Surrealism Revisited: Leonor Fini and Federico Fellini’s Satyricon

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.