Stelio Maria Martini’s ‘Neurosentimental’: A Simulacrum of our Time

Abstract

After Schemi, in 1963 – year of Gruppo 70 and Gruppo 63 – Stelio Maria Martini accomplished  Neurosentimental book, one of the main important work within visual poetry researches during 1960s, based on the interaction between literature and visual culture. In order to define this book, critics spoke about photo-poem, fiction, visual novel, and proposed references to mass-media culture, photo-story, comics, and cinema. However, this essay aims to come back to analyze carefully the medium used by Martini, collage, in order to better understand the visual features of Neurosentimental. Thus it’s usefull to study visual, formal, compositional, and structural basic elements of collages to highlight that it’s the organizing feature of collage to define the meaning of images and texts in the page of the book, and to point out how the “layout/assembly” allowed the developping of a visual and textual novel like Neurosentimental. By carefull study of visual and literary models and sources of Neurosentimental, the essay aims to clarify the complex theory and practice developped by Martini in term of content, visual form and method.