This Stage is an Art Gallery : The Italian Old Masters in Beckett’s Theatre

The paper focuses on the impact of Italian Old Masters on Beckett’s stage set and suggests that Michelangelo Buonarroti deeply inspired him and was among those artists who taught him to think of his stage images in terms of three-dimensional sculpture rather than two-dimensional painting. I argue that his competences both as connoisseur and museum curator brought him to employ the visual resources of the stage – depth and foreground, lighting and darkness, movement and stillness, colour and gesture – to conceive his plays as art installations, which happen on a stage that is also very similar to a gallery room.