Works and artists

Underwood No. 5: the typewriter that revolutionized the art of writing

Long Island, July 1922. The sound of ticking fingers pressing on typewriter keys spreads throughout the house: it is a hot summer day and Francis Scott Fitzgerald, sitting at his desk, is intent on bringing to life one of the most beloved stories of ...
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From Mount Fuji to Mount Etna and Mount Vesuvius: a history of geological art

"We belong to something beautiful," promise the billboards for a multinational cosmetics company. Instead, according to Kant, it is beauty that is inherent in us, and intelligible only through the lens of feelings. The basis of modern thought lies be...
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Mat Collishaw, flowers as fascinating enigmas.

An image composed of 15 shots installed on backlit panels focuses, in a visual synecdoche, on a bullet-hit skull hole. The work is titled Bullet Hole and plays on perceptual destabilization. Up close it creates an interpretive short-circuit that is b...
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The image of power. The portrait of Eleanor of Toledo in Pisa.

The most famous image of Eleanor of Toledo, born Leonor Álvarez de Toledo y Osorio, wife of Cosimo I de' Medici and duchess consort of Tuscany, is surely the one painted by Bronzino and now preserved in the Uffizi: the Portrait of Eleonora di ...
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Signs of Genius: the Museum of Graphics in Pisa.

The University ofPisa is the holder of an extraordinary cultural and scientific heritage, which the Athenaeum has amassed over its very long history, dating back at least to 1343, the year it was officially established, although according to some his...
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The Castle of Agliè, from the home of dukes and princes to the good of all

In Agliè Castle , time seems to have stood still at its last inhabitant, Duke Thomas of Savoy-Genoa, who sold it to the Italian state in 1939. Since then, the residence has become a public asset and is open to visitors as part of the circuit o...
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Wilhelm Brasse, the Auschwitz photographer who saved tens of thousands of images

Photographing all the prisoners arriving at the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp: this was the task of Wilhelm Brasse, still remembered today as the "Auschwitz photographer." Three photos for each prisoner, and while he was shooting, Wi...
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Prague's National Gallery, the charm of an eclectic capital through its masterpieces

Prague, among Europe's capitals, is perhaps the city that assimilates the most souls: it has in fact, throughout its very long history, been the administrative and political center of the Kingdom of Bohemia and the Holy Roman Empire, the "blossoming ...
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Those artists who work with obsolete technologies, from old video games to the cathode ray tube

Art has always had an ambivalent relationship with technology. On the one hand, it has embraced it as a tool to expand its language; on the other, it has questioned it, problematizing its effects on our living and thinking. In this dialectic, some co...
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Treasures from Wunderkammer: the skull with coral from the Museum of Natural History in Pisa

The skull with coral is one of the most famous and at the same time most fascinating artifacts in the Natural History Museum of Pisa, which is housed at the Certosa di Calci. The skull, presumably dated to a period between the 16th and 17th centuries...
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Vallo di Nera, between Franciscan frescoes and movements of ancient popular devotion

Sunday morning of a cold and strange December, and the alleys of Black Wall are empty. There is no travel guidebook that forgets to mention this sandstone village in the lists of must-see places in the Valnerina. Orange flag, Borghi più belli ...
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Davide Benati, the poetry of a translocated nature that flourishes on a humus of paper and canvas

To visit an artist's studio is to have the privilege of being invited into a secret garden, into which one must tiptoe so as not to disturb the subterranean germination of the works to come, which hover there in little more than a potential state. Th...
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Administrative documents on pottery from ancient Egypt: the ostrakas of Oxyrhynchus

The Egyptological Collections of theUniversity of Pisa, part of the Athenaeum Museum System, preserve a most precious treasure for the study of Egyptian society: they are the ostrakas of Ossirinco, which represent an extraordinary body of historical,...
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Why do we like landscape painting?

Writing to his brother Theo and sister-in-law Jo in mid-July 1890, a few days before he died, Vincent van Gogh said he had painted three large canvases, three "expanses of wheat fields under turbulent skies," and said he had painted them trying to lo...
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The Prato Textile Museum: the history of the textile industry

In the English writer Iris Origo's fine book The Merchant of Prato, dedicated to Francesco Datini, an extraordinary merchant active in the 14th century, the author writes, "It was once said in Prato that if anyone cared to look under the foundations ...
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Between history and the avant-garde, Enrico Cagianelli's Umbrian Nativity.

There was a time in the history of Italy when putting up a Christmas tree was a custom looked upon with suspicion: it was the 1930s, and Fascism was concerned with discouraging what is perhaps today the most beloved Christmas decoration, on the groun...
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