The bond which has been tied between cinema and visual arts in the first decades of the last century finds its paradigmatic expression in the ways of representing women. The comparison between the woman-owl interpreted by Pina Menichelli and Marchesa Casati’s pictures immortalized by Boldini’s brush highlight the strong and lively exchange among expressive forms and give back an idea of unconventional and eccentric femininity. This model meets the need of the cinema to accredit itself as a new form of art (highlighting the closeness with painting and literature, evidence of that complex system of referrals among ‘media’ which will consolidate in the following decades), more than the intention of conveying a different, more modern concept of woman.