Enchanted Curtains – Act I

Matteo Fochessati

Lele Luzzati’s pioneering and innovative work in theatre formed the cornerstone of his artistic vision and became the expressive paradigm of his rich and multifaceted creative universe. The language he developed for the stage found coherent expression across every area of his artistic practice, from illustration and animated film to ceramics, textile design, interior and naval design, and urban installations.

Together with his holistic approach to art, this extraordinary versatility generated unexpected connections between recurring stylistic and iconographic motifs, creating a constant dialogue across different scales and disciplines. Whether working on a theatrical production, a book illustration or a public artwork, Luzzati returned to similar subjects and creative methods, revealing the unity of his artistic imagination.

Guided by a profound empathy and a universal visual language, his work presents a poetic and imaginative vision of the world. Every creation emerged from an unfettered imagination and from the desire to transform everyday reality through simple means, projecting it into an enchanted universe.

When asked what imagination meant to him, Luzzati replied: “It is thinking that a chair is not simply something to sit on; put a hat on it, and it can become a man.”

His artistic language was built from humble materials and simple techniques. In 1949, for example, he created the costumes for Alessandro Fersen’s production of The Merry Wives of Windsor using leftover fabric supplied by MITA, while scraps collected from theatre costume workshops were transformed—together with his mother, Fernanda Vita Finzi—into vibrant patchwork tapestries.

This creative freedom and his ability to reinterpret the same visual devices across different artistic disciplines were rooted in remarkable technical skill of an essentially artisanal nature. Luzzati always described himself as a craftsman.

Although this definition often reflected his characteristic modesty and gentle irony in response to critical acclaim, it also expressed a genuine artistic philosophy. He consciously aligned himself with a tradition that, from William Morris to the Bauhaus, shaped twentieth-century design through the integration of craftsmanship, creativity and everyday life.

His identification with the world of the applied arts was inseparable from an innate inclination towards collaboration. Throughout his career he worked closely with patrons, directors, actors, architects, publishers, writers and artisans, considering artistic creation a shared process rather than an individual endeavour.

Far from restricting his creativity, collaboration and the practical constraints of each project became a source of inspiration. As Luzzati himself observed, “Freedom is having a limit.”

For him, every limitation became an invitation to invent—to play with brushes, papier-mâché, scraps of fabric and clay, combining materials and techniques to create a fairy-tale world. This enchanted universe often took the symbolic form of the forest: a magical space in which imagination could unfold without boundaries, as suggested by the title of one of his theatrical productions, My Stage Is a Forest (1990).

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