Giancarlo Bartolini Salimbeni, architetto dell'immaginario

Giancarlo Bartolini Salimbeni is an architect and artist whose variegated experience is viewed in this article. He is the outstanding sensitive set designer of memorable films such as Vittorio de Sica’s Garden of the Finzi Contini, Valerio Zurlini’s Desert of the Tartars. In his long career which started in the 1940s, he designed the set and costumes of more than a hundred film and television productions, and numerous stage productions. As a set designer, Bartolini’s task is not limited to providing a convincing and well documented reconstruction of the periods treated; indeed, he fills his stage with the same ambiguities and resonances that make the written text arouse emotion. This is astonishing when we consider that a film scene, which is mainly visual and limited to a few pre-established points of view and sequences, is at the same time a solid three-dimensional construction and therefore a form of architecture; and architecture, as Alberti would have explained, is an art of abstract formal equilibriums, closer to music than to literature; music normally does not describe, nor does it pretend to narrate; it merely asserts itself, and this applies to architecture, too. As an artist, Bartolini can adroitly perform the reverse operation, passing from a simple non mysterious, quotidian and concrete reality to the most profound and almost metaphysical poetry. In the same way that he makes a literary text become architecture, he also transforms architecture into a literary text, in both cases through his drawings.