Scenography

Scenography (inclusive of scenic design, lighting design, sound design, costume design) is a practice of crafting stage environments or atmospheres. In the contemporary English usage, scenography is the combination of technological and material stagecrafts to represent, enact, and produce a sense of place in performance. While inclusive of the techniques of scenic design and set design, scenography is a holistic approach to the study and practice of all aspects of design in performance. The term scenography is of Greek origin (skēnē, meaning 'stage or scene building'; grapho, meaning 'to describe') originally detailed within Aristotle's Poetics as 'skenographia'. Nevertheless, within continental Europe, the term has been closely aligned with the professional practice of scénographie and is synonymous with the English-language term 'theatre design'. More recently, the term has been used in museography with regards to the curation of museum exhibits. In what is not the first use of the term, Antonio Caimi, in 1862, describes a category of artists practising pittura scenica e l'architettura teatrale, inspired by the artist Ferdinando Galli-Bibiena, who was also known as a painter of quadratura, or architectural painting (usually trompe-l'œil depictions of architecture on ceilings or walls). Caimi also calls this Arte scenografica, and notes that it required ingenious engineering to create movable sets, or create illusions of environments. The Galli da Bibiena family was a pedigree of scenographic artistry that emerged in late-seventeenth-century Bologna, but spread throughout northern Italy to Austria and Germany. Another large family known for theatrical scenography were members of the Quaglio surname. Caimi goes on to mention practitioners of scenography in the second half of the 18th century and early 19th century in Lombardy, including: Bernardino Galliari, Gaspare Galliari, Pasquale Canna, Pietro Gonzaga, Paolo Landriani, Giovanni Perego, Alessandro Sanquirico, Bomenico Menozzi, Carlo Fontana, Baldassare Cavallotti, Carlo Ferrari, Filippo Peroni, Carlo Ferrario, Enrico Rovecchi, Angelo Moja, Luigi Vimercati, and the brothers Mofta of Modena, among others.