Collezione Maria Signorelli





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Maria Signorelli

Born on 17 November 1908, Maria Signorelli was the eldest of the three daughters of the Latvian writer (and doctor) Olga Resnevitch and Angelo Signorelli, who was one of the first Italian radiologists.

From her earliest years Maria was keenly receptive of the wealth of fascinating impressions provided by her family circle and by the literary and artistic salon that her father and, particularly, her mother (a devotee of the theatre and biographer of Eleonora Duse) held for many years in Rome, in their home.

The Puppets - "i fantocci" - by Maria Signorelli

Maria Signorelli's series of puppets known as the fantocci are amongst the most original creations of Italian - and indeed European - figurative art of the early 20^th century.

The director Anton Giulio Bragaglia, in March 1929 at his gallery in Rome, was the first to exhibit them; the following year Giorgio de Chirico presented them in Paris, whence they moved on to Berlin.

It was the beginning of an international career.

Puppets by Maria Signorelli

Maria Signorelli’s puppets are of several hundred characters created from the 1940s to the 1990s for 159 different productions; for dance shows, for fairy tales, nursery rhymes and films for children, for plays with classical and modern texts, and film. They are difficult to define as regards typology, because the artist constructed them according to their individual requirements, that is, the movement and function they had to have on stage......

The dance shows by Maria Signorelli

"... the puppet ballets have become the most important and engaging part of my theatre, the one where I feel most free to reveal the two leading elements of my compositions, colour, and rhythm…" .....

VIDEO

Maria Signorelli: I Fantocci 1920 - 1930 https://vimeo.com/319240531

Si crea l'incanto https://vimeo.com/214389116

La casa dei burattini https://vimeo.com/121911945

Vilnius https://vimeo.com/315353351

La Valigia dei Burattini

_{The
fairy tales, nursery rhymes and films.}

‘I came to the profession of puppeteer after many

years as theatre costume and set designer ...

I chose the puppet, moved by the hand of man

itself and not the marionette, operated by strings,

because I found that it could better express the

most intimate nuances of the character and

because the puppeteer who gives it life can

really do so, with the greatest abandon,

with his whole soul.’..”

Shows with classical and modern texts, films.

‘Theatre is performed in a great variety of styles.

One must know in which style one wants to work

and then find the appropriate techniques .

raditional techniques or new techniques?

Puppets or marottes, or shadow

or rod puppets?’......

The main sections of the Maria Signorelli collection

Podrecca Fund

(string puppets, sets, set designs,documentation)

The Fund belonged to the Compagnia dei Piccoli of Vittorio Podrecca (1883-1959), one of the legends of twentieth-century Italian theatre. Created in Rome on the eve of the First World War, from 1914 to 1966, therefore even after the death of its creator, this puppet company was famed in Italy and beyond for its great artistic talents and technical skills....

Trieste puppets,

with relevant sets and stage properties of

various scenes
There are around two hundred puppets 20 to 30 cm tall, which belonged to a non-identified aristocratic Trieste family from the early years of the twentieth century. They are in an excellent state of preservation: as the puppets were not acquired together with play scripts, it is thought that they were intended for an

adult audience, and used for works connected

with actual events of the time.......

Italian rod and glove puppets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

It is generally known that puppet theatres have existed from the sixteenth century on, but their enormous popularity in the nineteenth century is also recorded by a considerable amount of evidence, both visual (for example, Bartolomeo Pinelli’s lithographs and Dura’s coloured engravings) and literary (from D’Azeglio to Belli, Stendhal, Andersen and Gregorovius, to name just a few)....

Italian marionettes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

This section comprises around two hundred items of varied provenance, ranging from 75 to 110 cm in height. There are very famous examples here, as also the whole of the splendid series (around 80cm tall, complete with sets and photographs taken at the time) used for the play Cristoforo Colombo by the famous Genoese Ugo Ponti (1850-1919)...

Italian marionettes of the eighteenth century

In the eighteenth century, a century rich in theatre, the marionette created extraordinary interest. Unlike the rod puppet, which was of lower-class origin, it was widespread in aristocratic circles, answering, among other things, to the architectural taste of the period.....