The House-Museum of Maurice Ravel
Domenica is the Sunday insert of Il Sole 24 Ore, dedicated to culture, art and entertainment (art director Madda Paternoster).
Fot this issue (5 october 2025) the cover story is about The house-museum “Le Belvédère” in Montfort-l’Amaury (Paris), inhabited by Maurice Ravel from 1921 until his death.
The house has been preserved just as the legendary composer furnished it and lived in it and, as the text by Francesco Maria Colombo (photographer, orchestral conductor and journalist) reveals, it has something to say about Ravel’s most intimate personality.
There, Ravel, an artist with a reserved and inscrutable soul, collected a myriad of small objects: ceramics, stuffed birds, glass flowers, paintings, figurines, and much more, forming a material “symphony” that could be a clue to unraveling the mystery surrounding the great composer’s inner world!
My illustration tells precisely this story: the mystery of Ravel, which unfolds in the relationship between his interiority and exteriority.
I began working on the illustration starting from a portrait of Maurice Ravel.
I thought that portraying him at night, with cool colors, could accentuate the sense of mystery and detachment.
This also allowed me to create a chromatic contrast with the warm colors I chose to represent the composer’s inner world.
Based on photos from the house-museum, I was able to reconstruct some of the objects Ravel truly loved, which I then reinterpreted according to my imagination.
The four concepts I submitted to the editorial team
