No. 8

Winter Solstice 2023

2023 / 126 PAGES. Language: English, Italian

In our cover story, Roger Caillois and Detlef Heikamp explore the exquisitely unintentional art of stones. Richard Meyer and William Saroyan recall the dreamlike paintings of Morris Hirshfield, the misunderstood, humble visionary who had a brief but brilliant career in 1940s New York. The Masone Labyrinth presents Orhan Pamuk’s notebooks, hybrid works of art and text that reveal the evocative inner life of this Nobel laureate and visual artist manqué (Stefano Salis). Giorgio Villani writes on 17^th-c. Sicilian altar frontals in which inset marble, jasper, and other semiprecious stones evoke otherworldly holy scenes. And Rui Galopim de Carvalho explores the remarkable transformation in the culture of jewelry-making in Portugal with the sudden influx of diamonds and gems from 18^th-c. Brazil.

HORS D’ŒUVRE

“Éphémèra” – Of Sand and Clouds

by Giovanni Mariotti

“Conjectures” – The Polychrome Altar & the Unpainted Saint

by Giorgio Antei

“Auctions” – A Sleeping Martyr in St. Louis

di Massimo Navoni

NATURAL MAGIC

By Roger Caillois (with an Introduction by Pietro Mercogliano)

Vittorio Sgarbi, Detlef Heikamp

photography by François Farges, Massimo Listri

Roger Caillois’s collection of stones and Giovanni Pratesi’s collection of Arno river rocks and pebbles.

MASTER OF THE TWO LEFT FEET

by Richard Meyer

with a text by William Saroyan

The life and work of the Polish-Jewish painter Morris Hirshfield, who worked in the United States from 1937 in 1946.

LANDSCAPES GLIMPSED IN A DREAM

by Stefano Salis

with Transcriptions of Pages from Orhan Pamuk’s Notebooks

photography by Emre Dörter

The Moleskine notebooks of Nobel Laureate for Literature Orhan Pamuk, in which words and images meld and mingle, on exhibit at the Masone Labyrinth.

THE TECHNICOLOR MARBLE OF SICILY

by Giorgio Villani

photography by Massimo Listri

Five Palermitan altar frontals of marble inlay, now housed in two different churches, are ideally reunited in these pages.

GEMS OF THE BRIGANTINE DYNASTY

by Rui Galopim de Carvalho

photography by Massimo Listri

The glittering jewelry collection of the Royal House of Braganza, preserved at Lisbon’s Palácio Nacional da Ajuda.