In the nearly half century since his death, the Italian artist Piero Manzoni (1933–1963) has become a key figure in the postwar revival of Marcel Duchamp and one of the principal antecedents of the international movements of Body art and Conceptual art. This characterization, however, examines Manzoni’s art only through the concerns of wider tendencies of postwar art and ignores the cultural genesis of his work in Milan and Rome. As a consequence, Manzoni is presented as a fragmented and often contradictory figure. My dissertation seeks to correct this portrayal and situate Manzoni’s work in the context of postwar Italy, rather than solely in a European milieu. Doing so reveals that the artist’s immense contributions to postwar art were equally indebted to his dialogue with an Italian tradition of modernism, which has been neglected in broader surveys of the avant-garde.