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The brief life of the Accademia del Cimento (1657-1667), the first known society with a purely experimental programme, 1 is entangled with the most surprising advancements in the history of scientific instruments of that century, from the telescope to the microscope, the thermometer to the barometer, the hygrometer to the pendulum as a time-regulator, and more. The making of instruments at the Florentine court shows the interaction of princely, scholarly and artisanal actors. This paper explores this collaboration and shows how the supposed "invisibility' of artisans depended on their proximity to the academicians and princes, who mainly communicated verbally with them, directly or through middlemen. The visibility of artisans increases proportionally to their physical distance from the Court. In this essay I unveil the identity of the artisans of the Cimento and, finally, attempt to attribute five instruments (some lost and others still extant) to specific makers, shedding light also on relations between the artisan and his patron.

Studying highly valuable and fragile Renaissance drawings requires a non-invasive contactless analytical approach. In this work, we study an early drawing by Raffaello Sanzio, one of the most important artists of the Italian Renaissance, realized during his stay in Florence (1504-1508). Our analyses aimed to reveal the features of the paper support significant for its dating, identify and map the drawing media to understand the artist's technical approach, and document the drawing condition with imaging and single-sited optical methods. Reflectance Vis-NIR multispectral imaging spectroscopy elaborated with False-Colour and Principal Component Analysis provided information about the paper support and the drawing media. Laser scanning micro-profilometry and Optical Coherence Tomography allowed revealing the superficial micro-scale features of the support. The chemical composition of the different drawing materials was characterized by μ-Raman spectroscopy, which provided also some evidence of the conservation history of the drawing. Integration of spectroscopic and imaging data shows that Raffaello used different dry drawing media (carbon-based and Pb stylus) to sketch the figure and then refined the details and shadows with iron-gall ink. The paper presents a methodological approach for the analytical examination of fragile paper artworks., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

Whilst the link between young people's well‐being and the creative arts is strengthening, there is a lack of research which focuses on the roles that artists play to help teachers and parents engage young people in the creative arts. This paper explores the benefits of and barriers to artists working in education in six European countries (England, Iceland, Germany, Greece, Italy and Austria). Using the '5A's model of creativity' and a view of professional development taking place within 'landscapes of practice', the data were analysed in order to explain how creativity is operationalised in the different contexts. Our study highlights the need for policy at a national and transnational level to value the creative arts in order to help teachers cross boundaries and utilise the full potential of the creative arts in schools. Our study also highlights that further research is needed into how artists shape teaching and curriculum and how schools engage parents in the creative arts in order to build an evidence‐base relating to young people's positive mental health that can affect policy at these levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on urban regeneration practices based on adaptive reuse projects in culture and the arts, where new forms of social entrepreneurship emerge. Through in-depth qualitative research, we develop three case studies in three different urban contexts in Italy: Turin, a large and highly industrialised city in one of the country's north-west regions; Terni, a medium-sized city in central Italy; and Favara, a small town in the province of Agrigento on the island of Sicily. Building on the case studies, we outline a possible taxonomy of urban remains, entrepreneurship, and adaptive reuse models, reflecting on the role of social entrepreneurship and its peculiar governance and business models, the specific features of adaptive reuse and urban regeneration processes, and the relationship between art and urban regeneration. Some closing remarks focus on how social entrepreneurship in the cultural field challenges both scholars and decision-makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the time of his death in 1727, the Cavaliere Marcello Biringucci possessed some 600 paintings. A group of unpublished documents, mainly forty-two sheets in the Archivio di Stato in Siena offers unusual insight into this Sienese nobleman’s collecting activities. The papers – memoranda, lists, invoices, orders for payment, receipts, accounts of expenses – many in the Cavaliere’s own hand, illustrate the range of sources he drew upon, not only geographical but those in the secondary art market. He employed agents, purchased from the estates of other collectors, acquired art at auctions, and even redeemed the pawn of a debtor. The documents include the names of artists – many well known – with prices or values for some works, and by reference to the largely unpublished inventory of his estate, give some indication of which works in the documents Biringucci acquired and how his taste conformed to the prevailing trends of the period. Online appendices to the paper, at http://www.jhc.oxfordjournals.org, reproduce the 1727 inventory, working papers, and a selection of letters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I'm going to illustrate my experience related to the six month narrative laboratory with the psychiatric patients of the Daily Psychiatric Center located in Rutigliano. This project originated from my own way of conceiving the concept of Psychiatric and Psychosocial Rehabilitation in terms of Therapeìa, that is in my view the regaining "sense and meaning" as the essence of rehabilitation therapy. My goal was to awaken thoughts, words, gestures, emotions in order to reconnect an interrupted dialogue with themselves and start an initial storytelling experience. By telling this new story the relationship between the Self, the Story and the Character is recreated so that freedom and life planning are generated again. In order to "gather unspoken yet deeply felt experiences" I used artworks extracted from the catalogue "tutti uguali, tutti diversi"; catalogue created during the awareness campaign and the fight against social stigma and social exclusion by Art, that the Center of Mental Health 3 - CSM 3 - in Troia (Puglia, Italy) held in 2007 in synergy with the School of Fine Art and with the Monuments and Fine Art Department.

Copyright of Enthymema is the property of Enthymema, International Journal of Literary Criticism, Literary Theory & Philosophy of Literature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Aim: to finding what young patients with type-1 diabetes (T1D) knows about their body and also on their illness in perspective to tailor educational interventions to their real ability to understand., Methods: the present study involved 68 children with T1D , 5 to 14 years old with a duration of diabetes ranging from 2 to 6 years and a total HbA1c mean value of 7.96±0.87%. The sample was divided into two age Groups: 28 children 5 to 10 years old were gathered in the Group 1 and 40 teenagers aged from 11 to 14 years in the Group 2. These patients were invited to draw over a white paper using a black pencil "The human body as it is made inside". Subsequently they were asked to explain: "what is diabetes?" and "where does insulin go?". According to the methodology of the "interactive drawing", the interviewer interacted with the children while drawing, forcing them to verbalize the reasons for their choices, to justify their proceeding, to explain their plan and then to explicit their theories. Drawings and replies were classified as Correct, Correct-but-Incomplete and Incorrect., Results: the overall production of correct/correct-but-incomplete drawings was 83.82% vs 16.20% of the incorrect ones. One-hundred of the children who have produced a correct drawing supplied also a correct verbal reply, whereas 100% of the children who have produced an incorrect drawing was unable to supply any information on diabetes or about insulin. Both younger and older subjects who produced a complete-but-incorrect drawing appeared to have misunderstood the action of insulin therapy (only 23% and 17% of correct replies). Children who produced incomplete drawings and provided incorrect replies to the questions about their disease showed also a HbA1c mean value higher (8.36±0.97%) compared to the children who drew and answered correctly (p=0.0023)., Conclusions: the operative epistemic approach could represent a promising tool for a health professional team to verify the real understanding acquired by a child about T1D, and to provide pediatrician a guideline to directly communicate with his patient.

There is one book which so often finds its way into the backpack of 19th century Americans travelling to Europe that one cannot help enquiring over the cause and purpose of such luggage; the more so as the book is neither the Bible, nor the Declaration of Independence, but John Ruskin's "Modern Painters." Prior to fathering American realism, William Dean Howells was one of the travel writers who would pack their literal and figurative luggage and steer towards Europe—since Art, like all ideals, was not to be found at home. This paper aims at showing that Howells's search for an American ars poetica in Europe through the agency of Ruskin took place within a semiotic colloquium involving an author-traveller, a double object (travel and account) and a mise-en-scenic guidebook, and resulted in a realist affirmation of art as presence. To this aim, the paper looks at the polemical (inter)textual instances in Howells's "Venetian Life" illustrating a transcontinental search for truth as the meaning of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on the significations of the 'mental life' of the city that are represented by the material symbols on display. In trying to comprehend the public display of fascist era 'art' in the city of Trieste, it addresses an example of trying to make sense of the 'impossible'. Reassured of the contested nature of such displays, the paper reflects further on the power of symbols in fascism and how different countries have addressed their legacy. Confirmed of their danger, we examine the risk of leaving their significance unanalysed and contextualise this in a comparison of the respective approaches of Italy and of Germany. We also consider the potential impacts of toleration, and normalisation, of such artefacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we display the uncanny? During the Second World War the medical school of Queen's University (Canada) commissioned artist Marjorie Winslow to make a series of wax teaching models to illustrate childbirth, in three dimensions, for the benefit of medical students. How have curators displayed these obstetric waxworks, which provoke strong feelings of disgust or of horrified empathy? Even in storage in the Museum of Health Care at Kingston, the Winslow waxworks remain concealed behind a curtain, and when they are on display, they are now far more likely to be part of an art exhibition than a medical history display. This paper uses the early history of obstetric waxworks and their display in eighteenth-century Italy to show how medical waxworks have always challenged the disciplinary divide between art and science. This historical context informs our understanding of the display history of the Winslow waxworks and of uncanny objects in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comprehensive understanding of both the chemical composition and physical behaviour of modern materials is an important consideration in devising correct conservation treatments for contemporary artworks. To this end, national and international research projects and networks have been established that deal mainly with the preservation, conservation, and understanding of materials used by contemporary artists. This paper focuses on the self-taught artist Fernando Melani (1907-1985), one of the precursors of the Poor Art artistic movement in Italy, and for the first time provides a scientific viewpoint on the artist's materials and works. The analyses, which mainly focus on the pigments/dyes found in his home-studio, were carried out primarily by using Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FT-IR) and ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared Fibre Optic Reflectance Spectroscopy (UV-Vis-NIR FORS). This paper emphasises the performance of FT-IR and FORS in the identification of contemporary artistic materials, since these two techniques have been found to produce highly complementary data. The use of both of these was required in order to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the composition of Melani's materials. Furthermore, one of his artworks, named by Melani himself with its inventory number N. Inv. 2625 (1981), was investigated in situ with the sole use of the FORS technique. The results showed that Melani used traditional inorganic pigments as well as modern organic dyes. Calcite and barite were used as fillers and extenders. Sulphur and abrasive powder were also found, thus confirming his use of a large variety of non-conventional artists' materials., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Freud was the first to apply psychoanalysis to art, choosing for his subject the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci. Observing Leonardo's partly fused image of the Virgin and St. Anne, he inferred that the artist had depicted his two mothers, his biological mother and his stepmother. This very early analytic discourse on parent loss and adoption changed the course of the interpretation of art. Freud explored the psychology of art, the artist, and aesthetic appreciation. Confronting the age-old enigma of the Mona Lisa, he proposed a daring solution to the riddle of the sphinxlike smile of this icon of art. His paper prefigures concepts of narcissism, homosexuality, parenting, and sublimation. Lacking modern methodology and theory, Freud's pioneering insights overshadow his naive errors. In this fledgling inquiry, based on a childhood screen memory and limited knowledge of Leonardo's artistic and scientific contributions, Freud identified with this Renaissance genius in his own self-analytic and creative endeavor.

This paper analyzes perceptions of the Jews by the Dominican friars in late medieval Florence and focuses on the encounter between the Christian and Jewish worlds as manifested in Santa Maria Novella church in the oral and visual traditions. The intention is to examine the representations of Jews in a particular context, that of an Italian urban society in the late fourteenth century, especially in the context of mendicant activity, by studying both preaching and art in that context. The article shows the similarities and differences between the visual and the verbal in relation to the different media discussed, and analyzes the complexity of the Dominican perception of the Jews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore Luigi Ghirri's photography, demonstrating the impact of his work in reshaping contemporary art and in consolidating the dialogue with other disciplines. By focusing on some key works that highlight the developments of his poetics — such as Atlante (1973), In scala (1977–78), Viaggio in Italia (1984), and Il profilo delle nuvole (1989) — I argue that Ghirri uses space, place, and landscape to question our relation to the external world and its representations, and to revalue the role of photography and art. In particular, I analyse the way in which Ghirri's poetics of space moves from insistent decontextualization and estrangement to a notion of affective space, combining a sense of inhabiting with one of errance, a fascination with the new with a nostalgia for the old and the marginal, and a critique of contemporary society with an attachment to a sense of place and of the individual as vanishing traces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses experimental institutionalism in the city of Rome, focusing on artistic practices of the C.S.O.A. Centro Sociale Autonomo Occupato (Squatted Autonomous Social Centre) Forte Prenestino and the three-year occupation of Valle theatre, Teatro Valle Occupato. In scholarly research on art institutionalism, artistic practices in squatted spaces are often overlooked. While the 1990s European wave of experimental institutionalism transformed the concept of an art museum or art institution into a processed-based, community-oriented, and participatory platform, in Rome, the collectives of activists and artists used more autonomous endeavours, such as processes of instituting, to affirm how artistic practices' use of radical imagination can foster collective agency, creativity, and radical statecraft. In the following, radical statecraft is understood as a political act that reclaims and creates anew institutional infrastructures. Teatro Valle Occupato's experimental cultural institution of the commons at the 17th-century theatre Valle from 2012 to 2015, and the projects of artists and musicians of the European underground cultural hub C.S.O.A. Forte Prenestino at the squatted 19th-century military fort in the working-class, peripheric neighbourhood of Centocelle, are crucial examples of artistic, cultural, and institutional experimentation, whereby artistic and cultural practices foster social relationships based on freedom, mutualism, solidarity, and the commons. In both cases, the contingency to grassroots politics forged the desire and imagination to either create anew or carve out a social space. By reclaiming spaces in which art is used as a means of radical statecraft, these practices reimagine society fostering non-market-driven social relationships becoming pivotal in the struggles against the neoliberal turn in Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering all transactions related to modern and contemporary visual artists mediated by galleries in Italy between 2007 and 2012, we propose an empirical measure of artist brand and explore its relationship with artist-specific characteristics, such as talent, fame, and popularity, through a structural model. We find that artist brand depends positively on talent, fame, and popularity. Moreover, we find that a co-creation mechanism is at work in the Italian art market, where galleries choose their specialization strategies in picking their artist portfolios. We interpret our findings in light of a novel conceptual framework of human branding and co-creation in the visual art market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Dos Algarves: A Multidisciplinary e-Journal is the property of Dos Algarves: A Multidisciplinary e-Journal and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article comments on developments in the periodical "Intensive Care Medicine." The editorial team has the task of transporting the journal from the paper era to the web. The author welcomes the incoming deputy editors G. Conti and J. Mancebo and associate editors which include M. Bonten and G. Citerio. He adds that the editorial team is determined to serve the journal and the scientific community.

Geoheritage is a geotourism resource that could lead to the sustainable development of society, and could contribute to information on geological and geomorphological characteristics, education, public awareness on geoconservation, and landscape protection. Understanding this cultural wealth is still limited, since the information available is often specialized. Communication addressed to the emotional sphere can profoundly engage people, and technical information can be transmitted more effectively. For several years, our research group dealt with geoheritage and geotourism in central Italy. This work aimed to investigate different communication methods, such as publications, announcements through social media, conferences, live performances, and field excursions aimed at the emotional involvement of the public. Furthermore, the emotional response of the public was explored through a digital survey. These communication methodologies enabled a broad public reach, without any distinction based on social origin, cultural background, or age. Narrating the landscape through different forms of art creates a personal relationship with the audience. The emotional participation of the people demonstrates the effectiveness of the method in transmitting scientific and cultural themes, such as the origin of the geological landforms, the culture and the traditions that the site generated, and the problems pertaining to its protection and conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Art, the language of ideas and concepts, comprises a multitude of means of manifestation through sound, word, color, gesture, etc., between which there is often an interconnection. This article highlights some aspects of the aesthetics of the Renaissance period in which artists, starting from Italy, focused on realism and human emotion in art, but also on the interconnection between two arts - painting and music. In this sense, we turned our attention to identifying the symbolic role of the musical instruments of that period represented in paintings by some notable masters from Italy, Flanders and Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Art, the language of ideas and concepts, comprises a multitude of means of manifestation through sound, word, color, gesture, etc., between which there is often an interconnection. This article highlights some aspects of the aesthetics of the Renaissance period in which artists, starting from Italy, focused on realism and human emotion in art, but also on the interconnection between two arts - painting and music. In this sense, we turned our attention to identifying the symbolic role of the musical instruments of that period represented in paintings by some notable masters from Italy, Flanders and Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the nineteenth century, when the theatre arts were at their peak, Milan was considered the intellectual and artistic capital of Italy. This article explores the objectives and the functioning of an important mutual aid company based in Milan – the Pio Istituto Teatrale – through its accounting system. These accounting documents clearly convey the dual nature of this organization, which was dedicated to protecting both social welfare and the arts. This study confirms the social role of accounting and its implications. In recent years, the attention paid to accounting in artistic institutions has been increasing. However, while many studies have explored Italian mutual aid societies in general, few have considered those in the artistic field specifically. This article attempts to rectify this oversight by examining a mutual aid society functioning in the world of theatre via its accounting records. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A thermographic non-destructive inspection conducted during the winter season on precious walls confined to an indoor environment (Baiocco room, L'Aquila, Italy) is illustrated herein. The use of a heat conveyor ad hoc selected has produced a particular benefit in terms of defect detection after the application of advanced algorithms because the thermal stimulus coming from an air heater hit the finishing layer under a laminar flow regime. Thermocouples registered both the heat-up and cool-down phases to confirm the numerical simulations conducted via Comsol Multiphysics® software. The results obtained by applying the principal component thermography (PCT) technique to raw data registered in the time domain were a priori studied through thermographic simulations. Defects were modelled on the basis of results already shown in a previous work centred on the Baiocco room, too. A comparison between the results obtained from PCT and the innovative sparse principal component thermography (SPCT) technique was also added to the discussion. The SPCT results show their benefits above all when they are supplemented with ground-penetrating radar results. The experimental analyses were conducted on a multi-layer wall called thereafter rectangular portal, in which the instant thermal conductance was experimentally measured. Subsurface cracks were detected using a long heating-up phase. This procedure is preferred by the Monuments and Fine Arts Department with respect to the use of flash lamps. Indeed, short energy pulses should be avoided on finishing layers having low emissivity values because producing spurious reflections affecting the thermographic results. A discussion on this point is also provided. On the basis of the data analysis, it is possible to say that the thermal waves should arrive at the interface between the masonry and its top layer in order to obtain a clear thermal map of the defects present at different depths. As shown, this goal can be realized through a smart solution based on: (a) the inverse knowledge of the aedicula via thermal analyses, (b) the best mesh to be selected for the numerical model, and (c) the optimal type of thermal stress to be delivered to the object under inspection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes twenty-one works belonging to the collection "The Italian Costumes," made by Victor Meirelles in Italy between 1853 and 1856 and preserved in the museum named after the artist in Florianopolis, Brazil. The analysis focused on the identification of the common components of the works in terms of six aspects: ambience, position, body, costumes, colors, and shapes. In this article, only the first two aspects are addressed. The traces that indicate some of the artist's motivation when producing the collection are highlighted: the conjectural, which is linked to the sale of engravings of regional human types in Italy in the nineteenth century; the structural, or the education offered during the artist's era; and the ideological, including national and romantic propositions, biased toward the Nazarene movement. From the analysis of ambience and position, two hypotheses are discussed to demonstrate that the collection is not only focused on the improvement of the drapery technique but also a source of income and inspiration for Victor Meirelles that defined his poetics during his life. The divulgation of the results also aims to methodize the collection's knowledge and encourage deeper studies of the same or similar collections. Future work is justified and important, given the fact that the current research is the only work of this magnitude about the Italian Costumes collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers an overview of Futurism, the revolutionary aesthetic movement that began in 1909 and brought a new vitality to the Italian art scene. One of the least familiar aspects of the movement was the focus that its founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his followers espoused for promoting sport and physical education – both in schools and in workers' free time. The artistic efforts of the Futurists were quite innovative as they invented new forms of literature, poetry, theatre, music, dance, sculpture, painting, and architecture, as well as supporting the 'minor arts'. Many of their works employ the simultaneity of art and the celebration of such modern concepts as speed, dynamism, and flight. All these are combined with an amazing burst of creativity and surreal 'physico-follies' to create a new futurist vision of humanity. However, for the country as a whole Futurism was considered too elitist and it never really gathered much popular support. Surprisingly, some of its concepts were skilfully absorbed by the fascist movement lead by Benito Mussolini. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has long formed an art-historical truism that Ferrara’s notable Jewish history reinvigorated Giorgio de Chirico’s Metaphysical painting after 1915, when he settled there to serve during World War I. ‘It was not simply the workshops, the streets, or the people which drew [him] to it’, wrote the art historian Paolo Fossati on de Chirico’s time in the city’s former ghetto, ‘but a certain culture and a precise intelligence’. How, precisely, did such an intelligence manifest itself? What formed the extant dimensions of such a culture? What, in short, is actually ‘Jewish’ about de Chirico’s painted Jewish Angel, or his professed pictorial ‘evangelism’, or the increasingly involuted spaces of his painting after 1915? To reduce the question of Jewishness solely to its symbolic content is to miss a vital facet of Metaphysical imagery; for de Chirico’s avowed ‘Israelite system’ distills ostensibly Jewish moral and cultural tendencies not simply to an arcane iconography, but – more ambitiously and ineffably – to an ‘ascetic’ economy of painted form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We conducted a second National survey in all Italian Infectious Disease clinics to assess the number of people diagnosed and linked to care and, among these, the number of people on antiretroviral therapy and viral load suppressed. In 2014, 100,049 (0.16 per 100 residents) people diagnosed and linked to care were estimated, corresponding to an increase of 6.3% compared to the survey conducted in 2012. Among people diagnosed and linked to care, 91.9% were on antiretroviral therapy (increase of 11.4% compared to 2012), and among these, 87.7% were viral load suppressed. Overall, the majority were males (72.1%), Italians (82.7%), aged 25-49 years (45.6%); the most common HIV mode of transmission was reported to be in heterosexual contact (37.9%) and men who had sex with men (31.3%); 8.8% had less than 350 CD4 cells/μL, 82.4% had VL <50 copies and 22.9% had a CDC stage C. In conclusion, the number of people diagnosed and linked to care was increasing. The vast majority of them was receiving ART but the percentage of people still with a detectable viral load was lower than the 90-90-90 WHO target. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Villa Laurentina project seeks to present Count S. K. Potocki's brilliant vision of the legendary villa of Pliny the Younger at Laurentum near Rome, first rendered in the 1770s in over thirty colour drawings. This unique work, amazing in its formal and stylistic homogeneity, was produced in Rome, in collaboration with two Italian artists - Giuseppe Manocchi and Vincenzo Brenna - and probably Franciszek Smuglewicz, a Polish painter active in Rome. All the architectural plans, sections of façades and walls of the rooms are provided with scale bars in palmi romani and braccia polacche. The first stage of the project was to transfer the eighteenth-century drawings on to programs used in architectural planning studios. For this purpose, scans of the plates were transferred to a CAD programme, which enabled the plan traces, sections and renditions of the walls to be made. Historical systems of measurement were calculated according to the metric system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his little-known essay published posthumously in 1849, Über die Eintheilung der schönen Künste (On the Classification of the Beautiful Arts), Bernard Bolzano proposes an explication of the concept of beautiful art as well as a classification of these arts. Bolzano's divisions allowed him not only to provide a principled and comprehensive classification of actual, well-established arts, but also to anticipate kinds of beautiful art that would not exist or be widely recognized until decades after his death, such as moving pictures, abstract paintings, and what he called 'the arts of pure thought'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Francesco I de' Medici (r. 1564-87), the second Grand Duke of Tuscany, commissioned a private studiolo in the Palazzo Vecchio that united his personal passion for collecting objects of natural wonder with the Medici tradition of utilizing art to proclaim authority. Cabinets lining the walls protected the Grand Duke's collection of rare, precious, and exotic works of art and natural specimens. With the objects dispersed over time, art historians have until now only been able to guess at the kinds of objects on display. In 2014, the author discovered in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze a previously unpublished inventory from June 1574 that documents the objects contained within Francesco's studiolo, shedding light on both objects and organization within and contributing to our understanding of what studioli looked like at a moment of transition from the Renaissance focus on antiquities towards a 17th century fascination with the natural sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the display of art as a ceremonial performance and a means of establishing social and political interaction between collectors and visitors. It demonstrates that in early modern Italy the actors of these mises en scène did not improvise, but would rather know their lines by heart. By the beginning of the seventeenth century they also relied on treatises on gesture such as Giovanni Bonifacio’s L’arte de’ cenni. They were trained to behave in such situations according to shared social practices. The hosts would show with pride their collections, while guests were required to gaze at objects and to comment on them. The examples analysed in this contribution will help us to understand that showing art and being shown art in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy was primarily a social experience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers the author's insights about the eighteenth-century antiquities in Naples, Italy. Topics discussed include iconographies that have affinity with musical themes, Parthenopean Republic, and the publication "Disegni intagliati in rame di pitture antiche ritrovate nelle scavazioni di Resina."

Building upon discourses on trauma, art, and architecture, this work examines how the design and construction of buildings mediate the cultural, social, and political changes that occur after a catastrophe. It takes as its case study the reconstruction of Sicily's Val di Noto following an earthquake in 1693 and the role that the Baroque architectural style played in it. In this study, Sicilian Baroque building decoration emerges as a medium that facilitated the reconciliation of tensions that inhered among survivors of the earthquake and their social and material milieus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractStarting from the review of a recent book by E.F.M. Emanuele, this paper aims at opening a wider debate on the state of the Italian cultural heritage in the turmoil of the European financial crisis. The discourse starts with a few significant figures that show the state of abandonment of a large portion of Italian most valuable historic and architectural resources. It then continues analyzing the traditional flaws of the Italian cultural system (endemic lack of public incentives, inadequate fiscal regime, the misuse of public services as a means for only providing employment, lack of meritocracy..etc ) and it concludes suggesting a few innovative solutions, through the application of economic strategies to the managing of works of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1930s a particular emphasis was placed within fascist Italy upon cultural evolution towards the ‘new man’. Although this was in part articulated verbally by a fascist philosopher such as Giovanni Gentile, this new masculine sensibility received much of its most persuasive embodiment through the visual arts and music. Unsurprisingly, major musical figures of the era such as Alfredo Casella and the youthful Goffredo Petrassi were strongly aware of sympathies and complementarities between the two media – and the same is true of painters such as Enrico Prampolini and Fortunato Depero, or a sculptor such as Ernesto Thayaht, all of whose work is called upon in this study. (DO-S). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses whether Henry James' contact with the life of the country, its people and its manners was more than just of the ordinary tourist. It cites James ambivalent love for Rome which he proclaimed has a myriad of things that one grows irresistibly fond of but later maintains that the city's art is too heavy for his taste and the climate too unhealthy. It notes that his impressions of Rome and the Roman people did not change much in his travel essays and letters.

The announces the availability of grants for Venetian research being offered by the trustees of the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation of New York in 2006 and 2007. Scholars of Great Britain and the Commonwealth are entitled to apply. Areas of interest the would cover the research include history, art and architecture.