For more than 30 years, Mauro Morandi has been the sole inhabitant of a beautiful island in the Mediterranean Sea.He hoped to make it his life-long home, but that is now under threat.
After two Italian volunteers used a 3-D printer to manufacture a desperately needed ventilator component for those stricken by the coronavirus, the medical company with the patent for the device threatened to sue—even as the printed valves saved at least 10 people’s lives in a hospital in the northern Italian city of Brescia.
by Gino De Dominicis
INTRO:
At first glance you may be forgiven for thinking these images to have sprung from some hitherto unknown corner of the Cubist movement, but these remarkably prescient etchings are in fact the creation of an artist working a whole three centuries earlier. In 1624, Giovanni Battista Bracelli — an Italian engraver and painter working in Florence — produced an extraordinary book of prints titled Bizzarie di Varie Figure (Oddities of various figures). Its forty-seven plates show a variety of human figures mainly interacting in pairs, their bodily forms composed of a range of objects, mostly abstract – cubes, interlocking rings, and squares — but also such things as rackets, screws, braided hair, and the natural forms of trees.
The term cartoon is derived from the Italian word cartone which means a large sheet of paper. A cartoon is a full size and usually detailed preparation on paper for a painting (in fresco, on canvas or on panel) or a tapestry.
