Carlo Maria Mariani’s recent exhibition consisted of two distinct parts. The first showed 11 paintings from 1986, identical in format, that portray American and Italian protagonists of “high art” of recent decades (all of them male), with the exception of the eleventh work, which is a classical allegory that served as the grand finale and the conceptual nucleus of the installation. For this group of paintings Mariani chose to depict eight European artists (Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Mimmo Paladino, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, and a double portrait of himself and the 19th-century