Cast your mind back to the launch of what is now known ubiquitously around the globe as Ferrari. The Italian marque’s founder Enzo Ferrari built the company to fund its racing team and treated the road cars as the necessary evil that paid for it. In fact, the first production car didn’t roll out of Maranello until 1947, some two decades after the Scuderia Ferrari racing team first found the chequered flag.
Of course, its cars then became the most emotionally charged objects in the business anyway, finding their way off the racetrack and into the homes of its customers.
Now, Ferrari is decidedly taking that fandom one step further, releasing specialty art pieces crafted from some of its most iconic models.
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Growing out of the 812 Competizione Tailor Made, a one-off Ferrari on which sketch lines were painted onto the actual bodywork, Ferrari’s Sketch Body project takes a body panel, a hood, or a rear spine of the 12Cilindri, Purosangue, Daytona SP3, and F80, strips it of any automotive job, and turns it into a three-dimensional canvas lifted directly from Chief Design Officer Flavio Manzoni’s concept sketches.
The new venture reflects the two extremes of Ferrari’s creative process: the designer's first gesture and the manufacturing that follows.
What started as a single show car is now a full product line, presenting mechanical components as furniture and demonstrating that a Ferrari could retain its cultural currency even after its useful automotive life had ended. There is something almost wonderfully Italian about the confidence required to do it.
Ferrari has been explicit about wanting to reach beyond its existing customer base. Its Capital Markets Day strategy outlined an ambition to engage an audience extending from roughly 180,000 Ferrari owners to more than 400 million tifosi worldwide. The opportunity is obvious. There are vastly more people who can buy a piece of Ferrari than there are people who can buy a Ferrari.
Fashion understood this years ago. So did the art world. The most valuable object bearing a luxury name does not necessarily need to be the most expensive object to manufacture. Scarcity, provenance, authorship, cultural relevance; they can all do considerably more heavy lifting than the raw material. Luckily for the Prancing Horse, it has all four.
Ferrari has yet to reveal pricing, production numbers, or exactly how Sketch Body will be sold. But given the hype that continues to orbit this iconic brand, it would be optimistic to expect anything resembling conventional wall-art money.