The dissertation Morandi and the Respect for Things of Use reexamines the artistic production of Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), one of the most important Italian artists of the 20th century, in order to reestablish, within the time frame of the development of Modernism, his connections with contemporaneous European cultural production. The dissertation shows the ways in which Morandi s work presents itself as an alternative to Cubism s hegemonic artistic interpretation of Cézanne s work, favoring aspects of Cèzanne s poetics that Picasso and Braque relegated to the background – notably the perception of corporally determined depth of space – while at the same time uniting this spatialization with the language of flatness established by the Cubists. The dissertation seeks to demonstrate that Morandi s investigations had affinities not only in the arts, but that the production of his body of work and the questions it raised – in particular the visual understanding of things and utensils that motivated his still-lifes – were in line with the concept of thing and thingness elaborated by Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art and What is a Thing? both written in 1935. Morandi s artistic inquiries, in a broad sense, have deep affinities with the phenomenological method of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.