Articles

Surrealism Revisited: Leonor Fini and Federico Fellini’s Satyricon

Authors

  • Laura Aresi

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between Federico Fellini and Leonor Fini through their respective engagements with Petronius’ Satyricon. It argues that the fragmentary nature of Petronius’ text provided a shared imaginative and formal horizon for both artists, rooted in a dreamlike aesthetic informed by Surrealism. After outlining Fini’s marginalization within the Italian cultural scene and tracing her ‘hidden presence’ in Fellini’s films of the 1960s, the study examines Fellini’s Satyricon as a reworking that expands the novel’s narrative fissures and sidesteps moral judgment. It then turns to Fini’s illustrated Satyricon, showing how it enters into dialogue with Fellini’s film while offering an autonomous reading of Petronius that resists linear models of influence.

Author Biography

Laura Aresi

Laura Aresi is Assistant Professor at the University of Florence. After completing her PhD at the Universities of Florence and Heidelberg, she published Nel giardino di Pomona. Le Metamorfosi di Ovidio e l’invenzione di una mitologia in terra d’Italia (2017). She is a member of the Réseau Poésie augustéenne and of the Florentine unit of the PRIN 2022 research project Petronius and Apuleius: New Critical Editions and Related Studies. Her main research interests include intertextuality in Petronius’ Satyricon and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as well as gender in Augustan poetry and the reception of Ovid and Vergil in modern and contemporary literature. She has also worked on the theme of the Saturnalia and recently co-edited a special issue of Maia (“December est mensis”: The Saturnalia: Themes, Authors, Approaches, 2024). She is currently working on intertextuality, gender, and the classical tradition in contemporary writers and artists such as Goliarda Sapienza, Elena Ferrante, Leonor Fini, Madeline Miller.

Published

2026-04-16

Issue

2026: AN 21, preliminary version

Section

Articles
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