Fabrizio Clerici

The Roman monuments, architecture and paintings from the Italian Renaissance and the baroque period considerably influence him, as did certain religious works, due to their spectacular aspect.

At the end of the 1930s he made his first dreamlike and fantastic paintings, based on his memory of events, locations and persons transformed by the filter of time.

Upon his return to Rome after the Second World War he closely perused the scientific studies of Athanasius Kircher, Erhard Schön and Jean François Niceron.

On this return from Egypt he created sets for La vedova scaltra by Carlo Goldoni under the direction of Giorgio Strehler.

He then made the sets and costumes for Igor Stravinsky's ballet Orpheus, presented at the La Fenice theatre in Venice in 1948; for Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell and for The Rape of Lucretia by Benjamin Britten, both at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma and directed by Alberto Lattuada (1949); for Armide by Jean-Baptiste Lully (1950); for the comic opera Gianni Schicchi by Giacomo Puccini, directed by Peter Ustinov at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden (1962); and for Ali Baba by Luigi Cherubini, at the La Scala in Milan.

Over a two-year period he helped create the big stained glass window La fede di Santa Caterina for the Basilica of San Domenico in Siena (1957).

In 1968, on the occasion of the Berliner Festspiele, he participated in two exhibitions on painting and scenography in the Neue Nationalgalerie and the Galerie im Rathaus Tempelhof.