Luchino Visconti

Family arms

Luchino Visconti was born into a prominent noble family in Milan, one of seven children of Giuseppe Visconti di Modrone, Duke of Grazzano Visconti and Count of Lonate Pozzolo, and his wife Carla[4] (née Erba, heiress to Erba Pharmaceuticals). He was formally known as Count don Luchino Visconti di Modrone, and his family is a branch of the Visconti of Milan where they ruled from 1277 to 1447, initially as lords, then as dukes.

He grew up in the Milanese family seat, the Palazzo Visconti di Modrone in Via Cerva, as well as on the family estate, Grazzano Visconti Castle near Vigolzone. He was baptized and raised in the Roman Catholic church.[5] After his parents separated in the early 1920s, his mother moved with her younger children, including him, to her own house in Milan, as well as to her summer residence, Villa Erba in Cernobbio on Lake Como. The father, as chamberlain of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, also owned a villa in Rome that Luchino later inherited and lived in for decades.

• 
  Palazzo Visconti di Modrone in Milan
• 
  Grazzano Visconti Castle
• 
  Villa Erba on Lake Como

In his early years, he was exposed to art, music and theatre: The Palazzo Visconti di Modrone in Milan, where he grew up, had its own small private theater and the children participated in its performances. The family also had their own box in the La Scala opera house. Luchino studied cello with the Italian cellist and composer Lorenzo de Paolis (1890–1965) and met the composer Giacomo Puccini, the conductor Arturo Toscanini and the writer Gabriele D'Annunzio. Visconti found literature by reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time, later a lifelong film project that he never realized. Before he started his film career, he was passionate about training racehorses in his own stable. An engagement concluded in 1935 with Princess Irma of Windisch-Graetz raised concerns with her father, Prince Hugo, whereupon Visconti broke it off.[6]

During World War II, Visconti joined the Italian Communist Party,[7] which he considered to be the only effective opponent of Italian Fascism. While in his early years he had been impressed by such aesthetic aspects of the solemn parades of the National Fascist Party as marching in columns in boots and uniform, he had now come to hate the Mussolini regime. He accused the bourgeoisie of treason to tyranny, and following the Badoglio Proclamation, began working with the Italian resistance. He supported the communists' partisan fight at risk of death; his villa in Rome became a meeting place for oppositional artists.

After the king's flight in autumn 1943 and the intervention of the Germans, he went into hiding in the mountains, at Settefrati, under the nom de guerre Alfredo Guidi. Visconti helped English and American prisoners of war hide after they had escaped, and also gave shelter to partisans in his house in Rome, with the help of actress María Denis.[8]

After the German occupation of Rome in April 1944, Visconti was arrested and detained by the anti-partisan Pietro Koch and sentenced to execution by firing squad. He was only saved from death by Denis' last-minute intervention. After the war, Visconti testified against Koch, who was himself convicted and executed.

In the aftermath of World War II he became one of the founding fathers of the Italian neorealistic film movement that focused on challenging economic and conditions, and how it affected the psyche of the underclass. Visconti himself came from nobility, highly educated and never in financial lack. His films reflected that tension. In fact Visconti said he felt he came from a world long ago, that of the previous (19th) century.

In the film The Leopard, he addressed the decline of an old social order and the rise of “modern times”. He did not see his opulent flashbacks as an escape into imaginary, lost worlds, rather as the deciphering of signs. He wanted to put his finger on the signs of profound historical changes which will only become visible later. He searched world literature for relevant works to show the discrepancies between generations and their world views, as a task of realism in art. When he was accused of decadence, he recalled Thomas Mann and his way of creating art.[15]

In later years, Visconti made no secret of his homosexuality, though he remained a devout Catholic throughout his life.[16] "I am a Catholic," he commented in 1971. "I was born a Catholic, I was baptized a Catholic. I cannot change what I am, I cannot easily become a Protestant. My ideas may be unorthodox, but I am still a Catholic."[5] While his first 3-year-relationship from 1936, with the photographer Horst P. Horst, remained discreet because of the prejudices of the time, he later showed up openly in the company of his lovers, among them the director and producer Franco Zeffirelli[17] and the actor Udo Kier.[18] His last lover was the Austrian actor Helmut Berger, who played Martin in Visconti's film The Damned.[19] Berger also appeared in Visconti's Ludwig in 1973 and Conversation Piece in 1974, along with Burt Lancaster. Zeffirelli also worked as part of the crew in production design, as assistant director, and other roles in a number of Visconti's films, operas, and theatrical productions. According to Visconti's autobiography, he and Umberto II of Italy had a romantic relationship during their youth in the 1920s.[20]

Visconti was hostile to the Protests of 1968 and didn't even try to follow the movement and adopt the airs of a youth, like Alberto Moravia or Pier Paolo Pasolini did. In his view the protesters sought change for the sake of destruction without building something new. Disgusted, he looked at the young people in their enthusiasm, outbursts of anger, parties and tumults, their abstract speeches, their confused juggling with Mao, Marx, and Che Guevara. They saw him as a symbol of reaction, a member of the mandarin caste. The emerging radical-left terrorism in Italy frightened him and made him fear the rise of a new fascism.[21]

Visconti in 1972

Visconti smoked 120 cigarettes a day.[22] He suffered a serious stroke in 1972, but continued to smoke heavily. He died in Rome of another stroke at the age of sixty-nine on 17 March 1976. There is a museum dedicated to the director's work in Ischia where he had his summer residence La Colombaia.[23]

Notes

Sources

• Ardoin, John, The Callas Legacy, London: Duckworth, 1977 ISBN 0-7156-0975-0
• Bacon, Henry, Visconti: Explorations of Beauty and Decay, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998 ISBN 0-521-59960-1
• Düttmann, Alexander García, Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Blood, translated by Robert Savage, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009 ISBN 9780804757409
• Glasenapp, Jörg (ed.): Luchino Visconti (= Film-Konzepte, vol. 48). Munich: edition text + kritik 2017.
• Iannello, Silvia, Le immagini e le parole dei Malavoglia Roma: Sovera, 2008 (in Italian)
• Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, Luchino Visconti. London: British Film Institute, 2003. ISBN 0-85170-961-3
• Visconti bibliography, University of California Library, Berkeley. Retrieved 7 November 2011.
• Schifano, Laurence: Luchino Visconti (biography, in French), Paris 1987 (German translation: Luchino Visconti, Fürst des Films, Gernsbach 1988)
• Viscontiana: Luchino Visconti e il melodramma verdiano, Milan: Edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, 2001. A catalog for an exhibition in Parma of artifacts relating to Visconti's productions of operas by Verdi, curated by Caterina d'Amico de Carvalho, in Italian. ISBN 88-202-1518-7

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Luchino Visconti.

• Luchino Visconti at IMDb
• Biography, Filmography and More on Luchino Visconti (in Italian)
• British Film Institute: "Luchino Visconti": filmography
• Hutchison, Alexander, "Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice", Literature/Film Quarterly, v. 2, 1974. (In-Depth Analysis of Death in Venice).
• Luchino Visconti at Find a Grave