From the Visual to the Visionary Format: Paperback

This book aims to investigate Surrealism’s precedents in visual tradition and to explore its influence on contemporary art. Taking the ideational power of vision as its starting point, 13 essays examine, from different perspectives, themes essential to the Surrealist avant-garde – dreams, magic, madness – but also mystic visions, hybridity and the ongoing relevance of syncretic figures as protean germinations of the irrational. The book opens with a reconsideration of André Breton’s last book, L’Art Magic (1957). The other essays cover a rather wide array of themes from the witches’ iconography in the early Modern period to the contemporary immersive video-installations, with some specific surrealism-related topics brought into focus. Following the file rouge traced by Breton, the possibility of a different narrative on art history clearly emerges.

Alessandra Buccheri lectures in History of Art at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Palermo. She completed her doctorate at Oxford in 2009 and became a fellow of Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America in the autumn semester of 2021. She is well published and her research is concerned with art, architecture and stage design in early modern times. She is the author of The Spectacle of Clouds, 1439-1650: Italian Art and Theatre (London: Ashgate, 2014).

Giulia Ingarao lectures in History of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Palermo. She completed her postgraduate studies in Art History at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her principal areas of research are Surrealism, Gender Studies and postwar Italian art. She has published numerous essays, many of which concern the Surrealist diaspora in Mexico; she is the author of the monograph Leonora Carrington un viaggio nel Novecento; Leonora Carrington: The Image of Dreams (Milan, 2014, 2022).

Emilia Valenza lectures in History of Contemporary Art at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Palermo. She is Co-Curator of the project ‘Madonie-Paesaggi, 1973–2021’ (‘Madonia Landscapes, 1973–2021’), which won the Ministry of Culture’s (MIC) National Competition ‘Strategia Fotografia 2020’.