GENEALOGIE VISUALI. LEONARDO SCIASCIA E L'ARTE DELLO SGUARDO

For a writer such as Leonardo Sciascia, an advocate of passion as an antidote to specialism, practising the art of observation is tantamount to embarking on an exhilarating hermeneutic adventure and, at the same time, a step towards happiness. Observing is, in fact, an act of ‘reading’ that combines rationality and delight, serving as both a tool of epistemology and a stimulus to the creative imagination. Hence the interweaving, throughout his entire body of work – poetry, fiction and non-fiction – of a dense intertextual network aimed at establishing precise genealogies, often unrelated to an anthropological reading of the work of art. The aim of this book is precisely to explore, to use Panofsky’s terms, the ‘symbolic values’, the ‘intrinsic meanings’ and the ‘underlying principles’ that underpin his figurative imagery. To this end, various figures from the worlds of art criticism and the arts investigate the relationship between the visible and the invisible, exploring the connections between literature, painting, photography and graphic novels, as well as the typically Sciascian intertwining of cinephilia and critical vocation, without overlooking the author’s association with some of the greatest painters, engravers and sculptors of the twentieth century.