Luca Nannipieri releases new book on Picasso’s Guernica

Art historian Luca Nannipieri has released a new book titled ‘La Guernica di Picasso. Ascesa e oblio di un classico’ (Picasso’s Guernica: Rise and Oblivion of a Classic), published by Castelvecchi.

The work uses the 1974 act of vandalism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York—where an individual sprayed the phrase ‘Kill lies all’ onto the painting—as a starting point for a broader investigation. Rather than a standard history of the masterpiece, the book explores the symbolic power of images, the anthropology of the sacred, and why certain works are consecrated as classics while others fade into obscurity.

Spanning 28 chapters and featuring extensive iconographic material, the essay examines the cycle of veneration, consumption, and eventual forgetting that civilizations subject to their icons. Nannipieri challenges the notion of the classic as an eternally stable entity, suggesting that even absolute masterpieces are subject to shifts in cultural relevance.