They turn up on market stalls, they resurface from drawers and tin boxes where they had been forgotten, and they are the object of a new kind of collecting, because the passage from indifference to interest in them is fairly recent. They are the pictures the French call trouvées and Italians anonymous, because of whoever made them there is no trace.

In this essay, meant as a wide-ranging analysis of the phenomenon, the author proposes the more appropriate term of pictures by an unidentified maker, because somebody was there behind them.