Ricerc@Sapienza

Lacunae are the voids left by missing or damaged pieces of artwork, and their presence constitutes a central problem in the aesthetic experience of viewing artwork. However, we hypothesize that experience and knowledge of art might differentially modify viewer reactions to degraded artwork. Here, we investigated the implicit and explicit attitudes of art experts and non-experts towards the aesthetics of perfectly intact and lacunar artwork. Sections of Flemish oil paintings were displayed with or without a degradation mask, which mimics lacunae.

Bertolo paints and has always defended painting, even when it appeared to many to be an obsolete medium. Sometimes he uses other media (collage, photographs, pieces of used canvases, paintings found at markets, Super 8, wood, plastic: he is not a painting fundamentalist) but he mostly paints. Human beings have been painting and creating images for tens of thousands of years. We all produce images of some kind in our daily lives just as we produce words, but not every image demands the same attention as a so-called “artistic” image, and not all words are poems.

According to the Census Report, 2009, the landscape is the only root of national identity in Italy. The unity of this country, which is weak in terms of the values shared by Italians, finds a true source of integration in the affection of the citizens for the natural and architectural environments. One of the few reasons why Italians feel that Italy is a unified nation is that they greatly admire their territory.