The last setting of the Farsetti picture gallery, the least studied part of the collection owned by this Venetian family, was already attributed to Daniele. Now, two unpublished letters written by Daniele to the Bergamasque Sebastiano Muletti not only confirm his role, but also portray a figure of connoisseur of manuscripts, printed books, artistic literature and, of course, painting. It seems that two main motivations led Daniele in his purchases of paintings: their presence in artistic literature and their state of preservation. These criteria were broadly recognised in late eighteenth-century Venice.

This article aims to further discuss the relationship between originals and copies within the collection of the historian Paolo Giovio from Como. Particular attention is paid to a nucleus of portraits of Ottoman Sultans, the existance of which is also attested in Giovio’s Elogia virorum bellica virtute illustrium (Florence, 1551). Among the series of copies made, the first one, painted by Cristofano dell’Altissimo for Cosimo de’ Medici and now preserved in the Uffizi Galleries of Florence, is taken into consideration. The final remarks concern the echo and influences that Giovio’s collected portraits might have had in the Ottoman territories.

The article investigates the relationship between ‘copy’ and ‘fake’ and the ambiguous status of these definitions in the artistic practices of recent decades. Episodes narrated in art history primary sources are compared with twentieth and twenty-first-century episodes. Thus, one comes to the notion of fake in contemporaneity, which no longer has a negative meaning. On the contrary, it has become an acknowledged artistic practice, a means that reveals the mise-en-scène that each image represents by declaring itself as ‘true’. Also, the notion of a ‘second original’, obtained thanks to contemporary technologies, calls into question the Benjaminian notion of the artwork’s ‘aura’.

moderna, sono stati indagati specifici argomenti legati alla letteratura artistica,

Daniele Barbaro’s treatise on perspective is one of the most authoritative technical-scientific sources of the sixteenth century. Although largely based on the unpublished work of Piero della Francesca, the treatise had the precise and original purpose of filling a gap in the Vitruvian text about the contents of the so-called ‘scaenographia’, a discipline based on optical geometry of which Vitruvius provided only meagre and sibylline words. The subdivision of the treatise, examined here into the individual parts that constitute it, follows a clearly Vitruvian structure, with the first three parts dedicated to ichnographia (perspective drawing of plans), orthographaia (perspective drawing of solid bodies) and scaenographia (perspective drawing of the buildings and their ornaments), and with two other parts specifically dedicated to the measurements of the human body and to the drawing of the planisphere, themes treated by Vitruvius respectively in the third and ninth books of De architectura. In this sense, La pratica della perspettiva, published in 1568, should be considered as an integral text of the most authoritative commentary on Vitruvius’ I Dieci libri dell’architettura, published in 1556 and 1567.

The study of several French, British and Italian art treatises, articles, essays, and correspondences (mainly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) leads to the analysis of the art of pastel as an example of the relation between scientific knowledge and artistic practice. The importance of following strictly specific recipes, as for the fixative methods as well, reveals not only the presence of a pragmatic purpose, but also aesthetic motives that could be connected to the development of the pastel practice in eighteenth-century Europe.

Sculpted Renaissance medallions, inspired by ancient coins and clipeatae imagines, were developed in French monuments from around 1500 to 1550. First applied to the surface of the wall and restricted to a face, they showed, around 1530-1540, transformations related to the adaptation and variation of the body in the decoration. Characters in very high relief, sometimes represented up to the hips, were multiplied, freed from their frame, addressing the viewer and creating illusion games when they were placed in false windows. These decorations thus testify to the relationship between structure and sculpture and the growing humanisation of the wall.

As long as cultural history has been passed on, art and science have always been connected. However in the past decades, while it has become more and more evident that traditional anthropocentric and humanistic values have led to a huge and unprecedented environmental crisis, the dialogue between scientific research and artistic production has been increasingly focusing on a new vision of humanity as an open, undetermined and transitory entity. This essay examines how recent technoscientific advancements and relating artistic imagery have boosted the evolution of a posthumanistic idea of identity, moving away from the concept of human cultural self-sufficiency and gaining consciousness of our dependance on interaction and blending with alterity. A series of selected examples evidence the wide range of mutation spreading in contemporary audiovisual culture, oscillating between the two archetypical concepts of the Cyborg and the Theriomorph. The viral diffusion of hybrid contents, as the emerging idea of organisms and technology invading each other, suggests that we are approaching a paradigm of infection, not in the sense of a dangerous invasion of human health, integrity and purity, but in terms of a deeply necessary hybridisation with otherness.

Through the category of ‘border hack’ (proposed by Rita Raley) and the analysis of three meaningful artworks (Transborder Immigrant Tool by Electronic Disturbance Theatre 2.0 and b.a.n.g. lab, BorderXing Guide by Heath Bunting and Shadows from Another Place by Paula Levine), the aim of this article is to investigate the aesthetic-political practices around the notion of transnational border. These are works of a performative nature and are linked to the networked environment of the Internet. They exemplify a brand-new season of New Media Art, in which the electromagnetic armamentarium of satellite positioning systems and mobile devices takes on a tactical dimension of confrontation with the equally technological governmental-military strategies of border surveillance and identity control.