Emanuele Luzzati

Emanuele Luzzati (3 June 1921 – 26 January 2007) was an Italian painter, production designer, illustrator, film director and animator. He was nominated for Academy Awards for two of his short films, La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie) (1965) and Pulcinella (1973).

He was born in Genoa and turned to drawing in 1938 when, as a Jew, his academic studies were interrupted by the introduction of the Fascist racial laws. He moved in Switzerland with his family and studied in Lausanne, where he obtained his degree at the local École des Beaux-Arts. He designed his first production of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba in 1944, a collaboration with his friends Alessandro Fersen, Aldo Trionfo and Guido Lopez. He returned in Italy after the war.

His first work as an animator was the short film I paladini di Francia, together with Giulio Gianini, in 1960.

He provided designs for the London Festival Ballet, the Chicago Opera House, the Vienna Staatsoper and the Glyndebourne Festiva, including several Mozart productions and Verdi's Macbeth produced by Michael Hadjimischev in 1972.

Luzzati was interested in tarot symbolism, which he used in scenographies for Fabrizio de André concerts in the 1990s.

One of Luzzati's books (based on a theatre production) was, in the English-language version, Ronald and the Wizard Calico, a fairy tale in verse (translated English).

The Picture Lion paperback edition (William Collins, London, 1973) is a paperback imprint of the Hutchinson Junior Books edition (1969), which credits the English translation to Hutchinson Junior Books, and cites Ugo Mursia Editore 1962 as the Italian language first published version. (The title in Italian is “I Paladini de Francia ovvero il tradimento di Gano di Maganz”, which translates literally as “The Paladins de France or the treachery of Gano of Maganz”.)

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