Dario Cecchi’s long career as a set designer for Italian motion pictures helps account for the striking theatricality of this hot-red and deep-green folding screen, decorated with surreal vignettes including a blazing sun. When Cecchi painted the screen in 1948, he was also designing sets and costumes for Sotto il sole di Roma (Under the Sun of Rome), the first film of a neorealist trilogy about poor people, directed by Renato Castellani.