The illuminations of the Casin. 132 codex – Rabanus Maurus, De rerum naturis – which was transcribed at Montecassino during the Abbacy of Theobald (1022-1035), served, in 2004, as the source of inspiration for a graphic artwork by Mimmo Paladino (a portfolio composed of 8 impressions, in a total edition of 75 copies divided into 3 series of 25). Mimmo Paladino can be included among the chief exponents of the Transavanguardia movement and of the Italian contemporary artistic culture. The artwork demonstrates the remarkable longevity of an outstanding cycle of medieval illustrations. In the impressions, the dialogue between text and image, and between medieval and contemporary times, is intensified to the point of their becoming merged with each other. In fact, Paladin superimposes his striking images upon serigraphic reproductions of the illuminated pages of the ancient manuscript, in an empathetic fusion. The artist is stimulated by his connection with both Lombard and Beneventan cultures (Paladino was born in Paduli in Central Italy in 1948), but above all by the hermeneutic complexity of the De rerum naturis, in which each realistic figure reveals, behind its outward appearance, a transcendental meaning and a moral lesson. With extraordinary technical proficiency – which combines etching, aquatints, Japanese paper collage, the use of carborundum, the application of copper and silver foils, and flocking with quartz dust and pure gold – Paladino physically intervenes on the pre-existing figurative images, adding his personal and highly evocative interpretation of the Carolingian repertoire. Above all, it is the quality and ambiguity of the forms which, stripped of their transitory materiality, become immutable mental archetypes, with the veil of literature torn away so as to tap into the realm of the spirit, thereby creating the “short circuit” that imbues the Paladinian images of the De Universo with a powerful expressive tension.