Illustrating Tradition. About Emanuele Luzzati’s Languages

Abstract

In the history of Italian illustration, Emanuele Luzzati (1921-2007) represents an extraordinary example of attention to childhood declined in multiple and interchangeable languages of visual culture. From set design to theatrical costume design, from figure theatre to animated cinema, from books to illustrated books, from applied arts to posters, from playbills to covers, the artist’s work is characterised by a close relationship with the literary tradition (fairy tales, poems of chivalry, commedia dell’arte) of which he proposes a reinterpretation (which is also a rewriting and interpretation) in a figurative and verbal key. Luzzati’s constant technical experimentation, based on the use of poor materials and on the technique of reusing the objet trouvée, in his products for children is translated into the gesture of tearing, cutting, collage and graphic-chromatic sign applied to artefacts that are simultaneously material (fabrics, paper) and immaterial (stories, characters, words). This strongly interdisciplinary approach requires a critical approach that can bring the structural analysis of the verbal text (mostly poetic and rhyming) into dialogue with the examination of the parallel iconographic rhythm. A crossroads of languages that meet in a playful mood. Children’s works based on canonical stories and characters such as The Magic Flute, The Thieving Magpie, Cinderella, Ali Babà, Pulcinella, Pinocchio, Rodari’s corpus, etc. become pretexts for assigning the tradition of the popular imagination a timeless pedagogical-educational function that, precisely in the children’s book, encounters the possibility of coagulating into a sort of total work of art that makes the visual dialogue with the verbal, the musical and the physical action. In the rich critical bibliography of reference (mostly exhibition catalogues), there is still a lack of attention to Luzzati’s publishing production exclusively for children.