Other Publications

This volume examines the economy of artificial light in medieval churches across Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean region, and the broader medieval spheres. Whether innovative or inspired by the more established Latin and Byzantine traditions, the chapters explore local customs in order to understand how artificial light was used in ecclesiastical spaces, and how it brought together aspects of the architecture, decoration, objects, and rituals, while implicating the celebrants and the faithful gathered within the spaces. This volume complements the publication Natural Light in Medieval Churches (Brill, 2023).

Con questo libro, l’autore Vladimir Ivanovici inserisce uno dei battisteri paleocristiani più importanti in una storia viva. Le varie fasi del battistero di Riva San Vitale vengono presentate nel contesto storico, nelle varie tappe della diffusione del cristianesimo nella regione e nella vita liturgica, fino a cercare di ricostruire l’esperienza stessa dei partecipanti alla liturgia battesimale: un’esperienza forte di un momento culminante della conversione al cristianesimo. Il battistero di Riva San Vitale, dedicato a San Giovanni Battista, ha goduto di una particolare fortuna critica a partire dalla fine dell’Ottocento, quando Johann Rudolf Rahn, comprendendone il valore e l’importanza storica, diede sostanzialmente inizio al recupero scientifico del monumento. Leggendo le pagine che compongono il libro, dunque, si avrà modo di ripercorrere – con dovizia di particolari – ogni aspetto della storia di quello che è il più antico edificio cristiano ancora interamente conservato in Svizzera.

50 years Learning from Las Vegas
From the bustle of Johannesburg to the neon of Las Vegas, Denise Scott Brown’s advocacy for "messy vitality" has transformed the way we look at the urban landscape. Unconventional, eloquent, and with a profound sociopolitical message, Scott Brown is one of our era’s most influential thinkers on architecture and urbanism.
The anthology Denise Scott Brown. In Other Eyes – marking the 50th anniversary of the seminal treatiseLearning from Las Vegas – paints a portrait of Scott Brown as seen through the eyes of leading architectural historians and practitioners. It features new scholarship on　her education on three continents, her multidisciplinary teaching, and her use of urban patterns and forces as tools for architectural design – a practice documented in a new comment by Scott Brown, noting that sometimes "1+1>2."

With contributions by Mary McLeod, Joan Ockman, Sylvia Lavin, Stanislaus von Moos, Jacques Herzog, Robin Middleton, and Denise Scott Brown, among others.

This book argues that Romans credited certain living persons with the capacity to function as cult statues, that is, as images and vessels of the divine. After addressing the cultural context that produced the idea that humans can become images of the divine, the text shows how emperors, bishops, and others imitated the aesthetic, immobility, and material setting of statuary to establish themselves as iconic and how their role as mediators with the divine was eventually transferred to new categories of material objects, such as relics and icons. The figure of the iconic person thus is shown to have bridged the cult statues of Antiquity with the new mechanisms of interaction with the divine that Christians used for the following millennium. By integrating living persons in the art historical analysis of the spaces and advocating for the need to consider the animation of artefacts together with the reification of bodies, this study marks an important development in the study of the past.

Inside Christian churches, natural light has long been harnessed to underscore theological, symbolic, and ideological statements. In this volume, twenty-four international scholars with various specialties explore how the study of sunlight can reveal essential aspects of the design, decoration, and function of medieval sacred spaces.
Themes covered include the interaction between patrons, advisors, architects, and artists, as well as local negotiations among competing traditions that yielded new visual and spatial constructs for which natural light served as a dening and unifying factor. The study of natural light in medieval churches reveals cultural relations, knowledge transfer patterns, processes of translation and adaptation, as well as experiential aspects of sacred spaces in the Middle Ages.

Material Theories takes a radically new approach to well-established thinking on nineteenth-century architecture and design by investigating Gottfried Semper’s classic ideas about dressing, metamorphosis of material, and cultural development, culminating in his two-volume publication Style.
This book demonstrates how Semper’s theories crystallised among his encounters with material things of the late 1840s and early 1850s. It examines several discursive frameworks and phenomena which shaped the attitude to artefacts in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, and which were specifically pertinent to Semper’s evolution: archaeology and antiquarianism, the domestic interior, print media, collections, and the embodied relationship between the designer and their work. For the first time, this book examines the construction of a design theory not only as an intellectual endeavour but also as a process of confrontation with material things. It employs recent approaches to material culture, in particular Thing Theory, in order to show that Semper’s artefact references constituted his ideas, rather than simply giving impetus to them.
It will be an important investigation for academics and researchers interested in interior design history, as well as scholars of material culture and history of design theory.

In 1886 the international competition was announced for the reconstruction of the façade of Milan Cathedral, one of the most important competitions in that period. This volume traces its long and controversial history, and much more: photographs, engravings, reliefs and publications now kept in the Library of the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture and formerly owned by the Ticinese architect Augusto Guidini, one of the members of the competition jury, guide readers to the jurors’ table, revealing the organizational procedures of an international architectural competition in the late nineteenth century, as well as of the criteria adopted to assess the projects presented. For the first time the book brings together as a whole the rarest and most surprising element in the innovative method developed by the jurors: a photographic archive of all the historical projects for the cathedral façade all the way to the projects submitted to the competition. The result is a narrative in images that testifies to the reception of Gothic and the variations of taste in the various periods. The history of the cathedral façade thus becomes a mutable history in which time also unfolds, with its continuity and its ruptures, accumulating on the monument that is a symbol of the city of Milan.
Texts by: Carla Mazzarelli, Mirko Moizi, Daniela Mondini, Angela Windholz

In the past, scholars have used the available data to identify a process of ‘Christianisation’, understood as the transformation of the local population into ‘Christians’. Nevertheless, the Alpine region resists such an approach because it attests to only timid institutional efforts that allow for a thorough penetration of the territory. This assumption invites a rereading of local sources and customs in order to identify features that may have facilitated the integration of different beliefs and practices into new forms of Christianity. It appears, instead, that the spread of Christianity in the Alpine regions mainly relied on individual initiatives. The scholars who contributed to this volume revisited the available evidence to evaluate its relevance in light of this nuanced understanding of religious identity, thus shifting the perspective from a unidirectional ‘Christianisation’ of the Alpine regions to the multidimensional notion of ‘Christianness’.

Esito conclusivo del programma di ricerca internazionale Lettres d’artistes. Pour une nouvelle histoire transnationale de l’art, XVIIIe-XIXe siècles, questo volume esplora le corrispondenze degli artisti quale fonte di una (nuova) storia dell’arte che privilegia un’ottica transnazionale. I saggi qui riuniti pongono in primo piano la natura dialogica della lettera, strumento in grado di collegare luoghi e tenere unite persone lontane, ma anche di suggellare nuovi incontri (o scontri) tra culture, cose, lingue diverse. La prima sezione Incontri, transiti, geografie, che propone una storia dell’arte intesa come storia di attraversamenti di spazi e confini, ripercorre la costruzione di reti intellettuali e culturali tra artisti e tra istituzioni, attraverso le quali emerge un nuovo discorso sull’arte e sul ruolo dell’artista. Nella seconda sezione Generi e tipologie si analizzano i formati e i linguaggi delle lettere d’artista, incluse tipologie sin qui poco indagate quali i carteggi familiari o le lettere di presentazione e raccomandazione, come occasioni di definizione delle identità professionali e come pratica sociale. Infine la terza sezione, La lettera come patrimonio nazionale, è dedicata alla fortuna o sfortuna materiale e intellettuale delle lettere d’artista, al fenomeno ottocentesco dell’ingresso degli epistolari artistici nelle raccolte pubbliche, alla formazione delle autografoteche, all’utilizzo degli epistolari nella trama narrativa delle biografie artistiche.

Il nuovo numero monografico di Versants. Rivista svizzera delle letterature romanze è dedicato all’orizzonte della fototestualità nella cultura contemporanea (secoli XX e XXI) di lingua italiana, radunando voci provenienti dalla critica letteraria e fotografica e dall’ambito della creazione. 

Con contributi, fra gli altri, di Andrea Cortellessa, Tiziana Serena, Antonella Anedda, Giorgio Falco e Sabrina Ragucci, e con un’intervista a Olivo Barbieri, a cura di Marco Maggi e di Vega Tescari.