Painting Literature: Tullio Pericoliʼs Robinson Crusoe

As a cultural and political cartoonist, as an illustrator of literary classics, as a world-famous portraitist of writers, as a landscape painter, as a scenographer, as a writer and as a theorist of his own work, Tullio Pericoli wondered incessantly about the enigma of the story nested in the image or, vice versa, the image hidden behind the story. Many of his paintings and drawings presuppose or incorporate the written word. This article explores Pericoliʼs long fascination with literature, in particular through his important pictorial work on Daniel Defoeʼs Robinson Crusoe. After an introduction, in which Pericoliʼs interest in the relation between image and word is discussed in broader terms, the article offers a close reading and interpretation of Pericoliʼs work on Robinson Crusoe (1982–2007). This project, which has intermittently engaged Pericoli for twenty-five years, marks an important stage in the long history of interpretations of Defoe’s novel and shows the crucial power of the visual imagination in the reception of a literary classic.