Sei illustrazioni per gli scritti sull’arte antica di Johann J. Winckelmann, 1977

The cloth-bound volume – with a white dust jacket with flaps, titles in black – is made up of 32 unnumbered pages. The pages include, in this order: the general title-page, the title-page for the text by J.J. Winckelmann reproduced on the following two pages1, six plates each on a double page numbered from I to VI on the blank page preceding each plate, and the colophon.
The six illustrations on a double-page spread are inspired by the writings on ancient art by Johann Jakob Winckelmann. Each illustration is inspired by the image of a double page of the Italian collection of writings by Winckelmann (Il bello nell'arte. Scritti sull’arte antica, Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1953), reproduced at the centre of the double page of Paolini's volume. In the artist's own words: “Illustration, as defined in the dictionary: ‘the act or effect of illustrating', or ‘the figure or drawing that accompanies a book'. Or: ‘a book that designs or depicts the image of a book'".2
The first illustration reproduces Winckelmann's book open to the letter to Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg in December 1762, in which the author tells the story of his life, especially as concerns his Roman sojourn. The image of the book is overlapped by an etching documented by Winckelmann himself, which depicts the Roman decurion Quintus Lollius Alcamenes, seated on a bench, in the guise of a sculptor engaged in shaping a bust of his son. The exchange of gazes between the two figures that resemble each other emphasizes the visual act and questions the very theme of representation.3
In the second illustration, with a black background, the image of Winckelmann's book, which is opened to the page that documents the statue of the Apollo Belvedere, with its arm outstretched, is held by the statue of Apollo itself. A mise en abîme emphasizing the gesture of showing or announcing.
Similarly, in the third illustration, the image of the book open to the page that shows the Borghese Gladiator as he holds his arm upwards is doubled, so that the staggered juxtaposition of the two images amplifies the gesture of the figure.
In the fourth illustration, the image of the book open to the title-page entitled History of Ancient Art is associated with several torn fragments of reproductions of drawings by Winckelmann himself, applied in a randomly ordered collage, thereby evoking the traces of ancient lost artefacts.
In the fifth illustration, the book is open to the short chapter titled On Beauty: and the Impossibility of Defining It. The image of the book, held by an ancient hand, is associated with an empty envelope, applied by collage, that recalls the impossibility formulated in the title.
In the sixth illustration, the image of the book, open to pages 152-153, in the section that analyses the eyes of ancient statues, is held down by a photographic hand (the image is taken from a portrait of the artist as he holds a book before himself concealing his face). In the upper part, the drawing of a face cut in half at the viewer's eye level recalls the hidden one of the figure holding the book before itself, as if to suggest the gesture of reading, thus mirroring our own gaze.

1 The double page of text by Winckelmann preceding the illustrations reproduces an extract from the chapter On the Greek Art of the Disegno and on Beauty, chapter IV of the "Trattato preliminare dell’arte del disegno degli antichi popoli", in Monumenti antichi inediti, 1767 vol. I), of interest to Paolini by virtue of the treatment, during the Neoclassical period, of the autonomy of beauty.
2 G. Paolini in Id., "Sei illustrazioni per gli scritti sull'arte di antica di Johann J. Winckelmann", in Studio Marconi 1-2 (Milan), January, 1978, p. 16; republished in Giulio Paolini. Atto unico in tre quadri, exhibition catalogue, Milan, Studio Marconi (Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta editore, 1979), p. 104.
3 The same subject was developed in two paintings (GPO-0349, GPO-0913) and in a work on paper (GPC-0455) made that same year. See also the group of works by Paolini titled Mimesi, 1975, GPO-0283.