Pierre Luc Charles Cicéri

Pierre Luc Charles Cicéri was undoubtedly the greatest painter of stage designs for operas and theatres scenes active in France in the first half of the 19th century. He first trained as a singer and violinist, but following a carriage accident that left him crippled, the artist turned to painting. In 1802 he studied drawing with the architect François-Joseph Bélanger. In 1806 Pierre Luc Charles Cicéri developed a passion for stage decorations in the workshops of the Paris Opera. His artistic talent enabled him to become a painter-decorator for the Opera in 1810, then the chief decorator in 1818, a position he held for thirty-two years. Cicéri revolutionized the staging of plays and operas by unifying the decor and costumes with the text. To be as close as possible to reality, Cicéri required that all the elements of the decoration be faithful to the historical and topographical situations, and even to the local colors. The artist created more than 300 sets over the course of his career, transporting spectators to Italy, Egypt, Iran, and elsewhere, as well as gothic, fantastic, and romantic settings. His collaboration with Louis-Jacques Daguerre, particularly ingenious in the use of diorama and cyclorama, brought dazzling creativity to his staging.