Italian Disco Visual Stories: The Work of Luciano Tallarini
An overview of the work of the art director of some of Italy’s most notable albums
Italian music exists in synergy with visual culture, as the most prominent artists always crafted a very distinct visual identity for themselves. And while costume designers, set designers, and TV show or music-video directors largely contributed to this component, we cannot understate the importance of photographers, animators, illustrators, and art directors.
Luciano Tallarini, a frequent artistic partner of photographer Mauro Balletti, has defined the visual language of the Italian recording industry for more than five decades. He achieved a type of aesthetic that combined minimalism with theatricality, where artistic rigor went hand in hand with conceptual subversion.
He was a well-rounded humanist: after obtaining an arts-focused high-school diploma, he started connecting with the cultural and artistic circles of Milan. He worked at a printing press and as a graphic designer for the music-themed magazine “Musica e Dischi,” and he also moonlighted as a journalist. He first made contact with record labels’ press offices in that capacity, and was able to pitch his design services through that channel.
Despite having varying degrees of abstraction, surrealism, and stylized artwork, Tallarini’s covers always conveyed the essence of the artist they portrayed. The introduction to his personal archive, donated to Regione Lombardia, states that he would tag along in the recording booth during sessions to directly observe how the artists interacted with the songs they were performing. His presence during those sessions also allowed him to craft sketches on the go or even take pictures that he could use as a basis for his artwork. To complement that, he would also study the live performances of these artists, where they displayed a more finessed stage presence.
Mina was one of his most frequent subjects: throughout his career, Tallarini shot more than 100 covers for her, very much turning Mina into a “face,” in addition to the voice she always was. They collaborated for close to four decades.
The cover art of her 1974 double album Mina® and Baby Gate features portrait illustrations of the star. Specifically, for Mina® Tallarini opted for a surrealist style, and you can see her hair, eyes, and hand holding a rosetta with salame.
In the case of Baby Gate—which owes its title to the name she used when recording for foreign audiences—the style of the portrait is between surrealism and belle époque, with her pose and Tallarini’s art style echoing the poster art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha.
Perhaps most notably, his cover for Mina’s Attila reworks a portrait by Mauro Balletti by turning it into a Modernist neo-classical bust in grayscale, with her lips smeared by the dribblings of a rainbow-colored popsicle, which lies by the head itself. This award-winning cover is now displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
With Mina, Tallarini also played with androgyny and gender fluidity. Her 1980 album Kyrie features a male hockey player with a retro photo filter—it’s actually the singer’s son, Massimiliano Pani.
In Salomè (1981), her pre-Raphaelite-style portrait came with a full beard, giving her the semblance of a mythological and semidivine creature (this opinion has been largely influenced by a stunning 2018 Brooklyn production of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, where Iokanaan was played by a non-binary performer who really emphasized their androgyny for the role).
For the cover of the album Rane Supreme, released in 1987, Mina’s head is juxtaposed (or perhaps attached) to a buff male torso. As a double album, part one came with a frontal portrait, part two a Rückenfigur, tastefully cut just below the small of the back.
With Loredana Bertè, he leaned on the fashion and aesthetic of the decades in which her albums came out. In Normale o super (1976) she is in full 1970s boho regalia, while T.I.R. from 1977 looks very much like Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A.—which, by the way, came out in 1984. In Bandaberté (1979), an illustrated version of her embodies the aesthetic that would become ubiquitous in 1980s erotic thrillers. Perhaps most famously, he art-directed the cover of her 1982 album Traslocando, where his creative partner Mauro Balletti photographed her in a nun’s habit with full glam makeup while she embraced herself—in a way, Rosalía’s cover art for LUX recreated both tropes, i.e., the nun’s habit and the chosen pose. For Jazz (1983), she fully embodied the more rugged 1980s aesthetic.
He morphed Patty Pravo into an Edwardian beauty for the 1972 record Sì… Incoerenza, softening the self-presentation of the usually edgy singer, and for Oltre l’eden, her 1989 album, he fashioned her in a way that made her resemble 1980s female rockers.
Ornella Vanoni’s striking features and curls were the focus of his artwork for the Art Nouveau–inspired La voglia di sognare (1974) and Io fuori (1977), and the Warholian Un panino una birra e poi (2001).
Through his sleight of hand, Raffaella Carrà morphed into a comic-book heroine as she posed for the cover of Applauso (1979), where she is captured in the act of sprinkling stardust onto herself.
With Milva, he combined music, stagecraft, and political activism. For her 2007 album In Territorio Nemico, he made her appear like a watercolor portrait in black, white, and red.
His works were collected in the 2008 catalog/book hybrid Pop Life (now a rarity!), and an exhibition of his main contributions to the music industry periodically travels across Italy. In late 2020, shortly before his passing, he donated his personal archive to Museo Bellini in Asola, MN.