The first encounter with the magic of art took place when he was six years old, thanks to the gift of a box of pastels and a boy's naive attempt to imitate Monet's The Magpie surrounded by snow. Flavio Caroli traces the history of art through his personal biography, stages as a scholar and as a man. To each stage of life corresponds a painting, an artist and a creative season that the author reconstructs and recounts in these pages with charm, erudition and acuity.
At seventeen, a visit to Recanati in the footsteps of Leopardi leads him to the "revelation" of Lorenzo Lotto's Annunciation and its ineffable genius; the most important moment in his first year at university coincides with the inauguration of the Venice Biennale: pop art lands in Europe, it is 1964 and Rauschenberg becomes a new point of reference. In 1972 in the studio of an antiquarian in Ravenna, we witness the chance discovery of a Madonna and Child signed by Lucia Anguissola (sister of the better-known Sofonisba), which will be followed by years of investigation as the work mysteriously disappears. The tour is extensive and full of masterpieces and reflections, from Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson to Pollock's canvases, from Rubens to Savoldo, from Grechetto to
Cézanne, from Caravaggio to Hockney. And the final outcome prefigures an ideal, fascinating, sentimental education of the gaze.