This book is dedicated to the discovery of a combined project by Vincenzo Agnetti and Paolo Scheggi that remained unfinished due to Scheggi’s untimely death in 1971. The reproduction of the preparatory sketches discovered in the two archives was carried out by the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica di Roma, using a photocalcographic process to create extremely faithful, high quality copies.
The texts written by Cosima Scheggi and Germana Agnetti, daughters of the two great artists, and directors of the respective archives, describe the moment of maximum collaboration between these two leading figures in contemporary Italian art, focussing on the coherence of their forms of expression and research until their peak, with their project, Il Tempio. La nascita dell’Eidos (The Temple. Birth of Eidos).
This affinity is also described in the interesting articles written by Ilaria Bignotti and Bruno Corà, expert authorities on the works of Agnetti and Scheggi.
The concept was to create a sacred place, a temple, to contain linguistic objects representing primary forms of community, subjectivity and power, linked with the artistic and theoretical research the two artists were conducting at the time.
Agnetti died 10 years after his friend and colleague. His research followed a new route but remained closely linked with that idea born in 1968, that “any work, any artistic object, any gesture is a critical reminder of reality and our existence”.