Silos are an undeniable and unavoidable reality of knowledge production, particularly within academia. For those who choose to navigate between disciplinary boundaries, as opposed to within them, it is not uncommon to find similar concepts developing in parallel in two or more completely different fields of study. These silos tend to be not just disciplinary, but temporal, leading to the unintentional reinvention of concepts and the dismissal of already existing and potentially valuable scholarship. These silos can also be exacerbated by language or even personal agendas. In the face of this reality, it would be naive to assume a concept so seemingly intuitive as visual literacy would have escaped such silos. Although the documented history of visual literacy spans over eight decades and across several disciplines, a dominant narrative obscures portions of the whole history. By shedding light on the contributions of scholars and practitioners who have championed it from distant or occluded timelines, we get a fuller picture of the history of visual literacy and, potentially, a broader vantage point from where to explore it further. This article attempts to contextualise and reconcile the timelines (both the better-known and the more hidden) in a single chronology and to discuss the patterns that emerge from this exercise.