Andrija Buvina’s wooden doors of Split Cathedral (1214) exemplify the threshold as a symbolic passage between the profane and the sacred. Through twenty-eight panels depicting scenes from Christ’s life – from the Incarnation to the Ascension – they construct an anagogical narrative of redemption guiding the viewer into sacred space. While Ljubo Karaman’s 1942 study remains the most comprehensive iconographic interpretation, it addresses questions of religious alterity only in passing. This article reexamines that dimension, highlighting how visual strategies of representing the ‘Other’ deepen our understanding of Buvina’s programme.

This article investigates the use of urban views in the decorative programs of choir stalls in Northern Italy between the 15th and early 16th centuries, focusing on a particular motif: the cityscape as seen through an illusionistic "open window." Traditionally dominated by still lifes and architectural niches, the intarsia decoration of choir stalls also began to include realistic depictions of recognizable urban settings. Starting with pioneering examples in Padua by the Canozi brothers and continuing with the work of Giovanni Maria Platina in Cremona, the study explores how such views reflected a growing interest in perspective, geographic specificity, and civic or religious identity. It also examines the role of printed city views and the symbolic meanings these images could acquire in monastic and liturgical contexts. Special attention is given to the lost Olivetan choir in Venice’s Sant’Elena, described by contemporaries as an atlas of cities under Venetian rule. Far from being mere backgrounds, these cityscapes served as complex visual devices, mediating between representation, devotion, and identity.

L'articolo analizza alcune pagine inedite di un trattato del pittore Ludovico Antonio David (1704), mettendole in rapporto con le riflessioni di Carlo Fontana intorno alle cupole affrescate nel Seicento e con la storia pregressa di questo specifico genere della pittura monumentale.

This article examines The Situationist Times (TST, 1962-67), a radical periodical by Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong, in which artists, mathematicians, and pataphysicists were brought together to investigate art, culture, and space through a topological lens. On one side, the analysis emphasizes how TST’s topological approach employs a comparative methodology, merging diverse registers and disciplines to illustrate a pluriversal, mobile, chaotic world. On the other, it situates TST within the broader context of situationism and artists’ periodicals, highlighting art publishing as a dynamic tool for renewing knowledge through cross-pollination.

This paper investigates, based on unpublished archival sources, the work of the Collettivo Donne Fotoreporter (Lilli Barchiesi, Kitty Bolognesi, Giovanna Calvenzi, Mazia Malli, Laura Rizzi, Livia Sismondi and Chiara Visconti), formed in Milan as part of the feminist movements of the 1970s. Specifically analyzed are I Ruoli (January 1978) and Gesti e oggetti della casalinga (1979), two photographic projects that aim to disrupt, in both an ironic and critical form, the female stereotype through actions of transformation and alteration in order to produce a metamorphic overturning of visual customs on identity. As well as their inclusion in peculiar traveling exhibitions (I Ruoli and Una Nessuna Centomila) through which the Collective attempts to subvert social and patriarchal constructs.

This paper explores the theme of artistic “cross-pollination” through the lens of Mark Tobey (1890-1976)’s engagement with East Asian aesthetics and philosophies, significantly impacting post-World War II American abstract art. Tobey’s integration of Chinese calligraphy and Japanese Zen Buddhism into his artistic vocabulary represents a vivid example of cultural hybridization, where Chinese and Japanese influences not only transformed his stylistic approach but also contributed to the evolution of modernist expressions in “the West”.Mark Tobey, an influential figure in American abstract art, drew profound inspiration from his experiences in China and Japan and his mentorship under the Chinese artist Teng Baiye (1900-1980), leading to the development of his unique “White Writing” style.

Il contributo si propone di gettare uno sguardo nuovo e interdisciplinare su Cabiria, kolossal di Giovanni Pastrone del 1914. A partire da una serie di riflessioni teorico-metodologiche di matrice panofskiana e warburghiana ho riletto Sofonisba, vera protagonista femminile del film, come una 'figura di coalescenza' nella cui costruzione visiva convergono passati multipli: la tradizione letteraria e pittorica dell'età moderna, l'immaginario visivo fin de siècle e il paradigma gestuale isterico che in quegli stessi anni migra dalla clinica alla rappresentazione artistica soprattutto femminile.

Through the case of the amateur painter and engraver Gerolamo Imperiale, a Genoese patrician who, in the Parma of Ranuccio I Farnese, alternated university lectures at the Studium with attendance at the painters' workshops, the article intends to reflect on how amateurs were trained and their relationship with painters and the art market. Ubiquitous in seventeenth-century art literature, young members of the nobility who dabbled in painting, training alongside house painters or in the schools set up in the artists' studios, had the opportunity to engage in close contact with the work of their masters, but without being burdened by the professional constraints affecting collaborators and pupils, or by the impositions of patronage. With this in mind, we intend to examine the particular combinatorial freedom that Gerolamo Imperiale demonstrates in the invention engravings of his Parma years.

The particular iconographic theme of the Theotokos Platytera is manifested as an iconic representation in which the infant Christ is always inserted inside a clipeo – a disc with a circular shape or an ellipsoidal almond – that she holds up as if it were a portrait on the shield to impose on the veneration of the bystanders. Although the meaning underlying the use of clipeo is original and entirely in line with the contemporaries written of the most important ancient Christian authors, its use is presented as the reuse of a much older portrait typology and reinterpreted over the centuries, that is the imago clipeata which is conferred a multiple semantic value. The way in which the Virgin supports the imago Christi in the oldest attestations is configured as a transmigration of gestures and meanings borrowed from previous female clipeophores representations, thus giving life to 'hybrid' visual constructions extraordinarily rich in variations. The images of the Platytera are similar, in terms of iconography and meaning, to the type of the Victoria in clipeo scribens and rarest images of Aphrodite hoplismene. The analysis and iconographic comparison of the most ancient figurative testimonies highlight numerous conceptual links that demonstrate the persistence and continuity of the symbolic value attributed to the presence of the clipeo which gave rise to new visual formulas in Christian art recombined with familiar elements.