‘il giorno in cui il disegno statisco deiventera` il corpo dell’arte, averra’ il terzo paradiso:

                                                                                                          Michelangelo Pistoletto

 

 

 

An essay on the first definition of the body  as we know it,  set out by the Hellenistics in  a critical reaction to the transcendent formalism of Plato and Aristotle.

The reverse ontology begins with stones, then plants, other animals and humans. It is a definition which determines virtuous social and political interaction, and which is soma-centric, and not-anthropocentric.

From Thales’ analogy of the earth floating in water, to the conception of man as moving within a square and a circle, we arrive at modernity through Leonardo’s explosion of the anthropocentric worldview, through Albrecht Durer’s theory of proportions, to Michelangelo Pistolletto’s third paradise in which the ultimate work of art is man embraced by the body-social, what he calls the ‘statistical economic drawing’.