Dante Ferretti's set designs star in an exhibition in Macerata

The fascinating imagery of set and costume designer Dante Fer retti is the absolute protagonist of the exhibition Dante Ferretti, ephemeral by mistake, staged at Palazzo Ricci in Macerata from July 25 to Sept. 19, 2021. The exhibition, curated by Pierfrancesco Giannangeli and Benito Leonori with the assistance of Bianca Piacentini, is promoted by the Fondazione Cassa di risparmio della provincia di Macerata (Carima), under the patronage of the Marche Region and the Municipality of Macerata. The organization is entrusted to Maggioli Cultura.

Dante Ferretti, a native of Macerata, is internationally renowned thanks to his numerous collaborations in major Hollywood productions and is the winner of several awards, including three Oscars for Martin Scorsese ’s The Aviator and Hugo Cabret and Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd - The Devilish Barber of Fleet Street.

On display in the halls of Palazzo Ricci are 10 pastel sketches on aluminum, paper, cardboard, plywood and canvas (including those of the Oscar-winning films) and a resin model, belonging to the collections of the Carima Foundation. The exhibition design is created in the set design workshops of the Pergolesi Spontini Foundation in Jesi, coordinated by Benito Leonori.

The visitor will find himself immersed in the process of artistic creation, in the same situation that the director experiences when the set designer submits the creative hypothesis to him, through sketches and models. The exhibition is an exciting journey between darkness and light, to discover and relive how the process of building that film or play begins.

Hence the title of the exhibition, “ephemeral by mistake.” “It is a pun on the essence of the practice of performance,” the curators explain, “wrongly considered an ephemeral that lasts the time of the performance or filming. On the contrary, the event, when it happens, is a life experience shared in the moment of its making for both artist and spectator, and life is a succession of often ephemeral moments that characterize it and make it unique and exciting, eternal in its splendor. To consider a set an ephemeral is therefore a mistake, because that varied world of images remains forever imprinted in the memory, intellectual and affective, of a viewer.”

Dante Ferretti’s apprenticeship took place in the Marche area in 1962, in Portonovo Bay in the province of Ancona. “I remember being called the architect, with a certain respect for my role,” Ferretti writes. “With my love for cinema and with all the recklessness of my seventeen years of age, I threw myself into an adventure that, at a distance of time, seems truly titanic.” This singular scenic hero of two worlds is heir to a centuries-old Italian tradition of craftsmanship, which in the United States has been an added value. From the Pasolinian world, out of time and out of place, Ferretti interfaces with the Fellini world, which recovers in extremis the unmistakable national connotation, to complement the Scorsesian one with an American imprint. Ferretti himself recalls, "My irrepressible passion for cinema, especially American cinema, from Citizen Kane to the great historical reconstructions such as Ben Hur and The Tunic, was then very influential in my formation. It was in the company of these films that as a boy I spent entire afternoons in the movie theaters of Macerata."

Moving Ferretti’s creativity is the stubborn need to make the unimaginable tangible, even visible, every time. This obsession takes shape from the paper trail or similar in which lines and colors leave the viewer with the task of mentally processing what even on the screen remains elusive and suggestive. “Set design for Ferretti is but the terminal stage of a dream dreamed and then made conscious to be left behind in order to start all over again, in a perennial exercise as a beginner confronting further trials,” explains Anton Giulio Mancino in his contribution in the exhibition catalog, published by Maggioli.

Also from the catalog is Renzo Bellanca’s contribution on film set design: “It is a process similar to that of an actor who, having read his part, must enter his role and historical context, making the viewer experience it: in this way it allows you to travel, initially, by standing at the drawing board, returning to the audience itself the journey, the noises, the smells imagined through those architectural elements, colors, objects and furnishings that you have selected, leading them sometimes even to those inner places that many times are only intangible atmospheres but that you have been able to make visible even if visible it is not.”

In the sketches in the Carima Foundation’s collection, there is thebare Eden of The Canterbury Tales, the other sexually unrestrained and liberated face of the medal of anItaly seen from afar through Geoffrey Chaucher’s fourteenth-century licentious novellas. And the aerial creature that gravitates as a sprawling, plurivalent female specter in The City of Women.

In Anthony Minghella’s sketch of Return to Cold Mountain, one immediately grasps the smoldering black mark and sense left by the Civil War on the environments; of Bizet’s Carmen, which Ferretti staged and directed on his own for the Macerata Sferisterio, the theatrical scene is already inscribed on canvas. Instead, in Shakespeare’s physical territories lie the still two-dimensional, pictorial Coliseum of Julie Taymor’s Titus, which is counterbalanced by the model of Elsinore Castle in Franco Zeffirelli’sHamlet. Enclosed in a gilded cage, at the height of himself, is tycoon Howard Hughes played by Leonardo Di Caprio in Scorsese’s The Aviator, while in Terry Gilliam ’s The Adventures of Baron Muchausen, Dante Ferretti imprisons an old sailing ship in its entirety in the belly of the whale, visualizing Rudolph Erich Raspe’s literary trail, already illustrated by Gustave Dorè.

The secrets and history of Georges Méliès are shaped in Hugo Cabret with the visceral, dark cinematic tunnel from which the little protagonist nimbly emerges into a sloping beam of light, similar to that found in the more disturbing and claustrophobic shaving room of the serial murderer in the Burtonian Sweeney Todd - The Devilish Barber of Fleet Street. And finally the Tibetan atmospheres of Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, with the Royal Palace Norbvunka.

The specimens by Dante Ferretti that the Carima Foundation displays in the exhibition at Palazzo Ricci put history and stories in a circle. They enable the identification of intersecting paths and destinies through visionary creativity that will make visitors dream.

The opening of the exhibition is scheduled for Saturday, July 24, at 6 p.m.

For all information you can visit the official website of Palazzo Ricci.

Pictured: Dante Ferretti, Barber Shop, Sweeney Todd - The diabolical barber of Fleet Street (2008)

Dante Ferretti's set designs star in an exhibition in Macerata

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