A collection of texts and letters from the prolific correspondence of two friends offers the chance to survey stories and trends of Italian main artistic currents.
Cesare Brandi and Renato Guttuso, two protagonists of the Twentieth century culture, cultivated a deep friendship, whose key laid in their mutual diversity, in their being so “clearly different”. Their precious exchange of letters, which started during the Thirties and was never interrupted, is published in this volume for the first time. It deals not only with art, but it ranges from drama to music, from philosophy to poetry, from the defence of cultural heritage to the student movement. All the writings Brandi dedicated to Guttuso – including an unpublished text dating back to 1940 – have been collected in the appendix of the book. “Guttuso’s creativity” wrote Brandi “exhales from the leaves of a fantasy that kindles with the slightest thing, a fantasy that of a simple piece of wastepaper, a dead branch, an empty cage, suddenly becomes a symbol, an enchanted object, almost a charism”.