Flaminio Gualdoni

Immediately upon his death in 1963 at the age of thirty, Piero Manzoni s reputation as a provocateur and wild child preceded him, with his most subversive work, Artist s Shit, 1961, elevating him to cult status. But what actually came before, and lay behind those thirty grams of pure artistic output? Flaminio Gualdoni sets out to explore exactly that in this biography that traces the guiding themes of Manzoni s works, lending order to a jumble of hitherto fragmented materials and setting aside any apocryphal hypotheses.

Focuses on the historical evolution of the nude.

Trompe-l'oeil, a French term meaning to trick, the eye, describes a painting that deceives the spectator into thinking that the objects in it are real, not merely represented. To successfully fool the eye of the viewer, trompe-l'oeil artists choose objects, situations and compositional devices using as little depth as possible.