Francesco Cangiullo, in a complex pun, animated letters into students climbing the steps of the Faculty of Letters, the stairs becoming the classical stairs of learning, the gradus ad Parnassum…
In his best-known work, drawn in 1915 but published four years later, Cangiullo whimsically depicts a lively evening at the variety theater in his hometown of Naples in which the dancers, singers, acrobats, and comedians are composed of letters, numbers, and mathematical signs. This lyrical narrative, a pictorial interpretation of Marinetti’s words-in-freedom is reproduced on the screens above…