«Sua moglie è scesa dal quadro». Immagine e ritorno dei morti in alcune novelle di Pirandello

[Autom. eng. transl.] By reversing the romantic topos of the portrait he kills, Pirandello inserts in his narrative some portraits that bring the dead back to action or even to life. This happens in a particular way in the novels, both in the presence of paintings and photographs, especially during the years in which the novelty of cinema explodes. If the critical bibliography has so far focused on the fantastic nature of these stories, or on the oneiric dimension that characterizes their development, less attention has been paid to the role that the representation of death plays in them. Yet just the funeral vein of Pirandello's imagination, in addition to updating a repertoire that is now dated, allows the author to place himself in an original way in the thought of the twentieth century, the century that saw the civilization of the image prevail. Where major theorists (from Adorno to Baudrillard) warned the danger that reality would dissolve in its mechanical reproduction, as prefigured in the Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operator, Pirandello also intuited the opposite way: that of an "excess of reality", in which the past, the removed, the archived continue to act on the present by means of characters immortalized by their pictorial and photographic Doppelgänger.