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Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Aida, Act 1, Scene 2

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Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes. Voting period ends on 4 Oct 2016 at 01:50:49 (UTC)

Original – Philippe Chaperon's set design for Act 1, Scene 2 of Giuseppe Verdi's Aida, from the original 1871 Cairo performance.
Reason
Historical records of the first production are very valuable by their nature. The crop was done to allow me to carefully fix the edges; the paper was not cut that evenly for mounting, and I wanted to get as much of the detailed work near the top as possible. Lots of dust on this one.
Articles in which this image appears
Aida
FP category for this image
Wikipedia:Featured pictures/Culture, entertainment, and lifestyle/Theatre
Creator
Philippe Chaperon, restored by Adam Cuerden
  • Support as nominatorAdam Cuerden (talk) 01:50, 24 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • I rarely respond to FP canidates, but I love watching this page, and I fell I am uniquely qualified to discuss this one as I am a set designer for theater myself. One big question I have is with the crop of the image. Around the edge of this candidate is a curtain but it is unclear if that curtain is part of the set or if it is actually the House curtain. Because we do not have any reference point of where the proscenium is in relationship to this curtain I am uncertain if this crop is actually the whole set. More simply put if this curtain is the House Curtain then everything is great, but if it is part of the scenery than the image may be cropped too close.--Found5dollar (talk) 14:28, 25 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    • @Found5dollar: This is literally the entirety of the image as it exists - I very carefully made sure not to crop out any of it; indeed, I filled about a 6-10 pixels high strip in a few places in order to make sure no information was lost because of the unevenness of the paper. Compare File:Set_design_by_Philippe_Chaperon_for_Act1_sc2_of_Aida_by_Verdi_1871_Cairo_-_Gallica.jpg. I did cut that tiny tag of paper in the lower right hand corner, the rest, at most, lost a pixel or two. The blue backing paper doesn't appear to be original, so I didn't want to keep it.
While it's theoretically possible more of the image existed at some point, it certainly does not now; the BnF has the Paris opera artchives - note the "Bibl. de L'Opera" stamp on the original; this is the only copy. Adam Cuerden (talk) 16:04, 25 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Found5dollar: Also, if you look at [1] you'll see that he fairly regularly includes curtains to frame his designs, but they tend not to show any more detail than here. Adam Cuerden (talk) 19:01, 25 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I'm convinced. I'm still unsure if in his rendering style these curtains he includes are part of the theater or part of the design, but in-terms of the needs here we have as much info as we can possibly have.--Found5dollar (talk) 15:01, 26 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Promoted File:Set design by Philippe Chaperon for Act1 sc2 of Aida by Verdi 1871 Cairo - Gallica - Restored.jpg --Armbrust The Homunculus 04:04, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]