Lecco, at the Torre Viscontea the film celebrities photographed by Elio Luxardo

On until July 31 at the Torre Viscontea in Lecco is the exhibition Elio Luxardo and cinema, promoted by the Municipality of Lecco, SiMUL - Sistema Museale Urbano Lecchese and Fondazione 3M. The exhibition celebrates the artist known for being the photographer of the divas and stars of Cinecittà: Claudia Cardinale (pictured), Gina Lollobrigida, Lucia Bosé, Giorgio Albertazzi, and Sergio Tofano are just some of the famous faces of Italian cinema that Elio Luxardo portrayed through his shots during his career.

Elio Luxardo (Sorocaba, 1908 - Milan, 1969), born to parents of Italian descent in Brazil, established himself as a documentary filmmaker, learning a great deal from his photographer father and working with his brothers in the family studio. When he moved to Rome in 1932, he enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia with dreams of becoming a director. Impatient with discipline, however, he left school to join the studio of photographer Sem Bosch and almost immediately took over his business, quickly establishing himself as a portrait painter.

In his atelier at 197 Via del Tritone (and, from 1944, in the Milanese one in Corso Vittorio Emanuele) Luxardo experimented with a particular use of lights that would prove to be highly innovative for the world of photography, but which in reality was not new: as a great and passionate cinema expert, that system that enhanced faces and made them particularly plastic he had learned on the sets. It is somewhat inevitable, then, that it was the stars of Cinecittà and theater actors who particularly loved his portraits.

Luxardo brings out the characteristics of each of his subjects-from the look, to the posture, to the smile-and prefers shots in which the face or body occupies space diagonally, so as to convey a sense of plasticity. And it is precisely because of this ability to synthesize in the pursuit of beauty that Luxardo’s film portraits retain their very topical classicism.

All the works exhibited in Elio Luxardo and cinema come from the photographic archives of the 3M Foundation, a permanent cultural institution of research and education and owner of a historical photographic archive of more than 110 thousand images.

For all information you can visit the official website of the Lecco Museums.

Lecco, at the Torre Viscontea the film celebrities photographed by Elio Luxardo

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