In honor of the invitation extended to Umberto Eco, who has chosen as his theme “The Vertigo of Lists”, the Louvre presents an exhibition of graphic works, both ancient and contemporary. “Mille e tre” brings to mind Leporello’s well-known listing of Don Giovanni’s conquests in Mozart’s opera. In publishing, a “leporello” now refers to a catalogue in the form of a fold-out pamphlet.
Submitted by Bija Knowles on Thu, 10/29/2009 - 10:14
Everyone makes them (some of us more compulsively than others): scribbled on post-it notes, or kept mentally in our imaginations – we all make lists. And we're not the only ones either; lists have been around for a long time – possibly since the first writing systems and certainly since Sumerian scribes began to keep accounts in the fourth millennium BC in Mesopotamia. So what is it about the beauty of a list – its numerical order, hierarchy, completeness – that makes them such a part of how we like to categorise, order and understand the world?
