THE TWO WORLDS OF PIERO TOSI

27TH JUNE - 12TH JULY 2014
FORMER BAPTISTERY OF THE MANNA D'ORO | EX MUSEO CIVICO (FORMER CIVIC MUSEUM) - SPOLETO

The Two Worlds of Piero Tosi is the exhibition dedicated to Piero Tosi on the occasion of the Spoleto57 Festival dei Due Mondi, a tribute to this unforgettable protagonist of Italian cinema and theatre and recipient of an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Two installations celebrated his work and his personal artistic vision through original costumes, drawings, images, archival footage, music and video, in a dual exhibition curated by Quirino Conti. The exhibition, created in collaboration with the Tirelli Trappetti Foundation's Collection, the Tirelli Atelier and Gabriella Pescucci, was thought to unfold as a narrative through the history of masterpiece costumes, true identity-shaping tools in the storytelling of a character. The Tuscan master established himself through his refined culture, creative sensitivity and technical expertise, which led him to collaborate with some of the greatest directors of Italian theatre and cinema: Luchino Visconti, Franco Zeffirelli, Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, Pier Paolo Pasolini, to name just a few. 

PIERO TOSI AND THE CINEMA

FORMER BAPSTISTERY OF THE MANNA D'ORO

Piero Tosi and Cinema is the first of the two installations dedicated to the artist, set up in the former Baptistery of the Manna d’Oro. A space infused with an aura of sacredness was transformed into a sort of magic lantern: enlarged projections of archival images and footage flowed across the vault, while music and video alternated on the walls, overlapping and blending with the site’s architectural details. With their eyes lifted upward, visitors were immersed in a dreamlike environment inhabited by the characters to whom Tosi gave identity through his costumes, worn by cinema legends such as Burt Lancaster, Silvana Mangano, Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon, Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Anna Magnani, Dirk Bogarde, Isabelle Huppert, Charlotte Rampling, Maria Callas and Helmut Berger.

THE COSTUMES OF PIERO TOSI

EX MUSEO CIVICO DI SPOLETO (FORMER CIVIC MUSEUM OF SPOLETO)

For the installation in the former Civic Museum, Tosi reconstructed the fabrics and craftsmanship of twenty-four exceptionally beautiful garments, ranging from the costumes for Macbeth (1958), directed by Luchino Visconti, to the three extraordinary servants created in 2013 for Il Matrimonio Segreto, produced for the Spoleto Festival with meticulous mastery by the Tirelli atelier. The costumes were placed on piles of steel plates - irregular, sharp-edged and resonant - whose mirror-like reflections symbolized the falseness of a world that fails to recognize beauty, the regret for the disappearance of enlightened patrons, and the loss of an audience capable of appreciating the refinement of details, stitching, fabrics and cuts of a work-of-art costume. This devotion to detail stood as a cry of pain against a pragmatic attitude that is causing us to lose the richness of our culture. Yet, it ultimately triumphed over the spatial coldness of steel, rising above the silence of incomprehention.