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meow

The image of the original 1979 poster is a reworking of Henry Fuseli’s 1774 pen-and-ink drawing Dante and Virgil on the Ice of Cocytus.

The film poster, by contrast, was designed by Peter Sis at the request of Milos Forman, taking as its model Robert von Nutt’s poster for the Broadway production (1980). It depicts black hooded figure with outstretched arms and barely visible eyes. Despite its graphic stylization, the composition appears to reproduce the features of a typical Venetian mask, the bauta, consisting of a tricorne hat, a domino cloak, and the mask known as the larva.

My hypothesis is that this aesthetic shift was also influenced by another major Mozart-related event of 1979: Joseph Losey’s cinematic adaptation of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni. In this distinctive opera-film, set in an imaginary Venice, masks play a central role, particularly in the finale of the first act, when Donna Anna, Don Ottavio, and Donna Elvira—having identified Don Giovanni as the murderer of the Commendatore—enter his house in disguise during the ball. In Losey’s film, the masks retain the domino cloak (or tabarro) and tricorne hat, but the traditional larva of the bauta is replaced by a white face with distinctly feminine features. Since the film was released in the United States almost simultaneously with the stage production of Amadeus (Amadeus premiered in September 1979, and Don Giovanni was released inNovember 1979) it is not implausible that it helped shape the visual imagination that would later become iconic.

In Forman’s film, the black carnivalesque figure remains, but the larva is replaced by an original bifront mask depicting the faces of Comedy and Tragedy. This choice appears to invoke the theatre explicitly, not only as the original medium of the narrative (Peter Shaffer’s play), but also as a stylistic principle underlying the entire film, whose events and modes of representation are marked by a pronounced theatricality. In an article published in The New York Times ( “Paying Homage to Mozart”, 1984. https://www.nytimes.com/1984/09/02/magazine/paying-homage-to-mozart.html.) Shaffer himself stated that the use of masks constitutes a tribute to Mozart, who frequently employed disguises in his comic operas.

I couldn’t help but notice, anyway, that the recent blue ray posters have started to introduce the double faced mask as an iconography: meaning that, in fact, now it is this specific icon mostly associated with Amadeus!

One thing I'd like to add while reblogging is that the figure's beckoning pose is almost definitely Salieri, beckoning to Mozart in his costume during this scene in the play:

It seems obvious to me... but I've seen people say it specifically depicts the commendatore or Leopold Mozart. They could be right, and I could be wrong, but seeing the recording, this is the exact pose Salieri makes in this scene (while in the identical costume), and it just makes more sense thematically for it to be him.