This volume consists of three parts.
The first contains three chapters devoted to Umberto Boccioni and his “idea of Futurism”, Paul Cézanne and his experience of sunlight, and Vincent van Gogh and his pictorial inhabiting within the Mistral wind.
The second and most extensive part (divided into three partitions) is dedicated to the Greek-Athenaic sense of art and the implications and consequences that such a sense entails regarding the issue and question of artistry as a crucial but enigmatic gift of human dwelling.
The third and shortest part unravels in the form of an epilogue and presents a concise analysis of the relationship between art and nature, starting with the Aristotelian dictum
Through their intimate unity, of which the reader will only become truly aware at the end of his or her study, the three parts thus constitute an attempt to meditate on art in light of its origin—namely, with the thinking eye turned towards (i.e. in the direction leading to) its pro-vening—or, as we say, in the towardness of its provenance.*
All texts were originally conceived, written and published in Italian. Their translation offered me the opportunity to extensively rework and profoundly revise them—above all, with regard to the election of words—in order to attain a form, configuration and style suitable to the “encounter” between the needs of philosophical analysis and the “native colours” of the English idiom. So, to all intents and purposes, the present book constitutes a new and enlarged edition of the original works.
The three chapters of the first part stem from three essays, entitled “Spazio tempo luce (Il Futurismo di Boccioni)”, “Le grand magicien” and “La frugalità di van Gogh”, respectively. The second and third parts stem from a monograph entitled La provenienza dell’arte (Atena e l’enigma), whose thought-path sparked from the Italian translation, made in collaboration with Ivo De Gennaro, of the conference talk entitled “Die Herkunft der Kunst und die Bestimmung des Denkens” that Martin Heidegger presented on 4 August 1967 at the Academy of the Arts and Sciences in Athens.**
Due to its phenomenological style—which required a careful, coherent and well-argued choice of words—the treatise is preceded and introduced by a Lexicon in which some of the guide-words referred to over the course of the analysis (such as the aforementioned term “towardness”) are presented and elucidated.
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A note to the reader. In the various translations of Italian, German and Greek quoted passages, I offer explanatory remarks within square brackets, whereas angle brackets enclose additions that are to be read as integral to the text.
In the term “towardness”, we have to hear the traits of nearness and conceivableness, of advent and promise, of “vagisness” (see below elucidation #10 in the Lexicon).
See Martin Heidegger, ‘Die Herkunft der Kunst und die Bestimmung des Denkens’, in Denkerfahrungen, ed. Hermann Heidegger (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983), 135–60. The Italian translation was published with the title ‘La provenienza dell’arte e l’intonatura del pensiero’ in the online journal eudia, 5 (2011) (