Author ORCID Identifier
0009-0004-7240-1679
Abstract
Throughout the history of the cinema, filmmakers have turned to the visual arts for inspiration in creating spiritual styles on film. In this essay, it is argued that Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966) were influenced by Giotto di Bondone’s frescos and Andrei Rublev’s Eastern Orthodox icons, respectively. Committed to realism, Rossellini adopts Giotto’s proto-Renaissance, humanist art as a model for a spiritual style in which the Transcendent is manifested through the natural world. Subverting terrestrial reality, Tarkovsky adopts the aesthetic principles of the Eastern Orthodox icon, translating Pavel Florensky’s concepts of reverse perspective and reverse time into analogous cinematic aesthetics – principally into sacred, dreamlike temporalities. Taken together, these hagiographic films echo the historico-aesthetic process of differentiated approaches to spiritual aesthetics that unfolded through the Great Schism. Moreover, they illustrate how the most realistic of artforms, film, can express transcendence, albeit to varying degrees of success.
Recommended Citation
Hart, Alexander
(2025)
"Saintly Cinema: Modelling the Icon in The Flowers of St. Francis and Andrei Rublev,"
Journal of Religion & Film: Vol. 29:
Iss.
1, Article 81.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol29/iss1/81
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
VolNum
29
Included in
Fine Arts Commons, History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons, Painting Commons, Religion Commons, Renaissance Studies Commons, Visual Studies Commons
