The painterly brilliance of Luchino Visconti

‘When I’m directing an opera, I dream about a film, when I’m working on a film, I dream about an opera, and when I’m doing a play, I’m dreaming about music.’ So said the film-maker Luchino Visconti, a man of many disciplines. Few of his works capture the range of his artistry better than The Leopard (1963), his historical epic about the unification of Italy and the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy in the 1860s. Certainly it’s operatic; it also has literary heft (based as it is on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel of the same name). But less widely recognised is the way in which Visconti drew on 19th-century painting for his meticulous mise en scène – not only to express the film’s ideas, but also to achieve a particular kind of authenticity.

The Risorgimento – the combined political, military and cultural efforts of a group of Italian nationalists to cobble together a nation-state out of a hodgepodge of kingdoms, duchies and ecclesiastical domains – provides the backdrop to The Leopard. One of the critical moments in the film is the Battle of Palermo: in 1860 the nationalist leader Giuseppe Garibaldi invaded Sicily and routed troops loyal to the Spanish Bourbon king. Visconti’s rendering of the scene bears a remarkable resemblance to Giovanni Fattori’s Garibaldi at Palermo (1860–62). The colour palette is the same, and certain details of the architecture in Fattori’s painting rhyme with some of the structures in the filmed scene: the arched gateway in the background, for instance, is very much like the city gates the Garibaldini storm through in the movie.

Still from The Leopard (1963), directed by Luchino Visconti. Titanus/La Société Nouvelle-Pathé/Société Générale Cinématographique

Garibaldi a Palermo (c. 1860), Giovanni Fattori. Private collection. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

On the face of it, taking inspiration from a painting seems at odds with Visconti’s obsessive drive for authenticity. According to one story, he stocked a wardrobe with expensive silk shirts, ties and handkerchiefs just so Burt Lancaster – who plays the film’s protagonist, Prince Salina – could feel like an aristocrat, even though all that finery never appears on camera. Would imitating a 19th-century painting not risk introducing an element of artifice?

The mise en scène feels true to life precisely because it is true to art. The painting Visconti is evoking was capturing a contemporary scene. Fattori was a leader of the Tuscan school known as the Macchiaioli, who favoured, like the Impressionists a decade later, painting en plein air and the rough application of paint in blotches or spots. (Macchiaiolo means, literally, ‘spot-maker’.) Fattori may not have been present at the battle but, painting in the early 1860s just as Italy was coming together, he was not removed from the nationalist drama – and that’s the excitement Visconti is striving to capture in his staging of the scene. What the director sought was ‘non vero, ma di verità’ – not real, but based on truth.

Visconti used painting to achieve authenticity in interior scenes too. Take the frescoed ceiling of the main hall of Prince Salina’s palace outside Palermo: the prince shows off the frescoes to a cultivated Garibaldian general, pointing out Jupiter and other Roman deities arrayed about a putto figure displaying the Salina coat of arms.

Still from The Leopard (1963), directed by Luchino Visconti. Titanus/La Société Nouvelle-Pathé/Société Générale Cinématographique

The Salina palace was based on Lampedusa’s ancestral home. But that building had been destroyed by Allied bombing in the Second World War, so Visconti needed to find a substitute that resembled the original. The best he could do was the Villa Boscogrande, a dilapidated building on the outskirts of Palermo that had to be completely rebuilt and redecorated. The ‘baroque’ ceiling frescoes we see in the film were painted to Visconti’s specifications by a team of some 20 artists in just over two weeks. The director did not need to look far for inspiration: his own family home, the Palazzo Visconti in Milan, contained a number of frescoes by the 18th-century baroque painter Nicola Bertucci.

Both the influence of Fattori and the fabricated frescoes are placed in the service of making historical scenes convincing. But Visconti also draws on art history to comment ironically on the aristocratic characters. The prince’s disquisition on the Salina frescoes is a flashback, delivered to a peasant after a luncheon on the grass – or a déjeuner sur l’herbe.

Still from The Leopard (1963), directed by Luchino Visconti. Titanus/La Société Nouvelle-Pathé/Société Générale Cinématographique

Visconti’s evocation of Monet’s painting of 1865–66 is unmistakable. By having the prince recall the mythological art in the baroque style while he is ‘in’ a modern painting by Monet, Visconti emphasises that Salina is not a man of his times. Later, when Visconti moves the camera inside the Palazzo Valguarnera-Gangi in Palermo for the 45-minute ball scene that concludes the film, he captures the aristocratic look of the ladies sitting on a great pouffe in a golden salon by basing the set design and arrangement of the characters on a painting by Franz Winterhalter of the Empress Eugenie (wife of Napoleon III) surrounded by her ladies in waiting.

The Empress Eugenie Surrounded by her Ladies in Waiting (1855), Franz Xaver Winterhalter. Château de Compiègne

Still from The Leopard (1963), directed by Luchino Visconti. Titanus/La Société Nouvelle-Pathé/Société Générale Cinématographique

The women at the ball, however, are a far cry from the elegant women in Winterhalter’s painting. In fact, the prince compares them to monkeys, expecting them to swing by their tails from the chandeliers at any minute.

A curious visual irony occurs towards the end of the film – one Visconti may not have intended. Dressed in a top hat and scarf, Prince Salina bears a very close resemblance to Giuseppe Verdi in Giovanni Boldini’s portrait of 1886.

Portrait of Giuseppe Verdi (1886), Giovanni Boldini. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome

But the old-world aristocracy the prince embodies could not be more different from the nationalist circles in which the composer moved. Few cultural figures were associated with the Risorgimento more completely than Verdi, the man whose very name became an acronym for ‘Vittorio Emanuele, Re D’Italia’ – ‘Vittorio Emanuele, King of Italy’, the first monarch of the unified peninsula.

Perhaps, then, there are limits to viewing the film through the lens of fine art. For all the painterly qualities of its cinematography, The Leopard is irreducibly cinematic. Visconti may have drawn from the well of 19th-century painting, but his visual style is all his own.

‘Visconti: Decadence and Decay’ is at the BFI Southbank, London, from 1–30 January.