The paper aims to highlight the centrality of a late process of metamorphosis, which has unequivocally conditioned the image of the basilisk, radically transforming its appearance from a simple snake to a monster with the body of a rooster and a snake’s tail. The basilisk described in the classical sources corresponded to a small snake but was characterized by an extraordinary poisonous power. With the passage to the Middle Ages and the influence of Christianity, the basilisk took on new monstrous meanings, transforming its iconography into a rooster-snake hybrid, based on theories that believed it was generated from a rooster’s egg. The Renaissance and Early Modern Age inherited the medieval basilisk, which continued to be prominently depicted in emblematic literature; in parallel, however, the new scientific literature began to exclude excessively legendary meanings, preferring to return to descriptions of the classical era and thus depict the basilisk as a snake.

The article aims to provide a brief historical background of the church of Santa Marina in Venice. The church was originally dedicated to San Liberale but underwent changes in both dedication and layout after the arrival of the sacred remains of the virgin monk in the lagoon. The text briefly outlines the hagiographic story of Santa Marina, the circumstances of the translatio of her body to Venice, and how her cult became part of the devotional, cultural, and civic identity of the city. The final section aims to integrate existing knowledge of the church’s layout transformation from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age with new data from unpublished sources. The objective is to reconstruct the interior of the sacred building that no longer exists, but whose external appearance can still be confirmed visually through Jacopo de’ Barbari’s view.

The article discusses the representation of facial and bodily deformation as both a subject and an expressive means in diverse artistic media throughout the twentieth century until today. First, it wishes to provide a bibliographical overview of the recent research that delves into the problem from diverse methodologies. Second, it aims at tracing a timeline of how the imagery of ‘broken faces’, sometimes not directly related to the gueules cassées, yet persistent and recognisable, changed its use as a trope in the hands of modern and contemporary artists. Their works bear similarities in the dramatic accent on the deformation and decomposition of the body used to narrate collective trauma and a sense of confusion. Finally, the essay wishes to illustrate the complexity of this type of representation by contextualising some artworks within social and ethical contexts.

Drawing on and accentuating classical motifs, the surfaces of Renaissance armour are inhabited by an impressive variety of animal exuviae: leonine protomes and paws, ram’s horns, shells, tails, beaks, and wings. This essay examines the role of zoo­morphic armour around the period of the Italian wars (1494-1559) and brings into focus early modern ideas about the behavioural and morphological proximity of living beings, illustrating the period’s fluid perception of the human-animal divide. It argues for the centrality of ornament in military material culture and concludes by establishing armour as the period’s main figurative stage for experimenting with the permeability of bodily boundaries, and the mixing of human and animal forms.

Is it possible to apply the concept of Altersstil to Bernardo Bellotto’s career as a painter? Significant changes can be described in his work on the basis of three criteria: the expansion of the urban space, the role of the staffage figures and self-portrait. A comparison with paintings from the Dresden phase will be used to characterise Bellotto’s Altersstil in the Warsaw vedute. As a case study, Bellotto’s work is suitable for adding a facet to the concept of Altersstil, which on the one hand takes into account the personal experience of his own career, and on the other hand, includes the requirements of changing patrons in the interpretation of the Alterswerk.

The essay looks at the maturity of Ettore Tito, an artist of transition between the nineteenth-twentieth century, as an anti-Altersstil since in his case we are not dealing with discontinuities connected with a renewed attitude. His late international impressionism has been considered anachronistic as in the emblematic case of the antinomy between the two personal exhibitions of Tito and Modigliani at the 1930 Biennale of Venice. The essay aims to consider the Altersstil as a methodological ‘tool’, as opportunity to reflect on the history of official taste and of the first forty years of the Biennale, both around curatorial strategies and the display as story of taste.

Giuliano da Sangallo was an artist originally trained as a legnaiuolo and a sculptor, but it is especially as an architect that we remember him, particularly for his service to two generations of the Medici, from Lorenzo the Magnificent to Leo X. His late style is emblematic of the methodological questions developed by historiography around the concept of Altersstil. It was both the product of highly personal, even idiosyncratic, formal preferences and a trigger for new trends that emerged in the architecture of sixteenth-century Italy. Indeed, the erudite, seductive language displayed in the last years of his life would have a fundamental impact on subsequent generations of designers, despite the small number of projects actually completed. Different design strategies, all experimented with over the previous decades, converge in Giuliano da Sangallo’s late style, making his architectural work so distinctive and pregnant with consequences: the taste for variation in the use of architectural orders and their conceptual autonomy from the wall’s mass; the sculptural treatment of figural details, producing dense atmospheric effects; the conception of the building as a boxy, elementary volume covered with precious surfaces. In 1990, Manfredo Tafuri recognized the common ground of these different aspects in their fragmentary quality. He was commenting on Giuliano's very last projects for the completion of the church of San Lorenzo through a new, monumental facade, conceived between 1515 and 1516,a few months before Giuliano’s death and as a response to an initiative undertaken by the first Medici pope. This article will focus primarily on this group of projects, or better, of drawings, but will also analyse a significant addition, presented to the public in 2017, on the occasion of an exhibition at the Uffizi. In both their graphic modes and architectural contents, these sheets represent Sangallo’s artistic testament. Characterised by sumptuous forms – i.e., showing the free and secure ductus that one would expect from an artist in the autumn of his career – and density of references, in terms of tectonics, civic identity, and antiquarian knowledge, they constitute a final word on the possibilities of representation in architecture.

Starting from a singular ‘methodological’ note from 1992 by Fred Licht on the Altersstil of American painter William Congdon and from a later art exhibition, the article sheds light on relevant aspects of the late manner of a protagonist of American Abstract Expressionism. The article suggests a possible start date on the background of a dense critical debate, spanning from Clement Greenberg to the beginning of the twenty-first century, and relying on scholars such as Giovanni Testori and Giuseppe Mazzariol. It illustrates a rare example of expressive Survival that connects two fascinating physiognomies of Congdon, an artist who disappeared and reappeared several times throughout the art history and system, and of a great scholar, recently deceased, that deserves not to be forgotten.

This essay examines what Maurizio Cattelan achieved in the second part of his activity, starting from Maurizio Cattelan: All (the exhibition with which he had announced his retirement), up to the recent exhibitions Breath Ghosts Blind and YOU. Through a comparison with some artworks from his past, it will be highlighted the profound thematic and formal link that combine the last phase with the first one. In fact, the two moments are divided, not only by a temporal factor, but also by a different approach often interested to rethink what Cattelan has already done rather than to propose new solutions.