The largest exhibition ever dedicated to Hugo Pratt is in a 15th-century palace

Hugo Pratt began his journey as a fumettista making art in unlikely places. He was a Rimini-born, erudite vagrant, whose most famous character—Il Corto Maltese—became the central force of a feverishly illustrated world. He began life as an artist at age 14, distributing sketches of military highlanders to troops in Ethiopia in the 1930s for entertainment. Three decades later, his beloved protagonist would emerge in Una ballata del mare salato (A Ballad of the Salty Sea), Pratt’s most famous graphic novel. Before creating Il Corto Maltese, Pratt travelled across continents—from Africa to North and South America and Europe—surrounding himself with international cartoonists and artists. His work was consequently coloured by references, rich with historical details that made their way as drawn cameos into his graphic stories.

They now adorn the walls of the Palazzo delle Papesse—a noble residence built between 1460 and 1495 on the inclined street of Via di Città, a stone’s throw away from Siena’s famous Piazza del Campo. It was designed by Bernardo Rossellino, a stalwart sculptor and architect of the Florentine Renaissance. The palace is known for its rational, doughty travertine façade and atmospheric internal courtyard, which scales the full height of the building, creating a micro-environment of shade and murmuring sound at the heart of what is now Siena’s landmark space for art.  On the palazzo’s upper floors, an exhibition design by Giovanni Mezzedimi plays with scale and material intensities to bring to life Pratt’s work on a new canvas. The exhibition is the largest collection of Pratt’s work ever put on display, including an exhaustive catalogue of his comic strips and lesser-known graphic works and watercolors. It is shown against the palazzo’s whitewashed interiors, whose rooms sit beneath a series of whimsically frescoed vaulted ceilings, painted with roundel scenes enwrapped by botanical details. Pratt’s works have been sifted into thematic rooms, with exhibits sectioned into a minimal series of displays, their repetition avoiding an overload of textures within an already elaborately decorated space. 

Mezzedimi’s design has sought dialogue with two contexts: the Renaissance architecture of the exhibition’s borrowed home, and Pratt’s vast and imaginative universe. He leaves much of the space free of intervention, allowing the proportions, light and textured floors and ceilings of the palace to remain primary within the narrative of the show. The design is diplomatic to the space but announces itself with bold forms—specifically the collection of timber, pyramid-legged display vitrines that stand solidly dotted throughout many of the rooms.

The design uses a minimal material palette, with displays falling into three main groups: amplified wall murals, made using either printed transfers or video projections of Pratt’s drawings; the solid timber standing displays; and a series of custom-designed timber and perspex wall frames, each exhibiting whole scenes or magnified details.

An assortment of found objects and replicas intersperse with the artworks, creating a three-dimensional timeline of Pratt’s lifelong excursions. Giant masks, sculptures, and textiles spell out the footprint of his travels and highlight the way he integrated what he saw into his own works—objects are shown side-by-side with scenes in which they were included. 

The exhibition is expansive, attempting to capture the breadth of work produced by a vastly prolific artist. Different modes of interpretation are introduced across its three floors, helping viewers find focus amidst a copious mass of illustrated content. Inside several of the exhibition rooms, sound, projection, and oversized graphic scenography activate Pratt’s work, blowing it up and making it move. Elsewhere, focus is directed to the detail of his original folios. In one instance, a smaller room has been blacked out, with a timber black-painted box built to nest inside, darkening the space and directing attention onto glass suspended displays carrying warmly-lit pages of comic strips.   

It is easy to imagine how Pratt would have incorporated Siena’s warm sights and sounds into his drawings, were he still active today. The exhibition, which is sub-titled “geografie immaginarie” (imagined geographies) is planned to travel to Rome and thereafter Venice, where Pratt himself once lived. In doing so the intrepid story of the Corto and his comrades continues to evolve, framed by different contexts of time and space.