Maschere. Dalla Commedia dell’arte personaggi e costumi nella grafica tra Seicento e Novecento

The book offers a rich journey through the graphic production with the mask as its subject: engravings, affiches, figurines, illustrations from periodicals and books, produced between the 16th and 20th centuries, give life to a historythrough images of the Commedia dell’arte and masks in general, a history ‘to be watched’ with a dual theatrical and cultural value. An extraordinary variety of faces, scenic locations, depictions of squares with Carnival celebrations’ scenes and masks festivities; subjects that offer the opportunity to dwell on the link between Commedia dell’Arte and Carnival, between the masks of Comedy and the masks of the most representative secular and outrageous celebration, that adopted the best-known theater’s characters making their own and generating new ones. The book also reviews the abundant field of satirical and humorous magazines closer to us in time, finding their roots in the eighteenth century, when the masks became an instrument of political satire and in the illustrations that made the fortune of many nineteenth-century newspapers.