Fontana spent from 1946 to 1958 working from a manifesto toward one gesture: a blade drawn once through a painted canvas. His Milan neon arabesque and auction record show how far the idea travelled.
milan
The twenty-one-year job that gave back an honest ruin
Leonardo’s experimental technique made The Last Supper start decaying almost at once. A 1978–1999 restoration stripped away centuries of repainting, dividing critics between an authentic wreck and a lost masterpiece.
Gio Ponti and the tower too thin to be a slab
Gio Ponti edited Domus for four decades and, with the engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, gave Milan a tapered 127-metre tower for Pirelli in 1960 that survived a 2002 aircraft strike and remains the city’s most recognisable skyscraper.
How a Paris newspaper page launched Italian Futurism
Marinetti’s 1909 manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro had no art to back it up. Boccioni’s 1913 bronze, later cast on a euro coin, gave the movement its defining image.
Fifty years on, Milan’s Grande Brera is finally complete
Palazzo Citterio opened in December 2024, joining the Pinacoteca di Brera’s Napoleonic old-master collection to modern works once meant for a James Stirling design abandoned in the 1990s.