Sicily – and especially Syracuse – seems to have had an ongoing preoccupation with paired eyes as an apotropaic or magico-religious symbol. This brief paper explores some signature pieces and speculates that the excised eyes of Santa Lucia, patron saint of Syracuse, may be but a recent embodiment of a propensity that dates back to the Neolithic era.

The article analyses the collaborations between the residents of Villa Medici in Rome and the members of the French School of Athens. Its aim is to render explicit how the revelations of archaeology, actively disseminated by members of the French School of Athens, the “Athéniens”, had an important impact on the approach of certain pens…[Read more]

After a lacklustre attempt to become a painter,William Kent (1685–1748) developed a career as a garden designer, working mainly for Lord Burlington and other patrons in his circle. His gardens represent some of the earliest gardens of a style that became known as the ‘English Landscape Garden’, exemplified by Stourhead in Wiltshire, Rousham in Ox…[Read more]

Anna Morandi Manzolini (1714–1774), a Bolognese wax sculptor, overcame humble origins to become one of the most important anatomical artists of the eighteenth century. Working with her husband Giovanni Manzolini (c. 1700–1755), and continuing alone after his death, Morandi created remarkably lifelike and anatomically accurate wax models of the sen…[Read more]

Catalogo realizzato in occasione della serie di mostre dedicate, tra il 2021 e il 2022, dalla Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Jesi, dal Museo d’Arte Moderna e della Mail Art di Montecarotto (AN) e dal Museo Nori De’ Nobili di Trecastelli (AN), all’opera di Magdalo Mussio. Il testo prende in esame, in particolare, l’opera grafico-pittorica, oltre…[Read more]

CFP – AIWAC 2nd edition Rome 2022

Young Michelangelo Buonarroti’s experience was deeply marked by his cult of Antiquity, reverberated in the creation of artworks such as the Sleeping Cupid and the Bacchus and shared with Raffaele Riario and Jacopo Galli, his patrons during his first stay in Rome (1496-1501).
The cardinal-camerlengo Raffaele Riario was an important promoter of t…[Read more]

The peculiar iconography of the winged horse surmounted by several puttos, as appears in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili sixth woodcut, turns out to be unprecedented and enigmatic at a glance and it’s the result of the depth and complexity of the author’s concepts.
Considering the iconographic details of the sculptural group as well as the text sca…[Read more]

In the late 1420s, Abbot Gomezio di Giovanni initiated a major building campaign to reform the Benedictine monastery of the Florentine Badia. Designed to provide its community with an orderly space in which to pursue the Benedictine Observance, the compound rises around the so-called Orange Cloister, long considered to be an early work of Bernardo…[Read more]