The use of the sculpture links Venus of the Rags to earlier traditions, particularly the practice of deploying classical motifs by Italian artists associated with the Metafisica and Novecento movements of the early part of the twentieth century. This is the case in Giorgio de Chirico’s painting The Uncertainty of the Poet 1913 (T04109), which includes a depiction of fragment of statuary – a torso of Aphrodite. In Pistoletto’s Venus of the Rags the statue functions as a given, and its status as a replicated object makes it comparable to the readymades of Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968). The formlessness of the pile of torn fabrics may be said to anticipate and echo aspects of the idea of ‘antiform’ introduced by the artist Robert Morris (born 1931) in Artforum in April 1968. However, the sustained engagement with art of the past that characterises Arte Povera, and that T12200 exemplifies, makes this movement and this work distinct from the aims of antiform and other contemporary forms of art such as conceptualism and post-minimalism (Christov-Bakargiev, p.27).