Claudio Botta - Artista bresciano

Edward Lucie-Smith
Il Polittico

Ezio Bassani, Michael Bockemühl, Patrick R. McNaughton
Skira Editore

Many elements converge in the construction of a high-quality art collection, making it a fascinating, intellectual and emotional adventure, a journey of discovery and a labour of love. Formed over the course of thirty years by Udo Horstmann and his wife, the Horstmann collection is rather exceptional inasmuch as it offers a captivating vision of the variety of solutions adopted by black artists over the course of the centuries: nearly 120 extraordinary sculptures, figures, masks, household objects and weapons from Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Congo, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Swaziland, Mozambique, Kenya and Sudan.
The origin of the artworks-- selected for their perfection transcending the mere utilitarian function-- touches all of the lands of the continent, including the southern and eastern lands rarely so authoritatively represented in other collections, and their execution covers an arc of time of several millennia.
The presence of ancient works contributes to the demolition of the preconception that has weighed unfairly until recent years on African art, and that is the absence of evolution in the artistic creation of Black Africa, and therefore of any historic quality. This is a difficult negation to cancel if African sculpture is still often labeled as "primitive."
Another meritorious quality of the Horstmanns lies in the fact that they chose the sculptures in their collection, not out of any generic passion for the exotic and neither for any abstract demand for representativity of ethnicity or significance or destination, but for their quality, for the enchantment of the "form," or better, ofthe "forms."
Paging through the book, the reader will discover that the artistic creation, that is, the need to give "form" to the formless, is a common heritage of mankind, shared by the artists of Black Africa.

Matteo Pugliese
Silvana Editoriale

Francesco Maria Furno
edizioni Lume

Enzo Carli
Electa editrice

Marc Bormand, Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi, Nicholas Penny
5 Continents

Nella Firenze di pieno Quattrocento, l'opera di Desiderio da Settignano rappresenta uno dei momenti artistici più importanti nell'ambito della scultura del Rinascimento italiano. Il Musée du Louvre, in collaborazione con il Museo Nazionale del Bargello di Firenze e la National Gallery of Art di Washington, organizza la prima mostra dedicata a questo scultore rendendo in tal modo giustizia alla sua arte. Nonostante la morte precoce (nel 1464, all'età di circa 35 anni), l'opera di Desiderio resta particolarmente rappresentativa della creazione artistica fiorentina alla metà del Quattrocento, soprattutto di quella parte specializzata nel taglio del marmo, in particolare nel trattamento del rilievo stiacciato. La mostra dedicata a Desiderio consente di rendere giustizia a un grande specialista del marmo e di presentare alcuni tra i più importanti esempi di opere della scultura toscana del XV secolo. Il volume offre una monografia dedicata a questo scultore della scuola rinascimentale fiorentina.

Giorgio Tempesti
De Luca Editore

Cecilia Chilosi
ADW

Giovanni Testori
Grafo edizioni

Franco Cajani
GR Edizioni

Gian Carlo Bojani
Riolo Terme - Estate

Flaminio Gualdoni
SilvanaEditoriale