Collecting, accumulating objects has been a man's business since prehistoric times; but in recent centuries, and even more today, the desire to possess beauty, objects of art, has infected every social strata. The authors, Francesca and Alessandra Molfino, guided by two different disciplines, psychoanalysis and art history, have followed this immense spread of collecting. The parallel itineraries of the book are: on the one hand, a collection of observations on personalities, trends and environments of collecting from the eighteenth to the twentieth century; on the evolution of taste, the relative choices of the market, of connoisseurship, of private installations. On the other, a research on the collector's passions and strategies; on one of the methods that the mind finds to deal with the diversity of others and the unpredictability of destiny. This is what the back cover of "The possession of beauty" tells us, the new goWare ebook that will be presented today at 12 at the Faculty of Medicine and Psychology of the La Sapienza University of Rome
WHO ARE THE AUTHORS – Francesca Molfino had a Freudian psychoanalytic background and, before her untimely death, worked privately with adult patients. Since 1974 she has been an active part of the Feminist Movement, founding the Virginia Woolf Cultural Center (Women's University) together with others. She is the author of essays: on female identity (Abortion as a symptom of femininity, Rome 1990), on women and psychoanalysis (Sabina Spielrein, the patient, Bari 1992), on the mother-daughter relationship (Seduction of the father, seduction of mother, Bari 1995), on erotic transference in psychoanalytic treatment (From love to transference-countertransference and vice versa, Milan 1994), on the application of psychoanalysis to the phenomenon of fashion (The veil. The androgynous in culture, Milan 1991-1992 ).
Alessandra Mottola Molfino graduated in Art History with Giulio Carlo Argan. Since 1973 he has directed the Poldi Pezzoli Museum, for which he has organized innovative cultural activities and numerous exhibitions, often on the decorative arts, including those on lace (1977), on Lombard painting between Zenale and Leonardo (1982), on troubadour miniatures ( 1978), on Italian fashion of the Thirties (1980), on jewels (1986), on Federico Zeri's sculpture collection (1989), on Renaissance art at the court of Leonello and Borso d'Este in Ferrara («Le Muse and the Prince», 1991). Topics of his research in the last ten years are the history of collecting and museology (Il Libro dei Musei, Turin 1992; the monthly museology column in the «Giornale dell'Arte»; specialization courses in the Faculties of Architecture of Milan and Turin ).
