The cornerstones of the "breakthrough" theory in the visual field of the great American scholar for the first time translated into Italy. The pictorial turn is the "turning point" that has brought to completion a revolution with respect to millennia of history of culture in which the images have been denigrated as deceptive and bearers of a degraded knowledge. But it is also an opportunity to reflect on the flip side of this change of perspective, that is on the uses and abuses of visuality in contemporary societies, commonly considered as subjected to an uncontrolled domination of images. This book presents to the Italian public a coherent collection of the most representative texts of the scholar who gave a name to this turning point and is today recognized as one of the leading protagonists of visual studies. Essays in which Mitchell introduces concepts and terms that are now fully accepted in the critical vocabulary, such as the successful image / text formula, and analyzes in a problematic key the relationship between visual studies, image science and more traditional disciplines such as art history , semiotics and aesthetics.