Johan & Levi Editore

Can Machines Make Art? The giant leaps of generative artificial intelligence confront us with a dilemma. If in the mid-twentieth century a brilliant scientist, Alan Turing, could imagine a machine capable of thinking like a human being, today ChatGPT and other programs do much more: they write texts, compose music, and create images that are now difficult to distinguish from the products of flesh-and-blood artists. Can systems like DALL-E, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion truly replace humans in one of their most emblematic and elusive activities? Can art exist without an artist?To answer these questions—and many other queries on a topic of great relevance—Luigi Bonfante guides us through the discovery of the machina artifex: its mechanisms, potential, contradictions, and the theories shaping its evolution and its forays into the artistic realm. Starting from a concept of art as a process that necessarily involves human beings, the author takes a close look at AI creativity, highlighting affinities and divergences between the human and the non-human, as well as the possible dialogue between these two dimensions. Particular attention is given to those who, like Pierre Huyghe, have embraced the challenges of this new medium to outline a new "posthuman" aesthetic.Arte senza artista is a reflection spanning history, technology, and philosophy—an essay in which art, observed through the prism of artificial intelligence, still emerges in all its complex humanity. Getting to know the machine better thus becomes a way to understand our own expressiveness, and therefore ourselves.

A large Etruscan-period terracotta jar, 14,838 bronze objects, including finished items and tools (axes, fibulae, knives, sickles, razors) as well as unfinished objects, production waste and raw ingots of copper and other metals.This hoard of foundry materials, discovered in 1878 near the Basilica of San Francesco in Bologna, is an exceptional testament to the city’s metallurgical activity and industrial importance during the Villanovan period, between the late 8th and early 7th centuries BC. The discovery of this ‘storage room’ is attributed to Antonio Zannoni, an eclectic figure in late 19th-century Bologna who coordinated numerous excavations both within and outside the city’s urban fabric and applied himself to documenting archaeological activity with scientific rigour: excavation surveys, cataloguing of finds, maps, photographs and meticulously detailed reports have made his documents invaluable sources. Enriched by a foreword by Laura Bentini and extracts from the excavation notebooks, this volume republishes and recontextualises the text and the 56 photographic plates with which Zannoni meticulously documented the excavation and the finds of the so-called “Bologna Foundry”.

Linda Nochlin explores the theme of the fragment as a metaphor for modernity, tracing a long historical and visual trajectory that begins with Füssli’s emblematic drawing, in which the artist is depicted as a small, terrified figure beside an enormous ancient foot – a symbol of the modern condition as the irreparable loss of a past wholeness.With the French Revolution, the fragment takes on a positive value: the mutilation of bodies and the toppling of royal statues express the destruction of the Ancien Régime and the foundation of a new order. In the nineteenth century, the dismembered body becomes an image of trauma and history, and Géricault mocks it by painting severed heads and limbs, always poised between scientific dissection and romantic melodrama. At the same time, the Impressionists and Manet depicted cities and bodies with fragmented compositions: the fragment entered the very structure of the image. Cézanne and Van Gogh worked with sculptural fragments that evoked tensions between tradition and modernity, eros and sacrifice, art and life, culminating in the extreme act of self-mutilation. In the twentieth century and beyond, from the Surrealists (Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer) to Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe and others, the fragment destabilises the subject’s identity, gender and integrity.For the author, the fragment should be conceived as a constellation of specific cases and differences within a plural and ever-changing modernity, in which the loss of unity and the search for new totalities coexist in tension.

Whilst Pop Art may not be a movement characterised by manifestos and group demonstrations, it is at the very least a relatively cohesive trend, a set of practices that utilise images, objects and the languages of mass culture (advertising, comics, packaging, the star system, design) to showcase, celebrate, critique or play with them. This spirit was driven by a desire to experience the contemporary world with a positive rather than a negative attitude, in a climate of exuberant optimism.In this critical overview of Pop Art, written in real time before the movement was canonised, Lucy R. Lippard dissects the phenomenon – which first emerged in England and then independently in America – and its international legacy. She examines both its iconic figures – the spiritual fathers, the precursors and the five ‘diehards’ – and lesser-known names, as well as the artists who preceded them: the Abstract Expressionists.By capturing the energy, contradictions and social context without the retrospective lens of later textbooks, Lippard offers one of the first systematic analyses of how mass visual culture comes to constitute the very language of contemporary art.

Count Galeotto Corazzi’s collection of Etruscan antiquities has been housed at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden since 1826 and represents the first collection of Etruscan artefacts through which the academic world north of the Alps was able to engage with Etruscan civilisation.A selection of these artefacts is now returning to Italy on an exceptional basis, first to Cortona and now to Milan, in an exhibition that strengthens the bond between the Luigi Rovati Foundation and the MAEC – Museum of the Etruscan Academy.The Galeotto Ridolfini Corazzi collection dates back to the 18th century, when the spread of intellectual freedoms fostered the emergence of an international elite with an interest in archaeology and ancient civilisations, thereby contributing to the circulation of artefacts and works of art. Among the bronzes on display, some statuettes and artefacts are of a votive and cultural nature, such as the Boy with a Goose, depicting a naked child holding a goose in his arms and wearing a bulla around his neck, the inscription on the right leg of which attests to its votive function; a similar purpose is confirmed by the dedicatory inscription on the bronze statuette of Laran, the god of war depicted wearing armour and a helmet, dating from between 540 and 520 BC; The small bronze statue depicting a Griffin, a mythical creature combining the lion, king of the earth, with the eagle, queen of the sky, dates from the mid-4th century BC; it bears a dedicatory inscription on the right side of its body to Tinia, the god of thunderbolts.Alongside the Corazzi bronzes, a selection of volumes is on display, highlighting the documentary value of ancient publications for the study of the history of works of art and the history of taste.

Etruschi e Veneti hanno storicamente condiviso strettissime relazioni commerciali e culturali. Sempre in profonda e prolungata vicinanza, gli Etruschi hanno avuto una forte influenza sulla cultura dei Veneti, che hanno saputo trarre frutto dallo scambio facendo tuttavia un’attenta selezione nell’accogliere materiali, mode, influssi. Tra mondo etrusco e mondo del Veneto antico esistono quindi profondi parallelismi ma anche evidenti differenze.La mostra, organizzata dalla Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia che sarà ospitata nelle sale dell’Appartamento del Doge di Palazzo Ducale per poi proseguire, al termine della tappa veneziana, alla Fondazione Luigi Rovati di Milano, è occasione per riflettere su un elemento fondamentale per entrambe le civiltà, l’acqua, e per presentare alcune novità, sia di scavo che di studio. Il catalogo riunisce ventidue contributi di primari studiosi ed esperti che illustrano il valore sacrale dell’acqua per gli Etruschi e per i Veneti, si addentrano nell’analisi sia dei principali luoghi di culto e santuari che delle più importanti fonti sananti, e approfondiscono gli aspetti votivi e dedicatori così come le criticità legate alla valorizzazione di questi beni archeologici.Testi di Alberta Facchi / Alessandro Asta / Alessandro Conti / Angela Ruta Serafini / Anna Marinetti / Benedetta Prosdocimi / Carla Pirazzini / Chiara Squarcina / Daniele F. Maras / Elisa Biancifiori / Elisabetta Govi / Federica Timossi / Giovanna Gambacurta / Giulio Paolucci / Giuseppe Sassatelli / Heinz-Werner Dämmer / Jacopo Tabolli / Laura M. Michetti / Loredana Capuis / Maddalena Bassani / Margherita Tirelli / Rossella Zaccagnini / Silvia Paltineri / Simona Carosi /Tiziano Trocchi

This volume brings together the principal writings of the sculptor Francesco Somaini (1926–2005), who devoted one of his most fruitful creative periods to the theme of the city. A pioneer of urban art in Italy and Europe, Somaini pursued his artistic exploration by moving beyond previous artistic traditions, influenced above all by American architecture from the 1960s and 1970s onwards, following his solo exhibition in New York and his monumental sculpture projects in Atlanta, Baltimore and Rochester.His experience abroad took place during a crucial period, characterised by a strong social and political commitment to the reality of metropolitan life. His editions of classics in sociology and urban planning are crammed with marginal notes; his theoretical treatises, veritable manifestos, openly criticise modernity and the sterile symbolism of the International Style, with its megastructural utopias and the devastation of the man-made landscape driven by industrialisation. Somaini hopes, not without a certain urgency, that sculpture will finally take the decisive step and become a form of social critique, with the aim of re-sacralising public spaces.He thus conveys his project ideas through statements of artistic intent, lectures and conferences, but also through drawings of great imaginative power and photomontages, his medium of choice for his proposals for urban design interventions. Through a careful selection of unpublished texts, notes and sketches, Fulvio Irace offers a synthesis and contextualisation of the Lombard master’s original career and his contribution to the international debate on the future of cities.

Poliedrico e instancabile, in oltre sessant’anni di carriera Gio Ponti (1891-1979) ha ridefinito lo spirito del design italiano, attraversando tutti i settori dell’arte applicata: dall’architettura residenziale agli interni, dalla ceramica al vetro, all’arredamento e oltre. La sua creatività senza confini gli ha permesso di esplorare e reinterpretare i più diversi gusti del XX secolo, dal Novecento al Razionalismo, sempre alla ricerca del bello in ogni sua forma. Come fondatore e direttore della rivista Domus, ha recepito e diffuso idee internazionali e stabilito i canoni della “casa all’italiana” – uno spazio dove tutte le arti si incontrano e convivono in armonia – contribuendo a esportare il Made in Italy. Oggi Ponti è celebrato non solo per capolavori come il grattacielo Pirelli a Milano, villa Planchard a Caracas e l’hotel Parco dei Principi a Sorrento, emblemi della modernità, ma anche per arredi iconici che continuano a essere rieditati e a ispirare nuove generazioni di designer in tutto il mondo.