La pietra focaia e il pianale: Leo Steinberg, Jasper Johns e Robert Rauschenberg

Despite the similarities, the two papers devoted by Leo Steinberg respectively to Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg differ in how they explain the meaning of everyday things in the works of the two artists: a metaphor of «human absence» in Johns, for Rauschenberg the object is a fragment of modern reality placed on a horizontal surface, no longer related to the vertical and transparent «window», which Leon Battista Alberti considered as an analog of painting. Rauschenberg’s picture plane is opaque, similar to the flatbed of the typographic press, where images, letters, printed paper, and objects are assembled. Steinberg asks how, in this new situation, the work and the space involved in it are addressed to the eye, the body, and the imagination of the beholder.