This book presents an invaluable survey of Giorgio Morandi's drawings, watercolors, and etchings, selected mainly from British and American collections. Morandi was a reserved artist who rarely left his studio in Bologna. He focused his extraordinary artistic sensitivity upon the same motifs again and again, each time depicting them anew. He was a master engraver, and his celebrated etchings - of which there are few - reveal the artist's unmatched ability to express lightness and depth. For Morandi, drawing - as Renato Miracco writes in his introductory essay - represented the first physical manifestation of the idea, a concrete trace of a largely metaphysical quest. This essential volume - the second in the series I Quaderni dell'Istituto italiano di cultura di New York, which began with the works of Fausto Melotti - conveys an atmosphere of meditation and suspended reality, where simple shapes and muted colors reveal a parallel world that the viewer may gently enter.