Abstract
The research deals with the phenomenon of visual knowledge circulation, adopting the book The Story of Art by E. H. Gombrich (London 1950) as an emblematic case study. The book is paradigmatic in terms of representing the history of the Western imagination and because its educational role in art and visual culture has taken on a global reach, with over eight million copies circulating in more than thirty languages. The experimental and qualitative nature of the inquiry incorporates mobility within the realm of representational and visual art, following a series of trajectories that involve the book’s journey through local networks and ordinary landscapes along paths that evolve and deviate based on the encounters that occur throughout the book’s circulation. The research proposes to approach the book with a material and interactional mobility framework. Through ethnographic observation, semi-structured dialogues, focus groups and visual apparatus, the investigation seeks to follow some trajectories of the global and local circulation of the cultural artefact to collect traces of its reception, transmission and translation within the ordinary contexts in which it is distributed. On the one hand, the mobility framework is operational as it allows for exploring the physical movements of different versions of the book in heterogeneous contexts; on the other hand, it is interpretative of the degrees of permeability of a socio-cultural context concerning the imagery promoted by the book. In particular, mapping some of the artefact’s circulation processes in ordinary contexts reveals different degrees of impurity of the paradigmatic imagery. The thesis attempts to experiment with how a learning-by-moving approach to cultural artefacts and their constitutive images can reveal latent knowledge capable of significantly contributing to representational literacy.