This volume deals with one of the most original and most interesting creative moments in Renato Meneghetti's career: the Radiografie (x-rays). Beginning in the eighties the cycle of Radiografie is the cycle of cycles, because the conquests of each cycle are resumed and become the building blocks of a tower that becomes taller and taller. Nevertheless the Radiografie are not simply a sum total of what has gone before: they are more, incomparably more. Up to 1981 Meneghetti's art possessed that dignity which was common to much Italian Avant-garde painting: it was well executed, curious and interesting, but nothing more to place it above a state of aurea mediocritas. Suddenly, however, there was a break-through in artistic sensitivity, his artistic antennae extended, homed in on death, observed it lucidly. Sharply focused, we could say, he photographed it. Death, like life, is to be found within the body; everything is accomplished within that cage of flesh sustained by bone Meneghetti discovered that the x-ray plate could portray himself as he had never seen before, could take him outside of himself and allow him to investigate inside that other limitless universe: no longer the universe that lies before our eyes, no longer the universe that unfolds in the human mind. Meneghetti transports the x-rayed image onto the coloured canvass. He illuminates or shrouds parts changing the texture of its colours with alcohol. Composed of but a few lines, supported by extremely reduced chromaticity or richly coloured to the point of aestheticism, these Radiografie place their stress on the body, beyond a doubt the most engaging theme of the last century's closing years from Louise Bourgeois to Lucian Freud. Meneghetti uses new means and places us before the issue of health: the mutations of our bodies through disease and through medical science that has gradually come to consider us as guinea pigs; it is not clear to what end. Meneghetti, however, is far from being merely topical': Death's smile echos within the dark cavities of these bodies, in this race that despite all the test-tube sheep of the universe thanks be to God, we are destined to lose. Indeed beyond there is a light of which painting can be the supreme prophesy. (Ludovico Maria Ragghianti) Renato Meneghetti (1947), after his early artistic activity during the sixties which was presented by artists and friends such as Munari, de Chirico and Fontana and a series of competitions and early expositions, interrupted his relations with the art system, bought back almost all his works and now does not loan them except to public institutions and museums. Though he has a preference for painting he does not like exhibiting. *