Ul de Rico

Count Ul de Rico, AKA Ulderico Conte Gropplero di Troppenburg (1944-2023), was an Italian-born artist and author of illustrated children's books, most notably The Rainbow Goblins (1978) and its sequel The White Goblin. (1996) He was also a major artistic contributor to the children's fantasy film The NeverEnding Story (1984), based on the book of the same name by Michael Ende. Career Ul de Rico was born in 1944 in Udine, Italy. He lived in Munich for many years, studying at the Munich Academy. He studied painting under Professor Franz Nagel and, under the tutelage of Professor Rudolf Heinrich, received his diploma in stage and costume design. He now lives in France. The Rainbow Goblins was published in 1978 in Germany, and was translated into English in the same year by Stanley Baron. It is a story of 7 goblins, each a different color of the rainbow, who travel through the land catching rainbows and stealing their color. The work was praised for its enchanting oil-on-oak illustrations, which vividly draw the reader into the world of the goblins; and its simple story, which teaches children about color as well as reverence for natural beauty. In 1980, Ul de Rico wrote and illustrated The Ring of the Nibelung: Wagner's epic drama, an interpretation of the extraordinary 15-hour epic Opera series composed by Richard Wagner over the course of 26 years. de Rico's story was a simplified, truncated version of the full play cycle, which took several creative liberties, the most noticeable of which was the use of the three Norns as narrators throughout the story, rather than merely for Götterdämmerung, as in the original. The oil-on-oak color paintings were all designed similarly: the painting was ringed by the three Norns and their golden rope, and the top half of the painting showed a different scene from the bottom. The top image and bottom image were connected thematically, but not sequentially within the story.