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Sciltian at La Scala

by Vittoria Crespi Morbio.
Essay by Vittoria Crespi Morbio, A 20th-century Flemish.
Appendices: biographical notice; catalogue of the works; chronology of stage designs.
Collection «Performing Artists at La Scala».
Amici della Scala – Umberto Allemandi & C., Turin, 2009.
Italian edition, pp.88.

An Armenian exile in Paris first and then Italy, Gregorio Sciltian (Rostov 1900–Rome 1985) was an outsider in the century of Abstractionism and Informal Art. Dedicated to the pictorial canons aimed at reproducing reality he polished his personal style with the patience, the exquisiteness, the painstaking scruples of a seventeenth-century Netherlander astray in a foreign world. Each tiny detail achieves a near-metaphysical stillness in the many portraits he left us as well as in the showy fun of his stage designs of Donizetti, Schubert, Weber and Stravinskij.