From 1954 to 1964, through the publishing project “seleArte”, financed in 1952 by Adriano Olivetti, Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti shot a total of 19 critofilms. A key element of originality in these films is that they were “documents conceived and created by an art historian who, as such, adopted cinematography within the sphere of a project which is both critical and instructive”. In applying the language of cinema to art criticism, the author demonstrates how exemplary film is in this sense – a medium capable of supplying critical thought with a new visual alphabet. Ragghianti used film to trigger an original critical and visual process that saw cinema as a figurative art capable of lending three-dimensionality to an artwork, thanks to the dynamic reconfiguring power of the camera. Critofilm was thus proposed as a new model of scientific art documentary, a dynamic and exacting form of art criticism that drew its instruments from cinema while maintaining its own thematic and expressive autonomy.