Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge and thank Bocconi University in Milan for the research funds, which have allowed me to complete the writing of this book.
I am grateful to all those with whom I have discussed the issue of the provenance of art throughout these years, including the students who attended my courses and seminars.
I wish to thank Hans-Christian Günther, who, in his role as editor-in-chief of the Brill series “Studies on the Interaction of Art, Thought and Power”, endorsed the publication of this book, showing a sincere interest in my meditations on art.
I am deeply grateful to François Fédier, who, in the early 90s of the last century, encouraged me to approach and study Cézanne’s art and his pictorial thinking, as well as to Maurizio Borghi, who in 2014 invited me to consider the idea of translating my Italian writings on the philosophy of art into English. Without their stimulus, this book would never have been conceived.
I am very grateful to Bridget Pupillo, who carried out the very first draft of the translation from the Italian originals with extreme skilfulness. In this manner, I had at my disposal a text for the subsequent necessary in-depth hermeneutical analyses and refinements, and for the extensive study of my phenomenological coinages in English.
I thank Ivo De Gennaro who, in attentively following the evolution of this study, was generous with his advice and decisive suggestions. His book The Weirdness of Being (Routledge, 2014) was a firm reference point for me, also for the English rendering of some crucial phenomenological key-concepts. The long scientific dialogue with De Gennaro, which has persisted for almost thirty years, has always been of great help to me in my philosophical research.
I wish to thank Beatrice Gavazza, with whom I discussed some passages of the Greek texts and some points in relation to etymological and glottological issues, all of which were to the study’s great benefit. I also thank Beatrice for her revision of and contribution to footnote 332, p. 251.
I am very thankful to Stephanie Parsley, from whom I received suggestions, advice and brilliant solutions—all on a strictly linguistic level and on that of style—by dint of which the text could reach its final version. In a certain sense, this book is also her work, for the dedication, passion, intelligence, generosity and kindness she showed during our long and intense collaboration.
Of course, errors, inadequacies and shortcomings remain my responsibility.
Finally, I would like to express special appreciation to Fenja Schulz and Christina Sargent of Brill for their kind support in the publication of this monograph.
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The thought-path attempted herein constitutes part of the theoretical work that I have articulated through various previous essays and monographs, references to which can be found in the Bibliography at the end of the book.
It could never have been conceived and elaborated without the “hermeneutical abode” and “phenomenological style” that characterise Martin Heidegger’s project of the scope of being—a project he developed in his broad, open and profound Denkweg.