Pignotti's manuscripts and Italian visual poetry on display at BNCF

From May 8 to July 29, 2025, the Dante Room of the National Central Library in Florence will host a major exhibition of contemporary Italian poetry and art. Entitled Originals. “The Manuscripts of Today’s Poets” and Verbo-Visual Poetics in Italy, the exhibition was created with the aim of enhancing the Lamberto Pignotti Fund, recently acquired by the same Library, and to offer an articulate reflection on the relationship between writing and image through the verbo-visual poetics developed in Italy since the Second World War.

The beating heart of the exhibition is the Pignotti Fund, an important collection of materials belonging to Lamberto Pignotti (Florence, 1926), a key figure in Italian visual poetry. Pignotti was not only a poet and artist, but also a critic, theorist and protagonist of numerous seasons of the Italian cultural avant-garde. His activity spanned the second half of the twentieth century in a dense web of artistic experiences, intellectual collaborations and experiments that profoundly marked the country’s literary and visual landscape.

The exhibition itinerary takes its starting point from the exhibition curated by Pignotti himself in 1979, Originali, initially held at the Biblioteca comunale centrale di Firenze (now Biblioteca delle Oblate) and later presented in Rome, in the rooms of Palazzo Braschi, under the title Nascita della poesia. Those exhibitions were intended to investigate the “writing” of poets not only as a verbal expression but also as a visual construction. It is a reflection that today returns to the present day, thanks to the critical reinterpretation of the works presented on that occasion and the juxtaposition with other materials from the National Library’s collection.

The exhibition therefore offers a double look: on the one hand, the manuscripts and works sent to Pignotti in 1979 and later, true original testimonies of the poetic and artistic genesis; on the other hand, a selection of twenty artist’s books from the Library’s Artist’s Fund, largely made up of Loriano Bertini’s collection, and from the Artist’s Book Documentation Fund. These works ideally dialogue with Pignotti’s materials, strengthening the link between text and image and underscoring the hybrid and multidisciplinary nature of verb-visual poetry.

The Pignotti Fund comprises a vast body of documentation, articulated in materials covering an extended chronological span from the post-World War II period to more recent years. There are manuscripts and typescripts of poems, essays and articles, as well as photographs, letters, publishing contracts, notes for university lectures, and preparatory materials for publications and conferences. Particularly relevant is the correspondence, which includes epistolary exchanges with leading Italian and international artists and poets of the second half of the 20th century, making the collection a privileged observatory on the cultural dynamics of those years.

Prominent among the documents on display are annotations, erasures, remakes, variants and notes in the margins that testify to the poet-artist’s creative process, revealing how writing is not only a vehicle of meaning but also a visual object in itself. It is precisely on this boundary between word and image that the poetics of visual poetry is played out, of which Pignotti was a pioneer beginning in the 1950s, when he began to reflect on the relationship between linear poetry and images drawn from the emerging mass culture.

Decisive in those years was his meeting with Eugenio Miccini, from which a partnership was born that led to the founding of Gruppo 70, the movement that was the first in Italy to combine literary experimentation and visual artistic research. Pignotti was also an active part of Gruppo 63 and the International Group of Visual Poetry, collaborating with avant-garde magazines and taking part in cultural initiatives that helped define the artistic identity of Italy’s second twentieth century.

The interest of the National Central Library of Florence in Pignotti’s work is in line with the enhancement of documentary collections dedicated to poetry and contemporary art. Indeed, the Library has the most important collection of artists’ books in Italy, and the acquisition of the Pignotti Fund represents a further enrichment in this direction. The fund, declared of particularly important historical interest by the Lazio Archival and Bibliographic Superintendence in 2022, was donated to the Library in 2023 and deposited at the institution in early 2024.

The exhibition, curated by Giovanna Lambroni and David Speranzi, offers the public the opportunity to take a close look at the process of poetic creation in all its facets. Each document is a piece that tells not only the stylistic evolution of an author, but also the cultural context in which he or she operated, the intellectual networks he or she built, and the artistic and theoretical battles he or she faced. One section of the exhibition is devoted precisely to the dialogue between the original 1979 manuscripts and the verbo-visual works that share their spirit, showing how words can be transformed into images and how images, in turn, can convey poetic content.

The connection between visual poetry and the artist’s book, highlighted by the comparison of materials from the Pignotti Fund and those from the Library’s collection, represents a further level of interpretation of the entire exhibition. The book, in this perspective, is not only a support for texts but also an aesthetic object, a field of experimentation and a vehicle for a poetics that feeds on contaminations between languages.

The opening is scheduled for Thursday, May 8, at 4 p.m., at the Dante Room of the National Central Library in Florence. The exhibition will be open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. It will be closed on holidays. The project is supported by PAC2024 - Plan for Contemporary Art, promoted by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.

Pignotti's manuscripts and Italian visual poetry on display at BNCF

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