"Intravedere cinematograficamente". L'inganno nella pittura

“Kinematographisch scheinwerfen”, or gazing through lens of cinema, is an expression used by Aby Warburg in the famous conference of 1912 on the frescoes of Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara held during the 10th International Congress of Art History at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. After contextualizing the expression and deepening its possible theoretical scope within the Warburgian method, the essay applies this mode of “gazing cinematically” to a pair of mythological-literary canvases painted by Paolo De Matteis, most likely commissioned by the English philosopher Lord Shaftesbury around 1712, and a fresco painted by Ercole Procaccini the Younger between 1652 and 1674, commissioned by the magistrate Bartolomeo III Arese for his palazzo in Cesano Maderno. A semiotic-iconographic interpretation of these paintings reveals their programmatically fictional character, centred on sophisticated flashbacks and flash forwards symbolically placed under a theatrical mask displayed by a winged putto hovering over the scene in the first example, and by similar pictorial devices in the second. The theme of “fiction” is thus developed from the point of view of pictorial simulation and the beholder’s experience, comparing ways of seeing and thinking about images, both in motion (film) and still (painting).