948 WOULD BE a pivotal year in the career of Mario Bava, though the totality of his known output for this period is limited to a single
feature and a short. The short film in question was the most widely-
circulated of his many documentaries: Carlo Castelli Gattinara’s Il demoniaco nell’arte. Scripted by Enrico Castelli Gattinara, this was a visual essay on the infernal images in paintings by Pieter Brueghel, Hieronymous Bosch, Mathias Grunewald, Martin Schongauer, and other Flemish and German painters of the 15th and 16th centuries. Filmed in 16 mm, this 16- minute short was actually distributed to American schoolrooms in 1950, under the title The Demon in Art, sporting an English-language narration track by film critic Arthur Knight, best known for his “Sex in the Cinema” series of articles for Playboy magazine. Bava’s only feature of 1948, I pagliacci (amore tragico) stands out as his first masterpiece as a cinematographer. As such, it warrants detailed discussion.