The "scenic visualizations" of Luigi Veronesi

The essay deals with the work of the Italian abstract painter Luigi Veronesi (Milan, 1908-1998) in the field of set design, which began in the Thirties, when he produced the sketches for Igor Stravinsky's Le rossignol. In particular, a well-defined sector of this field of activity of the artist is examined, namely the exploitation of his research on the relationship between music and painting in the theatrical field. Starting from 1978-1979 he adopted a machine, purposely built for him by the technician Augusto Olivieri on a project by the engineer Mario Orefice, to visualize the sounds at the same time as listening, according to the criteria of correspondence between musical notes and chromatic tones elaborated by Veronesi in the late Sixties. The artist used this device to control the reflectors at the theatre, through a keyboard, by means of colored light projections on a screen, or directly on the scenographic elements. The system was used in some shows staged in the first half of the Eighties.