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(b Rome, March 5, 1873; d Rome, March 30, 1939).

Italian architect. His father, Luigi Bazzani, was a painter and stage designer. Bazzani graduated in civil engineering from the university in Rome in 1896. In 1899 he won the competition for the international art scholarship with a plan for a cathedral in an Italian Gothic Revival style. His first significant building was the Alterocca printing company building (1907) at Terni, in Stile Liberty. He was joint winner with Raimondo D’Aronco and Ernesto Pivovano of the architectural prize at the Esposizione de Sempione, Milan (1906). A number of important competition-winning schemes followed. In 1905 Bazzani won the competition for the façade of S Lorenzo (unexecuted) in Florence, which stood him in good stead for his entry for the Biblioteca Nazionale (won 1907; completed 1935) at Santa Croce. An eclectic Renaissance building, its structure picked out in grey against white, it already suggests a putative monumentalism and sits awkwardly in its Florentine context. In ...

French, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 2 February 1823, in Paris; died 1907, in Paris.

Painter, watercolourist, designer. Church interiors, landscapes, urban landscapes, architectural views. Stage sets.

Philippe Chaperon was set designer at the Opéra in Paris, producing most of the sets for French subsidised theatres, as well as the main theatres in France and abroad and the Expositions Universelles. He painted watercolours based on nature. He was the father of Eugène and Émile Chaperon, who took over from him....

(Yakovlevich)

(b Moscow, March 1, 1863; d Detskoye Selo [now Pushkin], nr St Petersburg, April 17, 1930).

Russian stage designer and painter. He studied architecture, then painting under Vladimir Makovsky, Vasily Polenov and Illarion Pryanishnikov at the Moscow College of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1881–90). In 1889 he attended Jacques-Emile Blanche’s studio in Paris and in 1895 travelled in Italy, France and Spain. In 1897 he studied under Raphaël Collin (b 1850) and Luc-Olivier Merson in Paris. A member of the Moscow Society of Painters from 1894, he lived in Moscow until 1901. Golovin expressed a great interest in Art Nouveau and in the search for a new national style of Russian art. Together with Yelena Polenova he devised a project in 1898 for the decoration of a Russian dining-room at the house of the painter Maria Yakunchikova, and he collaborated with Konstantin Korovin on the décor of the artisan section in the Russian pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900...

(b Crema, March 8, 1848; d Brescia, 1936).

Italian architect and stage designer, active in Portugal. He studied at the Accademia di Brera (now Accademia di Belle Arti), Milan, under Carlo Ferrario (1833–1907), stage designer at La Scala, Milan. Manini was appointed stage designer of the Teatro S Carlos, Lisbon, in 1879, at a time when the theatre received the most important European operatic productions. In this position he succeeded his compatriot Giuseppe Cinatti and, like his predecessor, in addition to his work in the theatre he designed houses for middle-class clients with a taste for his late Romantic façades, influenced by scenery design. He carried over into his architectural designs his passion for painting and for trompe l’oeil landscapes, and his principal achievements were decorative: the interior decoration of the Teatro do Funchal, Madeira; the ceiling of the Teatro S João, Oporto; and the winter garden (1893) of the Teatro Dona Amélia, Lisbon. His contributions to the layout of the terrace of the Palácio da Cidadela, Cascais, and the Portuguese Pavilion at the Exposition Universelle, Paris (...

Polish family of artists of Italian origin. The Italian architect Francesco Marconi had two sons, Leandro Marconi (1763–1837), an architect, painter and stage designer who was active in Rome and taught at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Bologna, and Giovanni Battista Marconi, an architect and painter who worked in Mantua. Leandro’s son Ferrante Marconi (1798–1868), a sculptor, went to work in Poland at the request of his older brother (1) Henryk Marconi; Ferrante’s son Leonard Marconi (1836–99) was born in Warsaw and worked in Poland as an architect and sculptor. Of (1) Henryk’s eight children, Karol Marconi (1826–64) was a painter working in Poland and Italy, while (2) Leandro Jan Ludwik Marconi and (3) Władysław Marconi were both architects.

(b Rome, Jan 7, 1792; d Warsaw, Feb 21, 1863).

Architect. He began his training under his father Leandro Marconi and studied at both the University and the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Bologna (...

German, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 1862, in Aachen; died 1932, in Cologne.

Painter. Urban landscapes, architectural views. Stage sets.

Aachen (Burg Frankenberg)

Cologne (Stadtmus.)

(Nikolayevich)

(b Moscow, Dec 17, 1880; d Gulf of Finland, nr Terrioki [St Petersburg region], June 14, 1912).

Russian painter and stage designer. From 1894 to 1904 he studied at the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Moscow under Konstantin Korovin and Vladimir Serov, and under Isaak Levitan, who had a formative influence on his early landscape studies. On a visit to Rome, Florence and Pisa in 1902 Sapunov was impressed by the painting of Adolphe Monticelli. In 1904 Sapunov participated in the exhibition of the Crimson Rose (Rus. Alaya roza) group of Symbolists in Saratov.

In 1905 Sapunov met the director Vsevolod Meyerhold at his theatre studio in Moscow and he later participated in Meyerhold’s attempts to create a ‘Symbolist theatre’ in the production of Aleksandr Blok’s Balaganchik (‘The little fairground booth’; designs in St Petersburg, Theat. Mus.) and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler at Vera Komissarzhevskaya’s theatre in St Petersburg in 1906. In attempting to polemicize against the detailed realism of the Moscow Arts Theatre, Sapunov and Meyerhold presented the sets for these productions as painted panels and bas-reliefs, and the figure of the actor was seen as an integral part of the overall pictorial schema. In ...

(b Feodosiya, Dec 24, 1867; d Monte Carlo, Aug 17, 1968).

Russian stage designer of Abkhazian descent. In 1893, after studying under Vasily Polenov at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, he went to Paris, where he later joined the Montparnasse art circle established in 1904 by Yelizaveta Kruglikova. From 1891 he worked on easel paintings, but in 1906 he was appointed head of the St Petersburg studio of stage design. His most significant designs during this period were for Vsevolod Meyerhold’s production (1908) of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Mariinsky Theatre. In 1911–12 he worked at the Starinny Theatre alongside artists from the World of Art group, such as Nicholas Roerich, Ivan Bilibin, Yevgeny Lansere and Nikolay Kalmakov (1873–1955). Shervashidze also worked as a draughtsman, a book illustrator, a dress designer, and as a critic and theoretist, publishing articles in Apollon, Zolotoye runo, Mir iskusstvo and Iskusstvo. He lived in Sukhumi for a while from ...

(Andreyevich)

(b Moscow, April 14, 1858; d Moscow, Aug 21, 1935).

Russian stage designer. He completed his training at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1882. From 1885 to 1886 he worked as a scene painter at the Moscow Private Russian Opera. He joined MKhAT (the Moscow Art Theatre) at the time of its foundation in 1898. He worked there until 1912 and from 1925 to 1935 with Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938) and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858–1943), designing many of their productions, including Aleksey Tolstoy’s Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich (1898), Aleksandr Ostrovsky’s The Snow Maiden (1900), Maksim Gor’ky’s The Lower Depths (1902), William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1903) and Lev Tolstoy’s The Living Corpse (1911).

Working alongside Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko and sharing many of their views, Simov was able to put into effect the reforms they introduced in the field of theatre design. His aim was to make the design of the production an organic part of the director’s treatment of the play. He created realistic scenery, revealing the psychological and social atmosphere in which the action of the play took place. In his attempts at an authentic reconstruction of life on the stage, Simov brought a number of new staging devices into many of the productions, such as eliminating even floor surfaces, combining platforms, staircases and passageways, and building dwellings with several rooms on stage. Simov was the first of a new type of designer-director who strove to reveal the thinking behind a dramatic work through the set. From ...

(b Sassari, Sardinia, May 12, 1885; d Milan, Aug 13, 1961).

Italian painter, sculptor, architect, stage designer and illustrator. He was brought up in Rome where his family moved in 1886. In 1902 Sironi enrolled in the Engineering Faculty of the University of Rome, but after a long illness abandoned his studies to devote himself to painting. In 1903 he attended the Scuola Libera del Nudo at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome and frequented the studio of Giacomo Balla. Following a short spell in Milan in 1905–6, he travelled to Paris in 1906 and shared a room with his close friend Umberto Boccioni. Several family and self-portraits painted in a divisionist technique (see Divisionism) date from this period. Sironi also visited Germany several times between 1908 and 1911, where he was exposed to contemporary Expressionist currents. He lived in Rome from 1909 until he moved to Milan in late 1914 or early 1915.

Sironi experimented with Futurism from ...

(Yur’yevich)

(b Smolensk, March 19, 1882; d Nyack, NY, Aug 12, 1946).

Russian stage designer and painter. He attended the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Moscow from 1897 to 1909, studying mainly under Konstantin Korovin and Valentin Serov, but although he painted a few Impressionist landscapes, his first major artistic concern was with Symbolism, as in his paintings of the first decade of the 20th century such as Pastorale (1905; Moscow, I. A. Myasnikova priv. col., see Kogan, no. 2) and Love (1907; Moscow, E. A. Gunst priv. col.). After taking part in the exhibition Crimson Rose in Saratov in 1904, he became a founder-member of the Blue Rose group of Symbolist painters, who paid homage to the painting of Viktor Borisov-Musatov, and he developed their mystical motifs and contributed to their exhibition in 1907. Sudeykin was also in contact with the World of Art group, and, on the invitation of Serge Diaghilev, he travelled to Paris in ...

( Bogdanovich )

(b Tiflis [now Tbilisi], Jan 2, 1884; d Erevan, Dec 28, 1928).

Georgian stage designer and painter of Armenian origin, active in Russia . He studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1901–3) but was expelled after a disagreement over the teaching methods. Posted to the Far East during military service, he became acquainted with Far Eastern decorative art, which inspired the works he exhibited with the Blue Rose group after his return to Moscow in 1907 (e.g. The Races, 1905; Moscow, Tret’yakov Gal.). His work of this time refers to traditional Chinese and medieval European art refracted through Art Nouveau, in an attempt to create a new decorative style in easel painting. In Moscow he often designed the décor for artistic soirées and balls, creating architecturally decorative compositions whose basic components were painted panels. In 1910 he travelled to Italy and in 1912–13 he worked in Paris, where he became acquainted with Sonia Delaunay and Robert Delaunay. In ...