Emilio Tadini. The Reality of the Image 1968-1972

English edition. The book revolves around the figure of the Italian artist and intellectual Emilio Tadini. A prolific painter and writer, Tadini still deserves to receive a broader recognition as a leading figure in Italian postwar and contemporary art and culture. The monograph especially focuses on a moment in Tadini's career, in which specific interests in reassessing the tenets of painting and investigating aspects of visuality through photography and painting emerged. In this respect, Tadini proves to be an outstanding figure in the expanded field of re-mediation, which was distinctive of the visual arts between the 1960s and 1970s. Different methodologies are intertwined in the book: the analysis of the paintings and works on paper, by virtue of which a comparison with major international figures in the art of the 1960s was established; the result of the research in the huge holdings of photographs held by the family of the artist, culminating in the comparison between the paintings and the photographs on which they are based, which are published here for the first time; the critical edition and the commentary of a notebook of the artist, which had never been published before. Dating to the end of the 1960s, the notebook provides an insightful perspective on Tadini's broad spectrum of cultural and artistic interests, ranging from Italian art, sociology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, foreign literature, Greek and Roman classics, and semiotics. Through a thorough reconstruction and analysis of all the sources mentioned or just hinted at in the manuscript, I could reconstruct the artistic and cultural complexity of Tadini. The notebook is also comprised of several notes about paintings to be done. The comparison between the notes and the artworks sheds light on the artistic process as well as the rich cultural background inspiring the artist's practice. In this respect, the study of the drawings which the artist made in those years, which are mostly unrelated to the paintings and are published here for the first time, opens up another field of investigation, through which the complexity of the artistic and cultural turmoil happening between the late 1960s and early 1970s could be further explored and properly analyzed.