Dante Ferretti, con i miei occhi

From 17 April to 19 July 2026, at the Musei di San Salvatore in Lauro, the secrets of a master of production design unfold between art and cinema. From Italian film to an international vision, from Fellini to Scorsese, this exhibition pays tribute to one of the greatest figures of our time.

A master of contemporary production design, and three-time Academy Award winner, he has worked across more than sixty years of cinema, spanning genres, countries, eras, narratives and visions – a journey through the craft of filmmaking, into a dimension that is at once artisanal, cultured and visionary, where drawing becomes space, memory becomes image, and the set becomes imagination.

The exhibition brings together around forty works, including sketches, studies, paintings and materials that reveal the power of a gaze that has profoundly shaped the history of Italian and international cinema. Particular attention is given to the artistic dimension of a body of work that—from Pier Paolo Pasolini to Martin Scorsese, via Federico Fellini – has elevated Italian mastery on the global stage.

The exhibition arrives in Rome, the foundational place of Ferretti’s artistic journey. It is here that his training, his encounters with the great masters of Italian cinema, and the international scope of his creations intertwine. An independent visual artist, he transforms the sketch into artwork, painting into cinema, and cinema into a lasting way of seeing.

Preparatory drawings, models and set reconstructions are not presented as secondary steps or purely functional tools for filmmaking, but as works in their own right, complete in their aesthetic and poetic integrity – original creations from which everything else emerges. Spaces, environments, architectures, perspectives and visions exist here already, even before the camera, each with its own visual, aesthetic and interpretative identity. Film expands, transforms and multiplies them: within their materiality one finds chalks, coloured charcoals and, at times, collage – demonstrating a technical mastery capable of conveying depth, light, shadow and narrative tension.

It is through painting that Ferretti learned to see cinema: to build atmospheres from the imagery of art, to read within paintings the potential for space, light and storytelling. His visual genealogy runs from Piero della Francesca to Masaccio, from El Greco to Luca Signorelli, from Caravaggio’s light to Giotto, from Flemish painting to Mannerism, and on to Bosch and Bruegel – a lineage that continues to live within his sketches as the tangible substance of invention.

Thus, the art of production design is not merely a backdrop to storytelling, but the origin of vision itself – a place where cinema is born from art, and art returns as space, light and the architecture of dreams.