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THE ROUTES OF THE IMAGINATION: HUGO PRATT RETURNS TO SIENA
Thirty years after Hugo Pratt’s death, the exhibition set up at Palazzo delle Papesse pays homage to the entire art of the master of adventure, twenty years after the great retrospective ‘Periplo immaginario’ set up in Siena in the museum complex of Santa Maria della Scala. In April 2025, drawn literature comes to life through watercolours, original plates and immersive projections, seven doors to pass through that open onto Hugo Pratt’s universe. Corto Maltese, women of adventure, cinematographic and literary influences, pop art references, deserts, oceans and plains of North America: an invitation to travel along Pratt’s routes.
DRAWINGS AND OBJECTS: THE WORLD BEYOND THE PAGE
Pratt did not just imagine, he looked for real traces, tangible elements to transform into signs. The exhibition displays not only plates and watercolours, but also shields, spears, masks, ethnographic objects that appear in his drawings and come from distant cultures, studied with the curiosity of an anthropologist from the heart of his vast library: over 17,000 volumes, including novels, historical essays, atlases, travel magazines, anthropology books and mythology texts. And comic books.
THE ART OF STORYTELLING, BETWEEN CINEMA, LITERATURE AND ADVENTURE
Hugo Pratt was not just a cartoonist, he was a storyteller, and he moved between pages and images with the same lightness with which Corto crossed borders. The exhibition highlights the literary, artistic and cinematographic references that nourished his imagination: the westerns and adventure films he knew and loved as a child, and then Stevenson, Conrad, Jack London and Rimbaud up to Homer. But every artist has a starting point, and for Hugo Pratt it was Milton Caniff. The shadows and contrasts, the tension-filled black and white of Terry and the pirates, the cinematic rhythms of Steve Canyon. Leafing through those strips Pratt realised that drawing and writing were one and the same: the stroke was narrative, the sign could tell a story as much as words. From there, everything else came together: his clean, essential line, his ability to evoke worlds with little detail, his use of silence as part of the story.
Sillabe Editore / Cong Edizioni
from april 2025
€ 29,00
208 pages, color
ISBN : 978-88-3340-524-7
‘Hugo Pratt, Imaginary Geographies’ is the catalogue of the anthological exhibition on display in Siena, from 10 April to 19 October 2025. It is a journey through Hugo Pratt’s drawn literature, through seven doors of the imaginary: Corto Maltese and all the other stories and characters born in Pratt’s enchantment, the female protagonists, the cinematographic and pop art influences and the real and imaginary literary references in his work.
More than 330 colour and black and white pictures, watercolours, original plates, albums and period material. To close, the volume gives readers a complete Corto Maltese adventure, A Mid-Winter Morning’s Dream, with new colouring by Patrizia Zanotti.
