Identifying quickly illusion with deception, we tend to oppose it to the reality of life. However, investigating in this collection of essays illusion's functions in the Arts, which thrives upon illusion and yet maintains its existential roots and meaningfullness in the real, we might wonder about the nature of reality itself.

Does not illusion open the seeming confines of factual reality into horizons of imagination which transform it? Does it not, like art, belong essentially to the makeup of human reality?

Papers by: Lanfranco Aceti, John Baldacchino, Maria Avelina Cecilia Lafuente, Jo Ann Circosta, Madalina Diaconu, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Brian Grassom, Marguerite Harris, Andrew E. Hershberger, James Carlton Hughes, Lawrence Kimmel, Jung In Kwon, Ruth Ronen, Scott A. Sherer, Joanne Snow-Smith, Max Statkiewicz, Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Daniel Unger, James Werner.

Inhalt
Topical Study.- Reality and Illusion in the Work of Art.- Section I.- Dream's Shadows: Fiction and Reality in Miguel de Unamuno.- On the Truth and Lie of Illusion in the Theatrical Sense.- Simulating the Unpresentable and the Sublime.- Section II.- The Restored Sistine Chapel Ceiling: The Transcendent Made Immanent.- Trompe L'Oeil and the Mimetic Tradition in Aesthetics.- A Metaphysical Perspective on Alberti's De Pictura.- Triumph of the Dissolution of Reality by Illusion: The Spiritual Experience of Trompe L'Oeil Architectural Wall Paintings The Tomb of the Leopards and the Villa of the Mysteries.- Illusionary Touch, and Touching Illusions.- Reality, Illusion, and Alterity: The Advent of the Other.- Silence as Disclosure: Virginia Woolf's Style of Being-in-the-World.- Section III.- Between Illusions: Art's Argument for 'Weak' Reality.- Post-Digital Awareness.- Thought, Object and Experience in Film/Video Installation Art.- The Spring-Tight Line in Minor White's Theory of Sequential Photography.- Section IV.- Imagination and Cultural Criticism in the Work of David Wojnarowicz.- A Message for the Oueen: Guercino's Death of Dido, Cardinal Spada, and the Internal Conflicts at The French Court.- Who is Deceived by Trompe L'Oeil?.- The Aesthetic of True Digital Illusions: Crossing Several Roads at the Same Time.