The recent restoration of the partially unpublished late medieval paintings in the sanctuary of San Michele in Padula has made it possible to examine pictorial texts and their context. These include isolated panels, devotional aedicules and altars painted in the core of the sanctuary and in the atrium, among them narrative scenes rich in lively stylistic and compositional solutions expressed through idioms of popular intonation. Although the hermitage, then sanctuary, represents an isolated place by definition, it reveals an inverse tendency towards openness, a nature that has proved particularly permeant to allogenic elements over the centuries. In this perspective, the paintings in question are interesting for a series of reflections, which concern interchanges and circulation of models. The final results of these analyses offer an authentic fragment regarding the figurative culture of the Regnum.

The early fifteenth-century Venetian physician Giovanni di Michele, known as ʻFontanaʼ, likely earned his name due to a fountain he invented, described in the Bellicorum instrumentorum liber, cum figuris et fictitys litoris conscriptus, an illustrated treatise on fine technology written around 1418. This essay explores Fontana’s connection with Arab culture, focusing on the relationship between his treatise and Islamic works on hydraulic fine technology, particularly automatic fountains, which were popular in both Islamic and Renaissance courts. The paper also highlights the influence of Fontana’s work on Agostino Ramelli’s sixteenth-century Le diverse et artificiose machine, a notable book on fine technology that includes descriptions of splendid automatic fountains.

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In 1994, The Italian Metamorphosis 1943-1968 opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York presenting, in addition to artworks, design, fashion and cinema fixed in the American collective imagination as typically Italian, even evoking clichés about Italian style. The objects, the chronological span and the curatorial discourses were functional to an American narrative and resumed choices and formulas used since the post-war period to promote Italian products in the United States. This article intends to give an account of the exhibition and its feedbacks, contextualising it and hypothesizing the reasons for recalling narratives from almost fifty years earlier, in 1994.

The essay examines a group of Alberto Viani’s sculptures, created around the mid-1940s, and characterized by a surrealist declination of the theme of ‘metamorphosis’. In this surrealist context, the theme of ‘metamorphosis’ is interpreted as a hybridization of the human figure with the vegetal, animal and mechanical world. Moreover, the essay intends, on one hand to identify the various visual sources used by the sculptor, on the other, it aims to define the importance of the theme of ‘metamorphosis’ itself. In particular it reflects on the interpretations proposed by the different artists studied by the sculptor (such as Hans Arp, Pablo Picasso, André Masson, Renato Birolli), and the role they played on the imaginative freedom, in an abstract sense, of Viani’s oeuvre.

The paper discusses early modern reconstructions of a first-century Roman arch preserved in the eastern Adriatic town of Zadar, at the time part of Venetian Dalmatia. Its reconstructions of the 1430s and the 1570s are contextualized within complex cultural and historical references. The Quattrocento renovation is associated with the reinterpretation of civic imagery through authentication of its classical roots, while that of the late Cinquecento is inscribed within the broader political and cultural context of contemporary Venetian promotion of Romanitas.

Sixteenth-century literary correspondences have been the subject of renewed interest in recent years, with including significant digitization projects. The two documents that are analysed in this essay (Caro’s letter to Guidiccioni and Tolomei’s letter to Grimaldi), have been repeatedly analysed by historiography as a privileged source for a new sensibility for fountains and water features that was emerging in the first decades of the sixteenth century. The present study highlights the ecphrastic abilities displayed by the two authors in portraying the metamorphic aspects of water, from the point of view of a peculiar valorization of the technical aspects underlying water plays and fountains.

The contribution proposes an analysis of the transposition of a great classic Russian comedy on screen. We will consider one of the pioneering Russian videoart projects, the Gore ot uma (Woe from Wit) (1994) by Olga Tobreluts. The work presents itself as the representation on the screen of the nineteenth century famous pièce by Alexandr Griboedov. But as the video begins it is suddenly clear it is not just merely a mise en scène. As Bruce Sterling pointed out it results to be more appropriate referring to it as an act of ‘mutation’. The work explores the possibilities of digital collage, mixing various references to different époques, uniting past and present.

The Pakistani artist Anwar Saeed is best known for his collages, colour-intensive paintings and works of different printing techniques which often explore masculinity and probe the controversial issue of same-sex desire in Muslim South Asia. He is therefore no stranger to self-censorship. Saeed has often had to alter his works so that they could be shown in Pakistan, and has generally learned to tell stories in order to survive. These stories had to be camouflaged, so the motif of the mask along with the complex othering of the self through the staging of animal-human relations entered his artistic iconography and came to play an important role in paintings, collages, drawings, prints and photographs. Many of these works suggest the artist’s concern with conflict between religious and social expectations and gender roles, but they also make a connection with cultural and political identity formation in a country with a short, but very conflicted, history.