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At first, my studies concerned the painting. With a degree thesis about the QUOTE and the SOURCES in the painting of the Eighties. The study included the different groups, different especially for theirs ways of return to painting and to figuration, in particular: Transavanguardia, Nuovi Nuovi and Anancronisti. The title was Art and History of Art. The quote in the painting of the Eighties It was the beginning of my interests in the philological investigation of the iconographies of contemporary art, in other words of my scientific method. During the specialization at the Udine University, I studied the SCULPTURE from the end of the 19th century to the first half of the 20th century. I started the Catalog of Ercole Drei’s sculptures. It was the result of a reorganization of the Drei’s archive, conserved at La Quadriennale. The catalog included only the works documented by photographs of the time. It was a precise choice to work only on materials of archive, and the photographic archive in particular. The catalog evidences a complex production, whit multiples and derivations, sculptures in bronze, marble and plaster (sometime proposed in different sizes, for commercial purposes) The PhD research concerned Roman painting of the Sixties, and began from the reorganization of La Tartaruga Gallery’s Archive. La Tartaruga, was the subject of some of my essays. First of all, the one about the collaboration between the gallery owner Plinio and the collector Franchetti. Franchetti brought, for the first time, the works of the American artists Kline and Rothko, for example, in Rome at La Tartaruga in the late 1950s. The PhD thesis directed the investigation to two directions: the first, concerned the visual sources of the young roman artists, Festa and Angeli in particular but also Schifano, the triad of new generation of roman artist; the second, concerned the reconstruction of the context and the history of Roman private galleries. This broad investigation about the galleries, continued during my participation at the research group of the PRIN 2015: Modern art exhibitions in private galleries in Italy: the two crucial decades from 1960 to 1980 About his topic, I spoke during the conference at SNP and at moment, I’m writing an essay that looks into some of the most significant editorial products of the roman galleries, such as Bulletins, catalogs, posters and brochures. The editorial projects are discussed by comparing the publications of some well-known roman galleries. The aim is to understand, not only the editorial strategies that gallery owners have been utilizing since the end of the 1950’s, but also the dynamics of publication and the uses of these minor editions - voice of militant critics - which quickly obtained the status of document and literary source. The PhD thesis concerned Roman painting in the period from 1955 to 1968. In other words, from the After Informal to the Return to figuration through an image mediated by the language of the media society. But also, I can say from the After informal to Arte Povera, highlighting the continuous use of matter. The models of Burri, Dorazio, Rothko and Matta were discussed, identifying since the beginning, especially in Festa, interests connected not only to the matter but also to the color-light and consequently to the color-field and to the mechanisms of vision and perception. After these first results, I also read the arrival of Festa at the figuration, in 1963, in new terms. I tried to exceed the critic reading that compared Festa to Newdada or Pop Art and I connected him to the Italian figurative tradition, contaminated whit his scientific interests and his reflections on visual perception. In this reflection, which Festa shared with his brother Francesco Lo Savio, he found a reference in the book Art and Visual Perception by Rudolph Arheim. These results were possible by analyzing 200 drawings and sketches by Tano Festa who, unlike his finished works, positioned his reflection between Mondrian and Arheim, between Rothko and Dorazio. Consequently, the contrast between Gestalt and Object Realism, proposed by Argan at the Biennale in San Marino in 1963, turned out to be less marked. To this topic I devoted the essay about Porta Rossa by Tano Festa in which I analyze his relationship with Rothko and Dorazio but also with the most recent painting, even the American painting, that used with scientific and not-scientific intentions, the color-light. Another result was achieved in the essay about the relationship between Festa and Michelangelo’s iconographies in 1964. It was the year of Michelangelo’s celebrations, and Festa combined the suggestions of Michelangelo’s iconographies - proposed through copies, films and photos at the exhibition at Palazzo delle Esposizioni - whit his reflection on patterns published by Arheim. Methodologically, it was a philological study of the image. By image, I refer as much to the figurative image as to the monochrome surface. In fact, the attempt was to read a monochrome painting, not as a blank slate in reaction to Informal, but as a figurative work. With the same method I studied the Angeli’s works. I read the veiling in two directions. The first as a filter of vision: for example, in the essay about the artist’s beginnings, I examined the reference to the techniques of photographic development, and also I analyze his sources Joseph Istler and Burri. Burri for the use of the matter, that Angeli transferred in the use of the scraps of nylon hoses. The second, the veiling as a negation of original meanings of political symbols: for example, in the essays that I wrote after the conferences at the HNHA in Paris and the Roman conference both dedicated at relationship between art and memory of fascism. Angeli used the symbols of political and economic power: the swastika, the star inscribed in the half moon of the Algeria’s flag, the papal coats, the hammer and sickle, the Roman she-wolf, and again, the French tricolor and the eagle of American half dollar. On his canvases, the symbols and their values mix, the meanings overlap. But he didn’t use the Fascism’s official symbols directly; he allude in fact Fascism through the symbols of the Roman Empire; or used the acronym S.P.Q.R or the date July 25. He was an actor in Franchina’s Film Morire Gratis in which is the protagonist of a journey from Rome to Paris with a ceramic she-wolf that emits from a radio Mussolini’s speeches. Since the beginning, therefore, the pictorial production of Festa and Angeli revealed interests in the vision that they transferred to the Cinema of artist in 1967. This is the topic of the monograph FRANCO ANGELI and TANO FESTA Painters with the camera, in which I explain how these painters used the camera as if it was a brush. The book begins with the analysis of a Collage in which Angeli and Festa represent themselves with the camera. I reconstruct a dialogue conducted, through the works, with Castellani and Paolini. I refer the desire of the two artists to begin, through the use of the pictorial, photographic or filmic portrait and self portrait, a reflection on the figure of the painter. Therefore they used a film director's tool to reflect on the painter’s profession and his social role. During the scholarship at the Archives de la critique d’art in Rennes, I studied the archive of Pierre Restany, who was the first critic to write about the young Roman generation and monochrome painting. He wrote the presentation of the exhibition Roma 60. The essay on the reenactment of the exhibition “Roma 60” in Turin in 1969, investigates the beginnings of these artists not only Festa and Angeli but also Schifano, Lo Savio and Uncini, the heritage of Burri for his positive use of the matter, but also read the use of the matter as a precedent of the experimentation of Arte Povera. The first methodological attempt was to read Piero Dorazio’s Cartographies as figurative works, although usually explained as abstract painting. The Cartographies are modulated surfaces of wooden painted in white, crossed by lines and circular elements. These surfaces are perceptually subject to the effects of natural or artificial light. The essay analyses the several directions along which Dorazio’s research developed. The Cartographies are interpreted not only in relationship with the works of the masters of Abstractionism from Kandinsky to Vantongerloo, but also within the broad visual context outlined by Dorazio in La Fantasia. Photographic archives: new tools for a history of criticism in the contemporary age. During the research grant I studied the photographic archives of the roman galleries from 1960 to 1980. The geography, as my previous studies, remained linked to Rome but CHANGED METHOD AND AIMS. I was not interested in photography for its visual values or as a visual document of exhibitions. Instead, I was interested in photography as an object and part of a device, the archive, exactly. I studied the archive like a devise in ever changing and increase for accumulation of documents. I investigated the dynamics of growth and accumulation of materials, dynamics frequently random. By definition, in fact, the archive grows randomly and unintentionally, recording, without selection, all activities of its producer, the gallery owner, in this case. I considered the photographic archive as a clump of information and documents in relationship. I studied photography, first of all, as a document with its annotations on the back and not only as an image. I paid particular attention to the photographic proofs because are the testimonies of the photographer’s intentions. I analyzed the intentions of Plinio De Martiis in the essay on the magazine Catalogo, in which the photographer used photography for a personal visual story, unconnected whit the texts.