Prospectus voor: Dante Alighieri, Le rime per la donna Pietra, 1965 1965

This prospectus for Dante Alighieri’s ‘Le rime per la donna Pietra’ was made in 1965, and by an anonymous artist. Immediately, my eye is drawn to the delicate linework of the two framed images, like a whisper of ink on paper, it feels like a love letter to the art of printing. There’s something so satisfying about the texture of the paper; you can almost feel the fibers, and the way the ink sits just so on its surface. The artist, or printer, really seems to celebrate the materiality of the book, and how that adds to the feeling of the work. Look at the almost brutalist design of the text. It’s as if each letter was hewn out of stone. That contrast is so crucial to the whole piece. It’s a bit like how Jasper Johns plays with text and image in his lithographs. We often think about art as something very separate from writing, but the artist brings the two into dialogue, suggesting meaning resides in the interplay between the two.