Despite the insistence of modernist discourses, especially in the peculiar case of Danto's theory, this analysis shows the impossibility of literalness in art, thus pointing towards a necessarily figurative nature of art (in the rhetorical sense of what a "figure" is). I have chosen to concentrate on the major historical "breaks" in Italian Art of the 60s, celebrated by the Italian "modernist" and the Arte Povera supported by Germano Celant, in order to show how they may all be redescribed only as figures of discontinuity (here again, in the rhetorical sense of "figure"), rather than as true breaks with the past.