Listri in Belgrade: Italian interiors before they reach parliament

The first thing to say is what is not on the exhibition. There are no people. No portraits. No chair just vacated. Nothing that should suggest life. Massimo Listri, with fifty years of practice behind him, has chosen to make empty rooms his subject and perspective his grammar. From this week, the Salon of the Belgrade City Museum holds the exhibition “Interni Italiani”, a prelude to the larger installation that will open at the end of June in the Hall of Ministers of the Italian Parliament in Rome.

The exhibition is co-organised by the Belgrade City Museum, the Italian Cultural Institute in Belgrade, the Italian Embassy and the private foundation DeGorsi Fine Arts. The Belgrade version is part of the “Salon of Excellence” platform, which has for several seasons served as a space for introductory shows ahead of larger European premieres.

What is seen through Listri’s lens

Listri photographs the interiors of palaces, libraries, museums and private residences. His technique has been consistent for half a century: a large-format analogue camera, natural light, a geometry of Renaissance precision, long exposures.

A first-time visitor to one of his rooms learns to look for the spot where the camera stood. Listri usually places it along one of the rarely used axes, so that the hall recognises its own structure as if seeing it for the first time. This is why his images of the chambers of the Vatican, the Uffizi, the Morgan Library and the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum hold a place in the collections of those same institutions.

Preparations for Rome

The Belgrade show matters not only as a local event. It is a dramaturgical prelude to the Rome premiere that follows in under a month. Listri has prepared sixty works that will be installed in the Italian Parliament with a specific order: the spatial arrangement will correspond to the protocol choreography the Hall of Ministers performs in its daily work.

What is particular to the Belgrade version is the curator’s decision also to include photographs of the Palace of Serbia. During his preparations Listri visited the representative interiors in New Belgrade and described them as “an exceptional space, full of design inventiveness and the highest aesthetic taste”. That phrase is not a piece of marketing copy; it is part of the exhibition itself.

What Listri actually does with an empty space

Technique is only the starting point. In one earlier interview, quoted in the Belgrade catalogue, Listri says technique matters far less than vision:

Technique means very little. What matters is vision, creative vision and a specific aesthetic taste. Everything else is work and patience.

In practice this means the photographs avoid spectacular contrasts, use natural light that often takes days while the composer waits for the right angle, and treat a room as a score, not as an object. Listri does not document interiors; he listens to them.

A career written through books

Listri began his professional career at the age of seventeen when, in 1981, together with the publisher Franco Maria Ricci and the critic Vittorio Sgarbi, he co-founded the magazine FMR, which became a reference for art history and photography in Italy. Over the following decades he published more than eighty monographs with leading international publishers.

His photographs form part of the collections of:

• the Louvre in Paris
• the Uffizi Gallery in Florence
• the Morgan Library in New York
• the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna
• national collections in Italy, France and the United States

Listri for now refuses to use artificial intelligence in his work. Asked about AI-generated images, in a recent interview he answered with a sentence already widely quoted: “The real work of a real artist will remain entirely separate from this.”

What the visitor takes away

The Salon of the Belgrade City Museum is not the largest exhibition hall in the city, but it has the atmosphere central to Listri’s work: natural light, wooden floors, a space that does not overpower the works. This makes the photographs feel not like reproductions but like windows into spaces the viewer can decide whether to visit.

Can a single photograph of an empty room say more than the column of tourists about to enter the same hall?