Tout-Fait: Marcel Duchamp Studies Online journal

… la … meraviglia fatta sito! (esempio)

Piero della Francesca e l’assassino - Roeck Bernd

“La Flagellazione” di Piero della Francesca è senza dubbio uno dei dipinti più celebri del Rinascimento. Ma anche uno dei più enigmatici. Chi sono infatti i tre misteriosi personaggi in primo piano, che non sembrano avere alcun legame con il martirio di Cristo? E perché l’evento è collocato in un contesto tutto quattrocentesco? La risposta di Roeck è che il dipinto nasconde una velata accusa di omicidio, costruita con i sottili strumenti artistici di cui Piero aveva piena padronanza e che gli permettevano di dialogare con i più eminenti umanisti e mecenati del suo tempo. Inserito in questo codice culturale condiviso, il dipinto alluderebbe all’omicidio di Oddantonio da Montefeltro, giovane duca di Urbino, vittima illustre di un attentato nel 1444. Ma chi fu il principale beneficiario della morte del duca? In altre parole, chi poteva essere il mandante dell’assassinio? Attraverso una ricostruzione attenta alle fonti e sorretta da una rigorosa analisi formale, l’autore si mette sulle tracce dell’assassino di Oddantonio e del possibile committente dell’opera (naturalmente interessato a smascherarlo), guidando il lettore in un intrigante viaggio nel mondo delle corti rinascimentali. 

Bernd Roeck (1953) è professore di storia moderna e contemporanea all’Università di Zurigo. Particolarmente interessato al Rinascimento italiano, conduce ricerche su Piero della Francesca da oltre vent’anni. Tra le sue pubblicazioni: Arte per l’anima, arte per lo stato. Un doge del tardo Quattrocento e i segni delle immagini (Venezia 1991), Das historische Auge. Kunstwerke als Zeugen ihrer Zeit («L’occhio storico. Le opere d’arte come testimoni di un’epoca», Göttingen 2004) e con Andreas Tönnesmann Die Nase Italiens. Federico da Montefeltro («Il naso d’Italia. Federico da Montefeltro», Berlin 2005).

Photographer Wang Wenlan (via ::798 Photo Galley::)

Marcel Duchamp?

Wilanów Poster Museum

John Szarkowski - The Photographer’s Eye

This book is an investigation of what photographs look like, and of why they look that way. It is concerned with photographic style and with photographic tradition: with the sense of possibilities that a photographer today takes to his work.

The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process—a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made —constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes—but photographs, as the man on the street put it, were taken.

The difference raised a creative issue of a new order: how could this mechanical and mindless process be made to produce pictures meaningful in human terms—pictures with clarity and coherence and a point of view? It was soon demonstrated that an answer would not be found by those who loved too much the old forms, for in large part the photographer was bereft of the old artistic traditions. Speaking of photography Baudelaire said: “This industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy.“1 And in his own terms of reference Baudelaire was half right; certainly the new medium could not satisfy old standards. The photographer must find new ways to make his meaning clear.

These new ways might be found by men who could abandon their allegiance to traditional pictorial standards—or by the artistically ignorant, who had no old allegiances to break. There have been many of the latter sort. Since its earliest days, photography has been practiced by thousands who shared no common tradition or training, who were disciplined and united by no academy or guild, who considered their medium variously as a science, an art, a trade, or an entertainment, and who were often unaware of each other’s work. Those who invented photography were scientists and painters, but its professional practitioners were a very different lot. Hawthorne’s daguerreotypist hero Holgrave in the house of the seven gables was perhaps not far from typical:

“Though now but twenty-two years old, he had already been a country schoolmaster; salesman in a country store; and the political editor of a country newspaper. He had subsequently travelled as a peddler of cologne water and other essences. He had studied and practiced dentistry. Still more recently he had been a public lecturer on mesmerism, for which science he had very remarkable endowments. His present phase as a daguerreotypist was of no more importance in his own view, nor likely to be more permanent, than any of the preceding ones.“2

The enormous popularity of the new medium produced professionals by the thousands—converted silversmiths, tinkers, druggists, blacksmiths and printers. If photography was a new artistic problem, such men had the advantage of having nothing to unlearn. Among them they produced a flood of images. In 1853 the new york daily tribune estimated that three million daguerreotypes were being produced that year.3 Some of these pictures were the product of knowledge and skill and sensibility and invention; many were the product of accident, improvisation, misunderstanding, and empirical experiment. But whether produced by art or by luck, each picture was part of a massive assault on our traditional habits of seeing.

John_Szarkowski.pdf