The book is intended as a survey of some of the most important work of the twentieth century in different disciplines (philosophical, scientific, historical), in order to outline a multiplicity of responses and meanings and a plurality of pronunciations of the term ‘time', which can be very useful for reading many of the manifestations of contemporary art from a different perspective. In particular, the figures and forms of time that result from these readings seem to be intrinsic properties of “artistic objects”, a sort of “theory” of internal time-clocks that manifest themselves according to different grammars and syntaxes: the notions of moment, instant, becoming, interval, event, constitute the elements and reveal how time can be manipulated in a very wide range of ways, of speeds, shifts, rhythms, intervals, retroactions, giving rise to an equally wide variety of figures. All of this is constantly accompanied by attention to the salient aesthetic phenomena of the contemporary world.

Mario Bertoni was born in Modena, graduated in Philosophy from the University of Bologna, researcher in scientific history, journalist, curator of exhibitions and monographs on contemporary artists.

What are the origins of the construction of power, of the use of violence as a conscious instrument, of bloodshed as the foundation of the collective, which form the basis of the thought and practices of our civilisation? When Rome decided to build the Capitol, a human head with an intact face was discovered beneath the foundations. It was as though the soldier depicted in the foreground of the work by A. Caron (1521-1599) opening the book, standing in triumph on a round podium, had just found it. The exhibition shows how one shows a trophy. One might say that these battles, these assassinations take place on the plinth, on the very supports of the monuments. These fundamental battles are the subject of this book, called the Libro delle fondazioni (Book of Foundations). Foundations of stone walls on flesh, foundations of the city, of its history, its culture, its spectacles, its politics: but also of our own. An essay in the philosophy of knowledge, this book is a search for reality distorted by ideological formations, and traces the possible outlines of a knowledge and a thought constructed outside the fury of verbal struggles and the delimitations of power. These are the terms of a culture, nature, civilisation, which here, in negative and in positive, find a new determination.

A journey – via Venice, Lugano, Berlin, Aix en Provence, New York and Venice again – into Carpaccio’s fragmented body of work. A journey through stories, myths, methods and ideas; an adventurous and fervent journey. A journey into Carpaccio’s work that is part of a cycle on painting (M. Serres has written about other painters: Poussin, Vermeer, Latour, Turner, Bonnard, and on sculpture), which in turn is part of a cycle on art, in an even larger cycle on the form of mental production. These are the patient stages of a long journey undertaken more than twenty years ago. All of Serres’s philosophy is presented in the form of a journey, a journey full of the passions and tribulations of Hermes/Mercury, god of crossroads. Hermes passes everywhere in space and time, between the formal and physical sciences, from their birth in antiquity to their current state; he crosses the critical pass that separates and unites the “hard” sciences and the humanities; sciences, stories and myths; sciences, art and the history of religions. Each stage corresponds to a book or part of a book, in the cycle entitled Hermes e altrove (Hermes and elsewhere). As the movement proceeds, the picture becomes more coherent. A global image emerges as an open promise. Is it perhaps that of a modern-day philosophy?

“The title is symbolic: the Shiite archer, representing the Asian creator, galloping on the border between the Western and Eastern worlds, his face turned towards the immense East (the Russian multinational empire, Persia, China, Japan, India), with only half an eye observing what comes from the West. The meaning of the metaphor is clear, perhaps arguable, but deliberately provocative: Russian avant-garde art exists in itself; it finds the necessary forms, the creative inspiration, on its own terrain”. Benedikt Livšic's memoirs, which cover a crucial period of artistic development in Russia, are of fundamental importance in the reconstruction of the epic of the expressive revolution of the first two decades of the twentieth century. Introduction by Jean Claude Marcadé.

This collection includes the writings of the German artist, born in Munich in 1880, who founded Der Blaue Reiter with Kandinsky around 1911. The writings, arranged chronologically from 1910 to 1915, comprise articles and notes on art theory and politics, texts that appeared in Der Blaue Reiter Almanac and writings from the war period in which Marc was a volunteer participant from 1914 to March 1916, the date of his death. These writings are a very important key to understanding the panorama of European art in the age of the avant-garde, the fundamental climate for the artistic development of our century. Permeated with important issues (the rejection of Renaissance perspective, the importance of synthesis and constructiveness in composition, the expressive value of Kandinsky and the ‘savages’, the relationship between art and science, popular art and the visual value of art, the transcendent meaning of war, the future of Europe), the narrative is always oracular and visionary. The deep philosophical content, which links in with Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, the polemic with Tolstoy’s aesthetics and the intensity of expression make it meaningful and moving. The selection is completed by a commemoration written by Wassily Kandinsky on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the author’s