Why those who work with images should read Figures by Riccardo Falcinelli

Let's start by saying what Figure is an exceptional, perhaps epochal book. We can say it without hesitation because Riccardo Falcinelli's is not a simple essay. It's much more.

The author takes us by the hand through the history of art passing from cave paintings, to the Renaissance, up to TV series, with an unsettling fluidity, showing us how everything is connected.

This book is not an essay on art history (even if over 400 works are illustrated inside), rather the author, with aclean and tidy layout, purposely omits all image captions. He writes “before being examples of art, the works are considered as evidence of mechanisms and ways of reasoning”. Why Falcinelli does not want to tell us the meaning of a painting, or the meaning of a frame from a Kubrick film: he wants to explain to us how images work.

Figures by Riccardo Falcinelli answers questions we have probably never asked ourselves:

• What do a still life by Morandi and a photo of McDonald's have in common?
• Why have some paintings become so famous?
• Why does one photograph capture us more than another?
• What are the mechanisms behind a figure?

Anyone who works in graphics, film, photography and the visual arts should definitely read it Figures.

This book, which follows the publication of Cromorama. How color has changed our gaze (That we reviewed here) is a volume that should rightfully be included among the textbooks of graphics schools and art institutes. A work so engaging that it can captivate anyone, because all of us - whether we like it or not - are immersed in the world of images and images.

In 2016 we played with the paintings of the most famous musicians with the provocative campaign Who invented Music. Because as Salvador Dalì said “Art is made to disturb, science to reassure.“

You can listen to Riccardo Falcinelli talk about creativity in this TEDx from 2014

Riccardo Falcinelli he is a visual designer and teaches at the ISIA Faculty of Design in Rome. Published:

• Making books, Rome, minimum fax, 2011.
• Watch. Think. To design, Alternative Press & Graffiti, 2011.
• Portable criticism of visual design. From Gutenberg to social networks, Einaudi, 2014
• Cromorama. How color has changed our gaze, Einaudi, 2017
• Figures. How images work from the Renaissance to Instagram, Einaudi, 2020