SCENOGRAPHY. - It is properly the art of painting scenes for theatrical performances, but since it is evident that the unity of a spectacle demands a coordination of all the elements that compose it, scenography is not something that can be conceived on its own, but an element more or less important in the various historical epochs of performance.
It will not seem strange, then, that especially in recent times the term scenotechnics has been used in its place, as better suited to define the complex scenic interplay of a performance, which ranges from scenography more properly so called to lighting, to costumes, to the very form of the stage or, indeed, of the hall in which the performance takes place.
The importance of these latter elements is in fact evident; and it is precisely to their form that one must turn in order to understand the spectacle of classical antiquity: the broad stairways sloping down in a semicircle and cut along the natural slopes of a hill, down to the level on which the orchestra is placed and in the middle of which the altar of Dionysus rises, make it quite clear how even for this ancient spectacle (as would later be the case for the medieval one) the origin must be sought in religious manifestations, which implied a communion between actors and spectators closer than is conceivable today. When, at a later stage, the stage was raised at the back of the orchestra, that ideal bond was maintained by the chorus, which remained around the altar and accompanied the unfolding of the performance. But with the stage there also arises the appearance of other elements that allow one to speak of a birth of scenography properly so called: first in a canvas bounding the back of the stage, on which at a certain point a perspective was painted for the setting of the spectacle (Vitruvius has handed down the name of Agatharchus of Samos, who painted the one needed for the performance of Aeschylus' Oresteia in 458 B.C.), and then in a permanent scene in marble or stone, in the manner of a building's pediment, with three doors for the actors' exits, while at the sides two other smaller buildings were constructed. Later, these latter were replaced by three-faced revolving prisms (the periacti), thus permitting the realization of the three principal scenes (tragic, comic, satiric) that made up the ancient spectacle. With the Romans the theater was no longer cut from the slope of a hill, but built in stone, and therefore raised on level ground; the orchestra, reserved by the Greeks for the chorus, served instead for the seats of the most distinguished spectators.
In the Middle Ages the theater arose for the needs of the liturgical drama, again this time first inside the church, around the altar, and then, with the affirmation of a more complex dramaturgy, on the churchyard of the church, having as its natural backdrop the facade of that same religious building. Characteristic of these performances, derived from the liturgical texts and from those of the more complex Mystery plays, is the simultaneous setting constituted by the so-called luoghi deputati, that is, by the very rough construction (which would also be taken up by the Elizabethan theater) of all the places in which the scenic action is to unfold in succession. A scenography that can therefore be defined as symbolic and that can well convey the choral character of this medieval spectacle, essentially religious.
Its evolution in a secular direction led to its prohibition by the ecclesiastical authorities, but in that evolution are also to be found the origins of a form of spectacle that would continue, more or less elaborated, down to modern times; and it would suffice to recall, in order to stress its importance, that the oldest performance of a Mystery play in an enclosed hall - that is, in a true theater - perhaps dates back to 1398 (the Passion at St-Maur-Les-Fossés).
The type of medieval spectacle also continues in the early times of the Renaissance (one may recall Brunelleschi's ingegni), and only toward the end of the fifteenth century do the new scientific laws of the rediscovered perspective intervene in its evolution, with the creation of true and proper stage sets, such as would be, some time later, the celebrated ones of Baldassarre Peruzzi, of Raphael (for Ariosto's Suppositi in Castel S. Angelo in Rome in 1519), of Giulio Romano and others; while Sebastiano Serlio, in his Trattato di Architettura of 1553, would codify the rules of this new Renaissance theater. A theater that naturally could not fail to know also a more complex syntactic realization of the auditorium itself and of the stage, and it will suffice to recall the famous Teatro Olimpico of Vicenza designed by Palladio and built by Scamozzi, and that of Sabbioneta (also, like the former, entirely of wood), the work of Scamozzi himself.
The Baroque period is the period of great scenic revolutions, which accompanied the evolution of spectacle from the commedia dell'arte to melodrama and which, especially as regards the intermezzi that were increasingly favored, drove set designers to more complex and "marvelous" inventions, particularly for the purposes of scene changes. It is the period in which Italians enjoyed the greatest prestige on the stages of all Europe, and the case of Torelli has remained famous — he amazed France so much with his mechanisms as to earn the title and the accusation of sorcerer.
It is the century of Burnacini (1636-1707), of the Bibiena family, inventors of the corner perspective, which made possible prodigious spatial illusions, of G. L. Bernini (even though he was rather a machinist than a true set designer), of the Jesuit Andrea Pozzo, codifier of Baroque scenography, as Serlio had been of Renaissance scenography. In the eighteenth century we recall F. Juvara (1676-1736), V. Bigari, P. Aldrovandi, S. Orlandi, M. Tesi, G. and B. Galliari, as well as G. B. Piranesi who, although he did not leave true scenographies, was nevertheless through his engravings a master to many nineteenth-century Romantic set designers.
Nineteenth-century scenography in fact ended up reflecting the taste of the dominant aesthetic theories, and there arose a "neoclassical" scenography, pedantically historicist, and a "illustrative" and romanticizing pictorial scenography. Among the most representative were the Bolognese Antonio Basoli and Francesco Cocchi, and the Milanese Carlo Ferrario.
Modern scenography established itself with the reaction to Romanticism of the verist, and at times excessively verist, theory of Antoine's Théâtre libre in Paris (1887) and with the reaction to realism on the part of the French symbolism of P. Fort's Théâtre mixte (later Théâtre d'art). But at this moment too the danger began to emerge of adapting to the stage an enlarged easel painting, on the part of the most renowned artists of modern art, who nevertheless had not understood what the function of scenography was within the whole of the spectacle. Meanwhile, having as its very aim the whole of the spectacle, Gordon Craig would impose himself as the dominant figure at a certain point, and then the Swiss Adolfo Appia. Also important in Italy, for the purposes of the scenic play of modern staging, were the Futurist theories of G. Balla and E. Prampolini, as well as the theory of light of A. G. Bragaglia. - See plate II.
