Marco
Rinaldi
Office hours: Wednesday 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm (provisional timetable).
THREE-YEAR PROGRAMME – Term 1, Academic Year 2025/2026
The course aims to trace the development of the decorative and industrial arts and the transformation of the aesthetic, methodological and technical approaches that, over the course of the 20th century, led to the definition of modern design, understood in the broadest sense as a culture of design with an Enlightenment-inspired and progressive ethos, aimed at active intervention – whether reformist or revolutionary, educational or disruptive, but always highly experimental – in favour of an aesthetic transformation of society.
Starting with the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 and the ensuing debate on the relationship between art and industry, and spanning seminal experiences such as those of Morris and the Arts & Crafts movement, Dresser, Thonet production and Shaker furniture, Art Nouveau, the Wiener Werkstätte and the Deutsche Werkbund, the artistic avant-gardes, the 1925 Paris Exhibition of Decorative Arts, the Bauhaus and Rationalism, Supported by increasing industrialisation, design has, to a certain extent, expressed a culture and ideology of modernity that has permeated multiple spheres (social, political, aesthetic, communicative) and disciplinary fields (standardised design applied to the smallest scale of the object as well as to the architectural, including architecture, urban planning and the environment, and the methodological extension to sectors such as the layout of exhibition spaces, advertising graphics and fashion), within an ongoing relationship between aesthetic research, technology and industry.
In reality, the aporias and ambiguities of what would become an independent design and creative sector after the Second World War would emerge with force in the 1960s, leading to the postmodern and post-industrial era: individual creativity and functionalist objectivity, craftsmanship and mass production, and the democratic notion of utilitarian beauty versus elitist luxury would once again stand as opposing and unresolved poles, further complicated by new issues such as globalisation, environmental sustainability and the scarcity of energy resources.
– Gabriella D’Amato, Storia del design, Bruno Mondadori, Milan 2005 (or later editions).
– Maurizio Vitta, Il progetto della bellezza. Il design fra arte e tecnica dal 1851 a oggi, Einaudi, Turin 2011.
– Marco Rinaldi, Italian Still Life, Italian Lifestyle: lo sguardo degli oggetti, in Natura morta: rappresentazione dell’oggetto, oggetto come rappresentazione, edited by Costanza Barbieri and Dalma Frascarelli (proceedings of the international research conference, Naples, Academy of Fine Arts, 11–12 December 2008), Arte’m, Naples 2010, pp. 145–150 (PDF).
– Marco Rinaldi, Redesign, ovvero la metempsicosi degli oggetti, in ‘Zeusi – Linguaggi contemporanei di sempre’, Vol. 5, No. 7, June 2018, pp. 19–27 (PDF).
– Marco Rinaldi, Il disagio della ragione: le eredità del Bauhaus, in ‘Zeusi – Linguaggi contemporanei di sempre’, Naples, VI, no. 11/12, January 2021, pp. 34–43 (PDF).
For the images projected during the lectures, the PowerPoint presentations will also be provided and form an integral part of the exam.
THREE-YEAR PROGRAMME – Term 1, Academic Year 2025/2026
From Romanticism to the Avant-Garde
The programme involves the study of a historical period spanning more than a century of profound changes, radical upheavals, dramatic conflicts, and social and political transformations, as well as technological and scientific innovations that have continually challenged humanity’s – and, consequently, the artist’s – view of the world.
It is precisely this historical background that is essential for fully understanding the transformations of artistic languages from Romanticism to the 1920s and 1930s, a period during which art consistently proved to be a sensitive barometer of the changes taking place.
The dialectical relationship between text and context, between visual document and historical and cultural background, will thus be addressed through the interpretation and analysis of the work, identifying those formal, linguistic and iconological elements which, as vehicles of the specific ideological content of an artist and an era, constitute a poetics.
– One textbook of the student’s choice.
The PowerPoint presentations shown in lectures also form an integral part of the exam.
TWO-YEAR programme – Term 1, 2025/2026 academic year
On landscape
Landscape painting, which began to take shape as an independent genre in the seventeenth century, albeit less prestigious than history painting or portraiture, underwent tremendous development over the course of the nineteenth century.
It was at this point in history, a period of profound transformation brought about by the Second Industrial Revolution, that painters began to closely observe nature, which still represented a world in stark contrast to the urban world, but which was on the verge of being affected by gradual anthropisation.
Landscape became the genre through which painting underwent substantial, if not radical, changes in its language, following a trajectory that led from the picturesque and the sublime of Romantic inspiration to an increasingly realistic depiction of the natural world.
The advent of photography would create new dynamics in this regard, while the concept of landscape expanded beyond its realistic representations to encompass a subjectivization that, throughout the 20th century and continuing to the present day, has enabled a broadening of its interpretative boundaries, impacting and continuing to impact fields such as design, architecture and cinema.
– A textbook of the student’s choice covering the period in question, i.e., from Romanticism to the present day.
– Kenneth Clark, Landscape in Art, Abscondita, Milan 2022.
– A text to be agreed upon, on a topic of interest to the student, or alternatively, an in-depth written essay.
The projected images included in the PowerPoint presentation and the analyses carried out during lectures form an integral part of the exam syllabus.