A Project for the Theatrical Presentation of the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri... The Foreword by Max Reinhardt. The Photography by Francis Bruguière.

280 x 212 mm. 21, [3] pages. With thirty-two plates with the photographs of scenography and masks designed for the show. Original editorial binding in black cardboard; on the front cover and spine titles printed on paper label. A very fine copy.

Provenance: Livio Ambrogio collection.

The volume documents one of the most extraordinary and bizarre projects inspired to the Commedia. The American set designer Norman Geddes Bell (1893-1958) planned a grandious show relating to Dante's poem, which was to have taken place at Madison Square Garden, the Chicago Coliseum or Olympia in London. The project was never realized owing many difficulties, and Geddes constructed a scale model of the stage, and 523 miniature characters and 14 masks for the protagonists (Dante, Virgil and Beatrice). As Norman Geddes Bell states in a preliminary note, "So many well meaning critics have told me that my drawings and even my model were interesting but that the production could not be realized in a practical sense, than I have proceeded with the cooperation of my pupils Francis Bruguière to illustrate, in the most graphic way I know, that it can be realized. We modeled five hundred miniature in clay, to the same scale as the stage, and arranged them on the stage model to fit the various compositions. The ensemble was illuminated, as nearly as the scale would permit, as the full size stage will be. Mr. Bruguière photographed the result".