Sul paragone delle arti nella rivista "Civiltà delle macchine". La direzione di Leonardo Sinisgalli (1953-1958)

This thesis concerns the journal «Civiltà delle macchine», published by the industrial group Finmeccanica, specifically during the editorial years of the poet and engineer Leonardo Sinisgalli, between 1953 and 1958. Shaped by overcoming the dichotomy between scientific knowledge and liberal arts, «Civiltà delle macchine» goes beyond the traditional boundaries of an house organ, coming up as a significant cultural project and innovative publishing product: the articles, that can often be considered as real essays, debate a wide spectrum of topics. Our research, looking further into the magazine «Pirelli», that had also resulted from the professional partnership between Sinisgalli and the manager Giuseppe Eugenio Luraghi, assumes that the dialogue between science and the humanities meets in «Civiltà delle macchine» the presence of literature and art. Our attention focuses on the articles related to literature and visual arts as well as on the relationship between written texts and images. The multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of «Civiltà delle macchine» and the specific perspective chosen for our analysis required us to use flexible and composite methodological approaches, in order to develop the in-depth investigations and the contributions that the thesis aims to offer to the specialized studies. At the heart of the first chapter we develop themes concerning the aegis of Leonardo da Vinci and the occurrences of analogy in the journal; connected to the analogy is the matter of the Baroque, in the second chapter. This second chapter is mainly devoted to some key moments of Sinisgalli’s intellectual life preceding «Civiltà delle macchine» ‒ the consequences of which are reflected in the editorial line of the journal ‒ from the acquisition of the poetics of Hermeticism to the advertising language designed for Olivetti company. The third chapter talks over the editorial line of the journal, by referring to an idea of polytechnic e inclusive literature; the fourth one, through the systematic interpretation of written texts, images and their relationship, deal with the fundamental topics in «Civiltà delle macchine»: machines, machines and human beings, factories, as they are represented and interpreted by writers and artists. We do deduce critical considerations on the poetics and aesthetics involved with mechanical civilization in the Fifties and on the links with the historical avant-garde, particularly with Futurism.