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With Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, the Bauhausler Xanti Schawinsky sought refuge in fascist Italy until the uncertain political situation and a career choice prompted him to move to the United States in 1936. Identified as the link between Italy and the Bauhaus, Schawinsky holds a special place in the history of Italian graphic design. However, his key role as promoter of modernism has not been subjected to scrutiny by looking at the work he did, networks he established, and design exchange he fostered. Schawinsky's propaganda poster for the plebiscitary elections of 1934 is the focus of this article. Drawing on photographic documents and primary sources—including correspondences, archival documents, and autobiographic accounts—we seek to clarify the circumstances under which someone fleeing Nazi Germany eventually designed works that served as vehicles for fascist propaganda. To this end, we ground the poster "1934-XII SI" within the larger sociocultural and professional context, historical and political circumstances of early 1930's Italy. We pair close visual analysis with a contextualized understanding to employ the poster as a case study to explore how fascist ideology was ingrained in everyday practice and show how the line between political and commercial discourses was blurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fireworks became an important part of festival culture in the sixteenth century, both celebrations at court and festivals connected to religious holidays. This essay considers the forms and uses of fireworks as well as how audiences perceived them. What may today be seen as mere explosions of fire and light tended to be understood allegorically in sixteenth-century Europe. Fireworks contributed to a wider, complex production of meaning at festivals, typical of the visual culture of the period and grounded in reigning concepts of nature and its materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The culture of consumption of Italian products in the United States, built within a wide system of transatlantic exchanges started in the late 19th century, played a key role in the rearticulation of Italian and American identity after World War II. If the diffusion of modern goods and advertising worked as a significant "transcultural mediator", the promotion of Italian products encouraged the American middle class to experience the Italian lifestyle by consuming its exports. In this sense, the history of the American trades of the so-called "Italian aperitif" - product, brand and consumerist ritual at the same time - represents an exemplary case study. In fact, since the early 1910s, the alliance between Italian artists and liquor producers pioneered a modern "artistic sentiment of promotion" which reshaped the international cocktail culture with a peculiar blend of Italian drinks, made with vermouth and bitter, and Italian styles, flourished in the modern domain of "la dolce vita". Combining the production and promotional history of the Italian aperitif with the iconographic analysis of some historical printed ads, the article proposes a first genealogy of an "aperitif visual culture" stemmed in the United States since the early 20th century. Subsequently, the post-war American campaign "Out of this world" by Austin, Nichols & Co. for Campari bitter is examined as a "social iconic act", analysing the illustrated material found in the Galleria Campari archives. From this first observation, the promotional blending between Italian spirits and its cultural "spirit" seems to have a major role in the diffusion of a consumerist culture based on the cosmopolitan values of versatility, conviviality, pleasure, and sophistication which, together with other expressions of Made in Italy, have influenced the social and cultural customs of post-war America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Funerary lament and ritual weeping are multi-sensorial public expressions of grief that are often referred to as examples of cultural continuity in and across the Mediterranean. In the 1950s, anthropologist Ernesto de Martino and his team assembled a unique set of photos and sound and film recordings on lament in Southern Italy in an attempt to verify that contemporary forms of mourning did not just resemble ancient funerary laments but were actual relics thereof. Departing from these audio-visual materials, this essay traces recurring patterns and sequences of images and sounds related to lament in Southern Italy, arguing that the (female) body of the performers becomes the main medium of iconographic and choreographic reproduction by way of re-enacting and imitating lament in staged settings. Rather than studying the phenomenon of lament in itself (or its decline) or commenting on the continuity thesis, I focus on the mediatised transmission of corporeal expressions of lamenters by drawing on Aby Warburg’s concept of the “migration of images” (Bilderwanderung). I include artistic approaches and modes such as re-enactment, performance, and montage in my ethnographic study of ritual mourning and show that there is a repertory of ecstatic gestures transferred through command performances that is not concerned with “authentic” documentation. Instead, these gestures are there to be performed, individually reappropriated, and revived in situations of crisis to the present day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Second World War, neorealism was fundamental as a spatial register of the time while simultaneously contributing to the creation of a visual culture at a key moment in Italian history. Although the term has been adopted ad hoc in architecture, transfers between neorealism and architecture are still not fully understood and significant grey areas remain. Against this backdrop, recent studies have suggested approaching neorealism not from the standpoint of the disciplinary autonomy of architecture, but from its active and bidirectional link with other forms of artistic expression, approached through the cultural climate of the time in Italy. Within the field of architectural theory, a significant number of works that have been linked to neorealism belong to new neighbourhoods that were developed through state social housing programmes. For this reason, this article uses the INA-Casa programme as a lens for examining neorealism's penetration in architecture, based on the hypothesis that this programme's written regulations were inflected by the neorealist environment during its first settennio (1949–56). It sets out to consider if and how a neorealist making existed in architecture by analysing the first two INA-Casa design manuals, which are seen here as an example of a rule book for the theory of architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary social movements focused on environmental and social sustainability, present an emerging need to combine, at least at a symbolic level, the changes in policies with profound transformations in everyday life and, therefore, a need to combine these lifestyle changes with corresponding imagery. The article presents a research on communication (websites, social media and visual identity) of 76 GAS, Solidarity Purchase Groups, active in Italy; among the numerous practices of political consumerism this requires more stable forms of engagement. The results outline a connected and dispersed movement, varying be-tween the mistrust towards the visual culture and the constructionof narratives consistent with their founding values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our article maps the increasing prominence of interartistic and intermedial methodologies in modern and contemporary Italy, and advocates the advantages of an interdisciplinary approach for Italian Studies. We map some current trends in cultural, visual and comparative studies and explore the influence of these fields on the development of Italian Studies. We suggest that the future of our discipline is best understood in terms of an ‘interdisciplinary turn’, which entails a broadening of the object of study and opens up new perspectives on familiar and on previously unexplored objects. To conclude, we draw attention to three periods in twentieth and twenty-first century Italian culture that have been especially marked by interartistic experimentation: Futurism, the early postmodernism of theneoavanguardiaand digital art. The perspectives we lay out in this article were developed during the first phase of the AHRC-funded Interdisciplinary Italy project,Interdisciplinary Italy 1900–2015: Art, Music Text. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates the revitalization of the literary theme of Renaissance conspiracies in nineteenth-century Italian art. The topic of political plots enjoyed widespread diffusion in Italian Renaissance literature, especially in the second half of the 1400s, when it was chosen as the subject of several texts. It is significant that four centuries later this topic was resurrected and reframed in a number of artistic works, becoming a pivotal theme of both Romantic visual culture and the later artistic movement of the Macchiaioli. In this evolution, the issue of conspiracies acquired new overtones, placed within the context of a turbulent period of political transition. It becomes a vehicle for modern political ideologies and an artistic pattern able to convey a new cultural sensibility. Thus the fertile relationship between literature and art brings new life into the recovery of Renaissance history, enriching the early modern tradition and continuously reviving it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term ‘fetish’ has been used since the sixteenth century to refer to indigenous ‘power objects’, perceived to embody positive supernatural energy. This concept is explored here with reference to the visual culture of the Later Neolithic in Southeast Italy (5800–4100bc). During this period, many aspects of the material world were ascribed a greater visual significance, being modelled into more varied art-forms and highlighted by more innovative and elaborate decoration, ritual performances and special deposits. A culturally specific range of powerful bodily and abstract symbols unified and animated these material forms, to the extent that we can talk of a fetishistic way of seeing and visual culture. These may have been used strategically to highlight and strengthen social connections, distinctions and boundaries. Ultimately, these social dynamics related to tensions surrounding the final transition to a fully agricultural way of life in Neolithic Southeast Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Textiles are often not given their due importance in art history in terms of the analysis of religious iconography, patronage, and reception studies. Bologna, however, had a thriving industry of embroidery, most of which was produced by women who, in convents and conservatori, copied famous paintings of local artists, including women. The subject matter displayed the gendered iconography of Counter-Reformation models of virtue as adapted for the use of the young girls living and working in these charitable Christian reform houses. This visual imagery was based on Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti's call for a maniera devota or devout manner in sacred painting, and commissioned by Bolognese noblewomen or wealthy silk merchants. This article examines how two such paintings by Lavinia Fontana and Elisabetta Sirani became part of a dialogue between the maniera devota and the mano donnesca, in which gender both influenced the production of sacred visual culture and was, in turn, affected by it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the idea of domestic education in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. Drawing on the cross-reading of a selection of two different sets of printed sources - pedagogical tracts, and art tracts which largely intersected with Catholic aims of religious reform and the creation of a confessional state and society - the article discusses the educational value that was attributed to the home environment, in its private, public and political dimensions, and the relevance which was attached to domestic visual and material culture and to the senses as learning tools to be used by children of different gender, age and class. Debates about education uncover less-known aspects of domesticity while suggesting the possibility to explore the continuities that might have existed between pre-modern notions of education and modern ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the elections of 18 April 1948, for Italian Communists the prospect of coming to power in the short term vanished. In the aftermath of the elections, the sustained confrontation of the Cold War at the international level and the unfavourable political context in Italy deeply shaped the tone and content of the Communist press, including the educational magazines for young militants. This article deals with the representations of the political enemies in the press for young Communists between 18 April 1948 and the electoral campaign against the legge truffa in 1953. Attention is paid to how the Communist press portrayed, in particular by visual means, the different subjects that made up the ruling anti-Communist bloc: the US government; Christian Democrats; the Catholic Church; and, finally, the Italian business world. In particular, the analysis underlines the relevance that a 'nation-' and 'gender-' related discourse had in the construction of political enemies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ludi (games) (spectacula) were important in Roman visual culture. Those involving animals (venationes) developed from moderately sized ritualized killing and hunt into carnage. Their popularity and development in scale and frequency contrasted sharply with the Romans' love of pets, good veterinary medicine, and fascination with animals. I explore factors that contribute to explaining the spectators' endurance and enjoyment of the venationes. Contextual factors were hunting traditions and a political system where power and popularity was gained through donations (euergetism). I suggest that the explanatory psychological factors are: hunter-insensitivity, psychological and neurological processes connected to enjoyment of cruelty (killing, aggression, horror), desensitization, neurological feedback loops, curiosity, envy, competition, mass psychology, diffusion of responsibility (bystander effect), and changed states of mind through identifications and emotional turmoil. Finally, I scrutinize psychologically one exceptional case of divergent mass behaviour at Pompey's games in 55 bc. I deconstruct what has been described as a compassionate attitude by the spectators, and by Cicero, who commented on the incident. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Donatello's bronze sculptures of Judith and David are stylistically discrete, and may have been originally created in and for different contexts, they are firmly connected to one another through their content: both figures clearly are characterized as active agents of decapitation. As this article argues, the Medici fostered a familial association with the iconographic, symbolic and practical language of decapitation in Florence since the Albizzi coup of 1433–4, when the family came to be associated with the feast of St John the Baptist's martyrdom, through the placement of the Donatello sculptures in the family palace in the 1460s. Although rarely mentioned in the vast art-historical literature on the Medici, visual allusions to beheadings in paint, performance and sculpture served a rhetorical function in Florence to describe the shifting political status of Cosimo de'Medici and his family. By outlining a cultural map by which this visual rhetoric of decapitation may be charted in relation to the Medici family, this article contributes yet a further layer of meaning to the Donatello sculptures within the larger context of early Medici patronage and politics and offers a new methodological approach for the investigation of early modern Florentine visual culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Les attestations figuratives italiennes d'époque tardiglaciaire et les différentes tendances iconographiques réparties tout au long des 10 000 ans où se développe l'Épigravettien sont proposées dans cet article. L'A. a décrit les possibles scénarios qui peuvent être reconstitués en conjuguant la restitution des expériences figuratives avec d'autres indicateurs archéologiques. La très rare attestation documentaire d'époque épigravettien ancien semble indiquer, en Italie seulement, la présence du modèle transalpin « franco-cantabrique ». La première innovation profonde, l'émancipation par rapport au modèle figuratif franco-ibérique et la tendance à une plus grande polymorphie iconographique surviennent lors de l'Épigravettien évolué (ou récent). Le système figuratif de l'Épigravettien final est bien plus articulé et nous pouvons suivre les transformations dans les presque 4000 dernières années du Paléolithique. The Author summarizes data on Italian figurative evidence dated to the last 10,000 years of Late Glacial (Epigravettian culture) and describes the possible scenario conceivable after a multidisciplinary analysis of different archaeologica data. During Ancient Epigravettian, the rare evidence indicates the presence in Italy of "franco-cantabric style". During Evolved (or Recent) Epigravettian the Italian visual productions appear more innovative and original in relation to a more polymorphic iconography. The variability of evidence is greater during the Final Epigravettian and the rich documentation allows to define in detail the visual culture during the last 4000 years of Palaeolithic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]