Scipione

Scipione (HWV 20) is an opera seria in three acts, with music composed by George Frideric Handel for the Royal Academy of Music (1719) in 1726. The librettist was Paolo Antonio Rolli. Handel composed Scipione whilst in the middle of writing Alessandro. It was based upon the life of Roman General Scipio Africanus. Its slow march is the regimental march of the Grenadier Guards.

Performance history

Scipione had its premiere on 12 March 1726 at The King's Theatre, Haymarket. Handel revived the opera in 1730, but it did not receive another UK production until October 1967, by the Handel Opera Society. In Germany, Scipione was revived at the Göttingen International Handel Festival in 1937 and at the annual Handel Festival in Halle in 1965. with the revival of interest in Baroque music and historically informed musical performance since the 1960s,Scipione, like all Handel operas, receives performances at festivals and opera houses today. Among other performances, Scipione was given by Christophe Rousset at the Festival de Beaune in 1993.

Scipione (Gino Bonichi)

Gino Bonichi (February 25, 1904 – November 9, 1933), known as Scipione, was an Italian painter and writer.

He was born in Macerata. In 1909 he moved to Rome, where he later enrolled at the Scuola Libera di Nudo of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma. He founded with Mario Mafai and Antonietta Raphael the Scuola romana, a group of artists active in Rome who were influenced by Expressionism, and opposed the officially approved art of the Fascist period. He exhibited his work for the first time in 1927. At about this time, he also began publishing his poetry and essays.

Scipione's interest in art history led him to study the Italian old masters, as well as El Greco and Goya. Expressionists such as Chaim Soutine, James Ensor and George Grosz influenced the development of his style, which was characterized by mysticism and a personal symbolism. His period of greatest activity was between 1927 and the autumn of 1930; during these years he produced his most important works, such as Still-life with a Bowler Hat (1929) and Still-life with a Feather (1929). He exhibited in the Venice Biennale in 1930, and at the first Rome Quadriennale in 1931. In the last two years of his life, the tuberculosis from which he had suffered for years forced him to abandon painting in favor of drawing. He died in Arco on November 9, 1933.