Reserve
How could a boy from Lombardy, an apprentice painter, having arrived in Rome at the age of about eighteen, build a career, develop, expand beyond the impoverished area around piazza Navona, beyond the Tiber, beyond the Alps, beyond his age and the following centuries and reach us as one of the highest examples (perhaps the most stable and compact) and establish himself as a standard of modernity for the most disparate currents, the most contrasting factions. How is it possible that still today, after Kandinsky or Mondrian, that the most casual passer-by, the keenest supporter of Pollock or Rauschenberg or the most compliant game-player can step into San Luigi dei Francesi and feel a wound rip open that he had thought closed for ever?
These are questions with no answer, or to which the only possible answer (considered by many with distaste) is that the truth of a great creative passion can be measured by its duration in time, by its ability to be a source of sustenance to ideologies, to new convictions, to new tastes: to reveal a new face that has never been seen before.
(From the presentation by Renato Guttuso)
The volume is available at the bookstore in via Torino 61, Milano, and at all Skira bookshops.
