From the beginning of his artistic career Giulio Paolini has placed himself at the end of a trajectory that starts with the structure of the view in the desexualized, monocular glance of Brunelleschian perspective, and runs through what is commonly defined as the Modern era. (One collage in this show, La cosa stessa [The thing itself, 1984), seemed to relate directly to the second of Bruneileschi’s lost tavolette.) This trajectory was challenged by 19th-century mannerism (Neoclassicism, Romanticism, the Nazarene and Pre-Haphaelite groups, Realism, and Symbolism), broken by Impressionism, and