Drama and Desire

A lavishly illustrated catalogue exploring the relationship between art and theatre during the “long” nineteenth century. This book was conceived to accompany an international exhibition that travelled from Marseille to Rovereto and Toronto. The exhibition aimed to connect elements of the modern tradition with the return to interest in Antiquity that emerged in Europe during the period 1750-1800, fuelled by the discovery of Pompeii and the pioneering theories of Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig regarding the dematerialization of the stage. This triggered a surge of passion for theatrical performances and for theatre in general. The period begins in the time of Voltaire and Jacques-Louis David and ends with the last vestiges of Symbolism, a century and a half during which European painters took a continuous interest in the parallel development of stagecraft. What emerges is a symbiotic exchange between the imagery of the stage and that of painting. The book examines works by some of the most significant French and English artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and focuses on a hitherto unexplored theme: the theatre and its staging on nineteenth-century.