrusted with the supervision of construction at the Duke's new castle in Celle....

(b Florence, Oct 31, 1604; d Madrid, July 1657).

Italian painter, draughtsman, engineer and stage designer, active also in central Europe and Spain. He was a pupil of Giovanni Bilivert from 1612 to 1620 and studied with Giulio Parigi. In 1622 he went to Vienna as assistant to Giovanni Pieroni da Galliano and thence to Prague, where he decorated the chapel (1630) with frescoes with scenes from the Life of St Wenceslas and the Life of the Virgin, the Knight’s Hall (destr.; rest. 1853) with ceiling frscoes including Albrecht von Wallenstein as Mars, and he worked on other parts of the Wallenstein Palace (see Wallenstein Palace (Prague)). He is documented in 1625 in Florence, where he became a teacher of perspective drawing. In 1626–7 the Medici employed him as military engineer at the fortress at Livorno; here, with Stefano della Bella, he drew harbour and river scenes (e.g. Peasants Waiting on a Quay, Florence, Uffizi). Baccio executed frescoes in Florentine palazzi, and his contributions to the decoration of the Casa Buonarotti include three ...

(Maria Nicolao)

(b Bologna, 1675; d Vienna, March 4, 1735).

Italian architect, decorative artist, stage designer and painter, active also in Austria. He trained as a quadratura painter in Bologna, where he was a pupil of Giovanni Gioseffo dal Sole. He was recorded as working as a figure and quadratura painter in Vienna for Prince Montecuccoli in 1695, and shortly afterwards for Count Heřman Jakub Czernin in both Vienna and Prague. He soon became a project designer, when his responsibilities expanded to include architecture. Beduzzi’s first project was probably the design of furnishings for the summer sacristy of Melk Abbey Church (from 1701; see Melk Abbey, §2), which matched the European High Baroque style of the building. Later he designed furnishings and frescoes for the abbey church itself (1711–22) although, contrary to common belief, he did not design the high altar and doorway. He initially painted his frescoes himself, but later these were entrusted to his associates, as in the case of the pilgrimage church of Maria Taferl, near Melk, or to specialists employed by those commissioning the work. Beduzzi’s design for the illusionistic decoration of the church of St Peter (...

[Santiago]

(b Piacenza, 1705; d Madrid, 18 or Sept 20, 1759).

Italian architect, painter, urban planner and stage designer, active in Spain. He was a pupil in Piacenza of the painters Bartolomeo Rusca (1680–1745), Andrea Galluzzi (fl 1700–1743) and Giovanni Battista Galluzzi (fl c. 1730–40). In 1728 he was one of a number of artists summoned to Spain by the Marchese Annibale Scotti to assist with the construction of royal projects that were already under way and to introduce an Italian influence in place of the French style that had been introduced by the Bourbon kings. He worked at the Aranjuez Palace with the French engineer Léandre Brachelieu (fl c. 1733–9) and then in 1735 became Director of Royal Works of Decoration. He specialized in quadratura painting and, in addition to his work at Aranjuez, where his fresco vault decorations provided fictive trompe l’oeil architectural settings for mythological figures executed by Rusca and ...

[Ludovico] (Ottavio)

(b Mantua, 1636; d Vienna, 1707).

Italian architect and stage designer, active in Austria. He went to Vienna in 1651 as the apprentice of his father, Giovanni Burnacini (d 1655), the Venetian theatre architect who introduced to Vienna the system of stage design developed by Giovanni Battista Aleotti and who produced stage sets in the Florentine–Venetian style of Giulio and Alfonso Parigi and Giacomo Torelli. Lodovico Burnacini was his father’s assistant until the latter’s death and succeeded him in the office of theatre architect and imperial court engineer to Emperor Leopold I. Although he participated in the construction of various imperial castles in the vicinity of Vienna, Burnacini was mainly engaged in theatre design, developing his father’s style of stage settings and becoming the founder of the Viennese style, which had considerable influence on German theatre. Designs for 115 compositions and plays have survived, and many of Burnacini’s designs were reproduced as engravings in luxury editions of the libretti. Holograph drawings are preserved (Vienna, Österreich. Nbib.). They include religious themes, physiognomic sketches, figurines and grotesques as well as narrative illustrations....

[Sellari, GirolamoFerrara, Girolamo da]

(b Ferrara, c. 1501; d Ferrara, ?Aug 1, 1556).

Italian painter, architect and stage designer. His father Tommaso (fl 1503–23) was a painter and decorator at the court of the Este in Ferrara, and Girolamo was trained in the workshop of Garofalo. He visited Rome in the early 1520s (Fioravanti Baraldi) and in 1525 was in Bologna, where he worked with Biagio Pupini and Giovanni Borghese on the decoration of the sacristy of S Michele in Bosco. Around this time (1525) he painted the altarpiece of the Virgin Enthroned with Saints (Dresden, Gemäldegal. Alte Meister; destr.) for S Biagio in Bologna.

From these early works onwards, da Carpi developed a pictorial language that combined the Ferrarese models of Garofalo and Dosso Dossi with the influence of such works by Raphael as the St Cecilia (Bologna, Pin. N.), which he saw in Bologna, the Madonna of Foligno (Rome, Pin. Vaticana) and the frescoes in the loggia of the Villa Farnesina in Rome. Da Carpi’s ...

[Cardi, LodovicoCigoli, il]

(b Castello di Cigoli, nr San Miniato, Sept 21, 1559; d Rome, June 8, 1613).

Italian painter, draughtsman, architect and scenographer. He was one of the most influential artists in 17th-century Florence, reacting against the artificiality of Mannerism and introducing a new clarity and naturalism attuned to the Counter-Reformation to create a distinctively Florentine Baroque style. His architecture unites the fantasy of Bernardo Buontalenti with a purer and more conservative classicism. He won great fame in both Florence and Rome, where shortly before his death he was named as a Knight of Malta by Pope Paul V Borghese.

He was born into a family having noble origins among the Gualandi of Pisa and was appropriately educated in the late 1560s in Florence in lettere umane. However, on displaying ability, he was allowed to train for the profession of artist and was apprenticed to the Mannerist painter Alessandro Allori, whom he assisted with the decorations for the funeral of Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1574 and the decoration of the gallery of the Uffizi in ...

Italian, 17th century, male.

Born in Parma; died 12 November 1708.

Painter. Stage sets.

Son of Roberto Clerici the Elder, and father of Roberto Clerici the Younger. He was mainly active in Modena and Parma.

Italian, 17th century, male.

Active in Parma at the end of the 17th century.

Died before 1698.

Painter. Stage sets.

[Giambattista]

(b c. 1685–6; d Venice, July 15, 1758).

Italian painter and stage designer. His earliest known work, the Flagellation of Christ (c. 1706; Venice, Mus. Diocesano S Apollinia), for the Scuola del Cristo of S Marcuola, is a dark, shadowy painting that reveals the strong influence of tenebrist trends of the 17th century. Crosato, however, belonged to the generation of Venetian painters such as Jacopo Amigoni, Sebastiano Ricci and Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, who were developing a lighter, more colourful style. His tonality changed from the darkened shadows of the Flagellation to the light-filled frescoes for Stupinigi, the hunting palace of the Duke of Savoy, near Turin, which constitute his next known work. The most successful of these, the Sacrifice of Iphigenia (begun 1733), on the vault of the antechamber of the queen’s apartment, is a highly dramatic work full of bright bold colours accentuated against the blue sky and white clouds. The gold, blue and red tones are effectively placed so as to lead the eye around the room and guide it through the narrative, which is related through the specific gestures or glances of a few figures, at the same time suggesting the idea of greater numbers. Equally direct is Crosato’s use of sharply defined, highly saturated colours, which remain constant in their intensity and effective in providing visual unity; his linear style defines solidly modelled forms. Other rooms at Stupinigi decorated by him included the antechapel of S Umberto, with figures of hunters and lady companions, and the Sala degli Scudiere, with the story of ...

[Dentone]

(b Bologna, April 4, 1575; d Bologna, Dec 18, 1632).

Italian painter and stage designer. A specialist in illusionistic architectural settings, or quadratura, he trained with Cesare Baglione (c. 1550–1615). His dramatically lit settings, which display realistic and well-proportioned architecture, departed from Baglione’s Mannerist fantasy and established classical ceiling decoration in Bologna. His quadratura combined a recessed frame as the immediate surround of the ceiling crown, with a substantial, deeply foreshortened frame, which simulates height.

Curti’s first surviving ceilings, at the Casino Malvasia at Trebbo di Reno (c. 1610–22) and the Villa Paleotti at San Marino (c. 1616–22), were influenced by his earliest model, Tommaso Laureti’s frescoed ceiling in the Palazzo Vizzani, Bologna (c. 1562; destr.), which first combined a wall frieze, based on Palladian windows, with a foreshortened ceiling frame. In 1618 Curti travelled to Parma, where he was involved in the decoration of the Teatro Farnese, and in 1623, at the invitation of Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, he went to Rome, where a ceiling in the Palazzo Odescalchi has been attributed to him. In the 1620s and early 1630s he worked as a decorator and stage designer in Bologna, Ferrara (...

British, 17th century, male.

Active in London.

Painter. History painting.

John Freeman painted stage sets for London's Covent Garden theatre.

Paris (Louvre): five paintings (attributed)

Italian, 17th century, male.

Active in Poland.

Born 1600, in Rome; died 3 May 1672, in Rome.

Sculptor. Portraits, animals. Medallions, stage sets.

School of Rome.

Giovanni Battista Gisleni was an architect by training. He worked particularly in Poland for King Sigismond III, King Ladislas IV and King Jan Casimir Wasa on stage sets, court festivities and funerals. His only artistic work in Rome, to where he returned in ...

(b Rome, 1600; d Rome, May 3, 1672).

Italian architect, stage designer and musician, active in Poland. He arrived in Poland before 1632, being court architect first to King Sigismund III, then to Vladislav IV and John II Kazimir. Between 1643 and 1654 Gisleni was noted at the Polish court not only as a singer and composer but also as a director and designer of ephemeral decorations. His immense though mostly unrealized architectural and decorative oeuvre is chiefly known from three collections: the album Varii disegni d’architettura inventati e delineati da Gio: Gisleni Romano … (London, Soane Mus.); 12 loose drawings (Milan, Castello Sforzesco); and a sketchbook containing his own designs, copies after modelbooks, and designs by other architects (Dresden, Kupferstichkab.; ‘Skizzenbuch des G. Chiaveri’).

Gisleni’s architectural projects were relatively limited in scale compared to the grander early Baroque palaces of the court architects Matteo Castelli and Constante Tencalla. The residences he built for the nobility then settling in Warsaw combined elements of the Italian villa and the north European castle, sometimes reduced to the scale of the small wooden-built house—a type that served for vernacular architecture for two centuries. Churches by Gisleni were usually single-naved, with a wall-pillared interior common in the north, to which new Baroque articulation had been applied (e.g. Brigittine church of the Holy Trinity, Warsaw, ...

(b Berlin, Sept 30, 1937).

German painter and stage designer. From 1957 to 1964 he studied under the German painter Peter Janssen (b 1906) at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in West Berlin. At first he painted figurative works influenced by Baroque models and by 19th-century history painting. In aligning himself with the great tradition and the values of figurative painting in the idiom of Rubens or Hans Makart, he deliberately set himself apart from all the artistic tendencies predominant in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. Characteristic of his painting is a theatrical element that in the 1960s occasionally took on a quality of caricature. This is in keeping with his interest in the theatre, in which he also worked as an actor, musician, playwright and scene painter (particularly in the 1980s, when he was associated with the director Peter Zadeck in Berlin and Hamburg). As a 20th-century artist who thought in historical terms, Grützke played on the contradiction between the traditional form of figure painting and its contemporary content. In some works, such as ...

Italian, 17th century, male.

Active in Ferrara.

Died 1644.

Painter, engraver, architect, engineer, poet. Stage sets.

Francesco Guitti worked for the city and for the duke. In 1638 he produced the plan for the decoration of the stage sets for the first Carnival, which he published with other plans, as engravings, under the title of ...

Italian, 17th century, male.

Died 1665.

Painter, decorative designer.

Guizzardi worked in the palace of Turin and in the royal villas. He produced the plans for the stage sets at the royal theatre.

German, 17th century, male.

Died 1699, in Dresden.

Painter, decorative designer, architect. Stage sets.

Kletzel was an architect as well as a painter of stage sets, which he designed and executed, aided only by apprentices.