Federico da Montefeltro’s most ambitious project was the construction of the Ducal Palace and, at the same time, the urban planning of Urbino. The rise of the Montefeltro family made the idea of an ideal city possible. Of this utopia only the palace remains as architecture — deserted by the court and stripped of its furnishings. Nowadays only the remaining works and decorations inhabit this space and relate to it. Is there a mutual enhancement in this space-works relationship? Does the content enhance the container or vice versa? Photography seems to be able to highlight this link.

This publication makes use of two photographic testimonies: that of a group of photography students from the ISIA of Urbino and that of a sample of visitors. These have been selected and divided into two sections in order to narrate the Opera-Architecture relationship. These two apparatuses are presented here from a further perspective, that of the graphic artist, who appropriates the visitors’ gaze and connotes it with an exasperated post-production, suggesting the questioning of three main questions: how does the visitor’s gaze relate to the space and the works? Can different gazes with different purposes dialogue in the same narrative? And finally, can the appropriation of a gaze itself be a gaze?