Abstract

This article analyzes the status of the pictorial image when inserted in the film continuum, in terms of its special temporality and its ideological implications. I focus in particular on two works, both inspired on Piero della Francesca's "Madonna del Parto": Valerio Zurlini's "La prima notte di quiete" (1972) and Andrei Tarkovskij's "Nostalghia" (1983). In these films, the fresco is used as an ideological tool in order to establish a personal ideology of artistic creation and to imagine the illusion of the extra-temporality of the instant.