Francesco zingariello biography

Description

Silhouetten
by Giacomo Fronzi

Étienne de Silhouette was the finance minister of King Louis XV in 1759, and the inventor of a kind of property tax.

Probably, he could not imagine that his name would have been preserved from the ravages of time. His fiscal reform, which taxed the wealthiest, made him unpopular with the high-income classes, but also rather famous: indeed, the tight and pocketless trousers in vogue at the time were called à la Silhouette, since there was no use for pockets when the money to store inside them was missing… The word “silhouette”, however, soon transitioned from indicating the trousers to denoting the typically aristocratic pastime (practised by the Minister himself) of cutting the figures’ profiles.

That pastime become the black art of silhouette, an artistic practice which, on the wave of the eighteenth-century Neoclassical taste, took inspiration also from the Greek and Southern-Italian ancient vascu