In the first section, writing intervenes as a sign and signifier within the image. The section begins with Lamberto Pignotti’s admonition (1955–60), written over the sixteenth-century painter Gian Girolamo Savoldo: “don’t let yourself go.” Today, this exhortation appears almost uncannily relevant, in an age of the commodification of even our own image. His voice is echoed by Luca Patella’s Mare firmato [Signed Sea] (1965), which already suggests the desperate need to sign, possess, and make one’s presence in the world visible. That same year, Nanni Balestrini asks, “but does war ever take place?” and demonstrates how art must also engage with the structures of language. Later, in 1972, Vincenzo Agnetti’s Free-Hand Photography series frees itself from the determinism of the camera, shifting attention from recording to the message. The concept becomes embodied in the image. At that point, detail can disappear or blur, as in Ketty La Rocca’s Riduzioni [Reductions] (1974), or be extended and reimagined, as in Cioni Carpi’s landscape Sehs Pass (1977).