Cinematic Explorations of the Italian High Renaissance: Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti’s critofilm ‘Michelangelo’ (1964)

Italian art critic and philosopher Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti (1910-1987) was one of the first art historians to explore the relationship between cinema and the visual arts. Not only did he publish widely on this subject, he also produced films on art in which he aimed to evoke a new form of art criticism using the language and mechanisms of cinema. Developing his concept of the critofilm, he created twenty-one art documentaries between 1948 and 1964 that carefully analyzed the formal and stylistic characteristics of major artworks. His last and most ambitious critofilm, released in 1964, is dedicated to the Italian artist Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564). Created for the commemoration of the 400^th anniversary of the artist’s death, this feature-length film shows an impressive range of Michelangelo’s paintings, sculptures, architecture, and drawings, in which Ragghianti’s cinematographic style reaches its culmination point. Using bold cinematic strategies of dynamic camera movements, chiaroscuro light effects, and animation techniques, Ragghianti transposes Michelangelo’s complex artistic language into the visual language of film. Comparing this 1964 film to other cinematic explorations of Michelangelo throughout the twentieth century, this paper examines how Ragghianti translates the critical discipline of art history into this critofilm. It investigates how Ragghianti creates a specific cinematic syntax to analyze the formal elements of Michelangelo’s artworks by drawing on theories of prominent scholars such as Benedetto Croce, Konrad Fiedler, and Heinrich Wölfflin. Finally, this paper demonstrates how Ragghianti’s film Michelangelo functions as an innovative art historiographic tool, influencing later films and art historical writings.