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Stage Design For Ruslan and Lyudmila by Glinka, 1842 Giclee Print Roller, Andrey... 24 in. x 18 in. Buy at AllPosters.com Framed Mounted This term embraces all the devices by which the audience is enabled to visualize the setting of a play, including the scenery, movable objects and the proscenium.
In Ancient Greece, stage design consisted of but a simple back wall with three doors. By the time of Vitruvius (1st cent. B.C.) some painted scenery was used. Vitruvius describes standardized decorations for three types of drama, architectural motifs for tragedy and comedy and pastoral designs for satyr plays.
During the Middle Ages, when mystery plays took place inside the church, stage design was at first limited to movable objects. But when, during the 14th and 15th centuries, the play was transferred to the outside of the church and to the market place, settings became more elaborate. The different scenes were called 'mansions' and the decoration was carried out by the guilds.
Renaissance stage design was nourished by three sources: the rediscovery of the works of Seneca, Plautus and Terence, the descriptions of Vitruvius and the festival processions, trionfi and masques of the 15th century. By the beginning of the 16th century the use of perspective was common on the stage. The matured Renaissance stage had a background painted in perspective with painted canvas wings to the right and left. Palladio and Scamozzi, who together designed the Teatro Olimpio at Vicenza, transformed the painted perspective into actual three-dimensional architectural settings framed by three triumphal arches. Changeable sets were first used in the Teatro Farnese at Parma, built 1618-19.
Aesthetically, stage design reached its climax in the 17th and 18th centuries. The art was considered so important that copper engravings were made and preserved of the work of all the leading theatre architects and designers. The influence of Italian stage designers spread throughout Europe. Inigo Jones was profoundly affected by what he had seen in Italy and based the designs for his elaborate masques on the Teatro Farnese. Italian artists working in Germany and Austria produced even more complicated settings than those seen in Italy.
Early in the 18th century stage design underwent important changes owing to the examples of the great stage-designing family of Bibiena, four generations of whom worked in various parts of Europe. Instead of a static, symmetrical composition, illusionistic Baroque perspectives became the order of the day. The spectator no longer looked at the stage as if it were a separate room with the fourth wall removed, but he himself was included in the room. Filippo Juvarra, who worked chiefly in Turin, and Giovanni Sernandoni worked in the manner of the Bibiena. But the artist who above all excelled in the style, surpassing the Bibiena in spatial fantasy, was Piranesi.
Complicated prison scenes, romantic ruins and crumbling stairways gave way at the beginning of the 19th century to increased naturalism. This can be observed in the stage designs of the German architect, Schinkel. The tendency led to the development of the 'box set', in which closed side walls replaced the individual side wings. This period was marked by the decline of stage design as an art, despite the improvement in purely mechanical devices and lighting.
Max Reinhardt ( 1873-1943) was among the first to revolt against complete naturalism. He used devices for movement which were opposed to realism. The work of the artists who designed for him, Alfred Roller, Emil Orlik and, above all, Ernst Stern combined naturalistic detail with stylization. Reinhardt was the first to realize that the demands of the intimate theatre and the theatre for the masses were entirely different.
Adolphe Appia ( 1862-1928), following Wagner, regarded the theatre as a combination of visual, musical and literary impressions united by rhythm. His stage designs were three-dimensional and relied largely on light and colour, arranged rhythmically. Edward Gordon Craig reduced stage sets to pure cubic volumes and later even dispensed with these basic shapes and used only portable folding screens. Meanwhile, in Russia, Tairov tried to abolish stage illusion by the use of scaffold and technical constructions. Tairov's ideas influenced the characteristic settings of the Jewish Moscow Academical Theatre.
Cubism and Futurism greatly influenced stage design, and abstract sets were designed by Picabia, Bagaglia, Prampolini, Moholy-Nage and Oskar Schlemmer. Theatrical machinery such as the revolving stage was used, not for practical purposes, but for the expression of ideas. Bakst replaced the conception of the threedimensional spatial setting by a two-dimensional fantasy and was followed by various painter-designers, Léger, Matisse, Braque, Picasso and Derain. The influence of Surrealism lingers on in some recent stage design, but it is combined, as in the work of Leslie Hurry, with a return to the three-dimensional set and a revival of something of the spirit and fantasy of the 17th and 18th centuries.
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