Long Ago in Spoleto: Signature sketches at the Festival of Two Worlds

July 2, 2021 News, Offerte, Visore Home No comments

“From the very beginning, the Festival’s sketches were executed by set and costume designers known throughout the world, but also by sculptors (Moore, Franchina), painters (Guttuso, Campigli, Andy Warhol), authors and directors (Jean Cocteau, Luchino Visconti himself, Franco Zeffirelli)’: a theory of talents to make heads spin, as Gianna Volpi reminds us in her ‘Spoleto Story’.

Of these small works of art, these often unacknowledged masterpieces, we have chosen a few reproductions (contained in catalogues or theatre programmes) which we found among the material kept in the photo library of the “G. Carducci” Public Library and which are part of a collection currently being reorganised. The names are impressive: Andy Warhol, Gabriella Pescucci, Filippo Sanjust, Flaminia Petrucci, Diane Von Fürstenberg.

Before his all-out affirmation with the portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s soup cans, not yet risen to the divine status of King of Pop Art and visionary creator of serial forms capable of indelibly engraving the collective imagination, Andy Warhol officially appears in the programme of the 1961 Festival among the curators of the sets and costumes of the sketch ‘Le die sorelle’ with Lucilla Morlacchi and Bice Valori.

“Le Due Sorelle” is a very short one-act play, written by Mario Felder (a pseudonym that Menotti himself allegedly hid behind), which was part of the short, minimal and experimental theatre pieces of “Fogli d’Album”, a varied container that presented the public with an “open” formula, sketches in prose and musical and choreographic interventions. Warhol was not new to the Spoleto Festival, having already collaborated with Menotti in 1959 when, for “Fogli d’Album”, as well as various uncredited interventions, he signed the cover of the score of A Hand of Bridge, an opera by Samuel Barber with a libretto by Menotti himself, which premiered in Spoleto in the second edition of the Festival.

Gabriella Pescucci, in the 1970s assistant to Pierluigi Pizzi and Piero Tosi, then a young costume designer who was making a name for herself in opera by repeatedly collaborating with Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, was to become one of the most awarded film costume designers in the history of the seventh art (one Oscar, two Emmy Awards, seven Silver Ribbons, two BAFTA Awards, two David di Donatello Awards).

It was under Griffi’s direction that Pescucci made her debut at the Spoleto Festival in 1972 with “Ascesa e rovina della città di Mahagonny”, a play by Weill based on a text by Brecht.

At the Spoleto Festival, together with Piero Tosi, she designed the costumes for Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut”, staged in 1973 and 1974 by Visconti, and then in 1975 for “Napoli: Chi Resta e Chi Parte”, a musical performance to scores by Raffaele Viviani created especially for the Spoleto Festival and which renewed the association between Patroni Griffi and Pescucci. The sketches created by Pescucci, reproductions of which are kept in the Photo Library, refer to the latter performance.

The untitled stage sketch made by the great costume and set designer Filippo Sanjust, who in 1979 was to be responsible in Spoleto not only for the sets and costumes of Monteverdi’s opera but also for its direction, probably refers to L’incoronazione di Poppea (Monteverdi’s musical drama set in ancient Rome). Also working for years alongside Visconti, Sanjust often linked his name to Spoleto and his clockwork precision would climax on the occasion of Donizetti’s Duca d’Alba directed by Visconti in 1959 for the Festival’s second edition, when he even used the original nineteenth-century sets to recreate, with philological rigour, the atmosphere and historical texture of the opera.

Flaminia Petrucci‘s stage sketches (as, plausibly, the costume sketches, entrusted to the famous stylist Diane Von Fürstenberg) belong to L’Angelo dell’informazione, a 1985 production directed and performed in Spoleto by Giorgio Albertazzi with Ombretta Colli and Walter Toschi, based on a play by Alberto Moravia, an acidulous portrait of a ménage à trois that is also an apologue on the pervasiveness of the mass media and information.

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