Gaetano Kanizsa

Gaetano Kanizsa (Hebrew: גאטאנו קאניזסא; 18 August 1913 – 13 March 1993) was an Italian psychologist and artist of Jewish and Slovenian Catholic descent who last served as a founder of the Institute of Psychology of Trieste.

Gaetano Kanizsa was born on 18 August 1913 in Trieste, Austria-Hungary to a Hungarian-Jewish father from Nagybecskerek and a Slovene Catholic mother from Bovec.

He attended the classic lyceum and got the laurea (post-secondary academic degree) at the University of Padova in 1938, writing a thesis on eidetic memory.

He retired from academic life in 1988 and continued research until 1993, the year of his death.

A dominant figure in Italian psychology, Kanizsa became famous in the 1970s, after having published an article about illusory contours in Scientific American (1976) and the book Organization in Vision (1979).