Between 1970 and 1971, Italian artists Paolo Scheggi and Vincenzo Agnetti worked together on a project they called The Temple. Birth of Eidos. Due to Scheggi’s untimely death in 1971 at the age of 31, the project remained unfinished. These previously unpublished preparatory sketches, drawings, and notes, which were shown at the Museo Novecento in Florence, are examined in essays by Ilaria Bignotti and Bruno Corà and texts by Germana Agnetti and Cosima Scheggi, daughters of the two artists and directors of their respective archives. The concept of the project was to create a sacred place, a temple, to contain linguistic objects representing primary forms of community, subjectivity and power, linking these with the artistic and theoretical research the two artists were conducting at the time.

Agnetti died 10 years after his friend and colleague. His research followed a new route but remained closely linked with that idea born in 1968, that “any work, any artistic object, any gesture is a critical reminder of reality and our existence”. (Germana Agnetti).