In 1996, the Italian artist Giulio Paolini was invited to design the cover of the book L'occhio di Calvino by Marco Belpoliti. The book was one of the first to study the role of images in Italo Calvino's production, becoming an ideal background for Paolini's cover: a collage portrait of the writer while he was proofreading one of his texts. This image raised one of the major questions which was already addressed twenty years before, when Calvino and Paolini first collaborated: the crisis of authorship and the multiplicity of the self, which Calvino will also stresses in his Six Memos for the Next Millenium. This article tries to explore the specificity, the limits and the legacy of their theory of authorship by analizing the portraits of Giulio Paolini in comparison with Belpoliti's and Calvino's texts.