Italo Calvino – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

Invisible Cities: Miscellanea

Cover art: The Castle in the Pyrenees (1961) by René Magritte.

A final post for this week devoted to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and it occurs to me that “Miscellanea” could easily be the name of one of Marco Polo’s cities.

One thing that’s become apparent over the past few days is that this subject is a very popular one with artists, especially in Italy. This is understandable but it also means you could probably fill another week of posts pursuing further illustrations and homages. Rather than belabour things I’m ending with a few of the more notable derivations including some cover designs. The Einaudi volume above was the first printing in Italy in 1972.

Cover design by Arnold Skolnick.

And this was the first American edition from Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich in 1974. The cover is printed in silver foil which makes the book a particularly desirable item. This might explain why it’s also rather expensive today.

Cover art: Martyrdom of a Saint by Monsù Desiderio.

The 1979 Picador edition is one of two paperback editions I own. The enigmatic “Monsù Desiderio” has a confused identity (see this post), and specialised in curious architectural paintings so this is an apt choice.

Continue reading “Invisible Cities: Miscellanea”

Seeing Calvino: Invisible Cities

Continuous Cities 4: Cecilia by Leighton Connor.

Seeing Calvino is the most recent of the illustration projects featured this week, a group effort by three artists—Leighton Connor, Matt Kish and Joe Kuth—dedicated to picturing all 55 of the Invisible Cities. Matt Kish has been mentioned here before since he and I were among the many artists adapting literary works for The Graphic Canon (2012), a huge three-volume endeavour edited by Russ Kick. (Matt chose Moby-Dick while I worked on the rather less daunting Picture of Dorian Gray.) The depictions for Seeing Calvino are bold, vivid, and almost abstract at times. The trio completed their Invisible Cities project in April this year but there’s a promise on their Tumblr to commence work on an adaptation of Calvino’s astronomical fantasia, Cosmicomics.

Thin Cities 4: Sophronia by Matt Kish.

Cities and the Sky 1: Eudoxia by Joe Kuth.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Gérard Trignac’s Invisible Cities
• Colleen Corradi Brannigan’s Invisible Cities
• Le Città In/visibili
• Mikhail Viesel’s Invisible Cities
• Bookmark: Italo Calvino
• Crossed destinies revisted
• Crossed destinies: when the Quays met Calvino
• Tressants: the Calvino Hotel

Gérard Trignac’s Invisible Cities

I wrote a short appreciation of French artist Gérard Trignac back in 2006, and he’s been mentioned a few times since, so it would be remiss of me to not include his etchings in this week’s illustration series. Trignac is a favourite of mine among the current crop of French etchers and engravers for his superb renderings of fantastic architecture. Most of this work is from his own imagination but he’s also illustrated Borges (The Immortal) and Calvino, producing plates for expensive limited volumes. Les Villes Invisibles was published in 1993 by Les Amis du Livre, Paris, in an edition of 200. The combination of a small print run with a series of ten etchings makes this a costly volume; the cheapest edition on Abe.com just now is going for €1500.

Scarcity aside, these are marvellous depictions of Calvino’s cities, as detailed and meticulous as any of Trignac’s other works. One thing that becomes apparent when you start looking at illustrations of Calvino’s novel is that artists tend to pick the same few cities. So in Trignac’s case we have more views of Armilla, Octavia, Zenobia and so on. All of these may be seen at Trignac’s website, while one of the expensive volumes is for sale here. For those who can’t afford the latter I recommend Les Portes du Silence (2004), a collection of Trignac’s work that includes all the plates for Les Villes Invisibles, the Borges’ illustrations, and much more besides.

Thin Cities 2: Zenobia.

Trading Cities 5: Esmeralda.

Continue reading “Gérard Trignac’s Invisible Cities”

Colleen Corradi Brannigan’s Invisible Cities

Cities and Memory 5: Maurilia.

Colleen Corradi Brannigan’s multimedia project was linked here back in 2011 when news of her endeavours reached a number of high-profile websites. These artworks are another attempt to depict all of Italo Calvino’s cities, this time using a range of media that includes sculpture. I like the variety of this series; some of the depictions approach the more rigorous perspectives of MC Escher while others are as loose as Expressionist paintings. The website also includes extracts from Calvino’s descriptions.

Trading Cities 4: Ersilia.

Thin Cities 3: Armilla.

Continue reading “Colleen Corradi Brannigan’s Invisible Cities”

Le Città In/visibili

Thin Cities 3: Armilla by Luca Enoch.

Sergio Bonelli Editore, an Italian comics publisher, staged an exhibition of art based on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities at the Triennale Milano in 2002. The drawings for Le Città In/visibili head in the opposite direction from Mikhail Viesel’s depictions, and in several pictures push the cities towards generic fantasy and science fiction. These images are from an extinct page on the publisher’s website although they may also be seen on the current site with a little searching. The publisher doesn’t offer much information, however, so while the artists are identified it’s less clear which cities are being depicted. I’ve noted the more obvious ones; Calvino obsessives can have fun guessing which the others might be.

Laura Zuccheri.

Thin Cities 2: Zenobia by Maurizio Dotti.

Continue reading “Le Città In/visibili”