POETRY IMAGE IMAGINATION A Journey through the Artists’ Books by Francesca Diano “All arts aim to the word, but the word to silence.” Carlo Diano The idea for this talk was inspired by Gilberto Rolla’s Casket Books (Libri Scrigno in Italian), objects d’art where the different techniques employed contribute to create unique works of very fine craftsmanship and suggestions. While I was exploring them, trying to decode the artist’s intentions and aims, I began reflecting on how often writing, sacred texts, literature, especially poetry, and visual arts, have walked side by side, enhancing each other or, better still, reciprocally highlighting some hidden sides and meanings. And, since their origin, books offered a perfect ground for this beautiful love dance. We can go very far back in history and retrace illustrated books, as soon as something like what we now consider to be a book made its appearance in Western cultures. Before that, as far as we know, papyrus scrolls bore also images, usually of gods or connected to the divine, like the Egyptian Book of Dead. But, when books with vellum pages began to appear, their rarity, their preciousness and their extreme value, not just as fine objects, but for their holy content, required an adequate decoration to celebrate God’s glory. Let’s just think of the illuminated manuscripts, making their first appearance during the early Middle Ages: Gospels, Bibles, Psalters, Books of Hours and especially the Book of Kells. But, before talking about that, let’s see what Rolla’s Casket Books are and how they originated. Gilberto Rolla is a renowned architect with a love for painting and drawing. In his lifelong activity, while restoring old or ancient buildings, he often happened to find a number of old books that had been left behind, perhaps because they were judged of little or no value after they had been read, or because they had been forgotten or discarded. But he has also rescued from the garbage plastic bags full of books that had been thrown away, whose sad final destiny was to be sent for pulping. Loving everything connected to culture and knowledge – he had founded the International Book Centre in Pontremoli – he couldn’t help sparing them a sad, inglorious end and he started bringing them home. All book lovers feel that a book is a living thing, an entity, so they cringe at the idea of destroying a book, even an old and battered one. As the artist Brian Dettmer, who creates beautiful, amazing 1