Old as Stone, Hard as Rock: of Humans and War
An Italian illustrator set out to draw wartime poets, could not shake the images, and made a wordless book in which colour and sequence carry what language dropped.
A wordless book about war, painted by an Italian illustrator who set out to illustrate wartime poets and found he could not shake the images. What remains is sequence and colour doing the work that language failed at. Sanna works in washes that bleed into one another, so the reader supplies the narrative, which is the point: the book refuses to tell you what to feel about any of it.
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Maria Popova
But as Sanna tried to paint the work of his favorite wartime poets, he found himself unable to shake off the mental images of all that ruin, the emotional atmosphere of all that grief. In the author’s note to what became Old as Stone, Hard as Rock: of Humans and War (public library) — his extraordinary wordless reckoning with humanity and war — he echoes artist Ann Hamilton’s moving manifesto “Making Not Knowing” and writes:
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