Piero Manzoni was one of the most radically inventive artists of the twentieth century whose work continues to challenge the definitions of artistic sovereignty and virtuosity to this day.

Immediately upon his death in 1963 at the age of thirty, Piero Manzoni’s reputation as a provocateur and wild child preceded him, with his most subversive work, Artist’s Shit, 1961, elevating him to cult status. But what actually came before, and lay behind those thirty grams of pure artistic output? Flaminio Gualdoni sets out to explore exactly that in this biography that traces the guiding themes of Manzoni’s works, lending order to a jumble of hitherto fragmented materials and setting aside any apocryphal hypotheses.

About The Author

Flaminio Gualdoni is an art historian and critic. Since 1980 he has taught history of art in the Accademia delle Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, and he has had a lengthy career as director of museums and galleries (Galleria Civica di Modena, Musei Civici di Varese, and Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro). In 2011 with Luca Lampo he created the Atlas of Italian Art for the web, www.atlantedellarteitaliana.it. Peter Benson Miller is an art historian and curator. He was most recently the arts director of the American Academy in Rome. Marguerite Shore is a translator, working from Italian into English, specializing in art-related texts. She works with art institutions and publishers throughout the United States and Europe.