¶ … Pasolini's final interviews, before the release of Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom, and prior to his murder, he revealed his thoughts on his work. He simply saw himself as a poet. His most popular essay on the cinema was entitled "Il cinema di poesia." In that essay, he discusses his writings and films and referred to the poetry as inspirations from the paintings of Giotto, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, and Masaccio. His concept of poetry was wide and included all the art forms. Paolini's point-of-view was derived from classical roots such as Aristotle and later, Horace. It was also apart of an Italian idealist philosophical tradition manifested by Benedetto Croce, whose philosophical method influenced every Italian intellectual of Pasolini's generation. These included Pasolini and Antonio Gramsci. The mixture of Marxism and idealist philosophy, coupled with Catholic context, was specific to Italy.

To provide further background, Pasolini studied art history with Roberto Longhi, Italy's well-known art historian, at the University of Bologna during the early 1940s. Most of imagery depicted in his films, either by content or by outlining and location, are reproduced from the periods of Italian Renaissance and baroque...

His thesis at the university consisted of the symbolist-decadent poet Giovanni Pascoli. Pasolini's films mention directly from painting, poetry, music, and seldom, the cinema.
Frequently the references are constructed as comparisons between the everyday low life like whores and libertines to the high and spiritual, either illustrated or from music and literature, as in Salo, for instance, where the libertines are correlated with divine music, the avant-garde of the thirties (Leger), the neoclassical (their villa, where victims are collected, detained, and murdered), Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper (the banquet of tripe), and most plainly the Marquis de Sade and the Inferno of Dante Alighieri. The libertines quote Nietzsche; Pasolini quotes Bataille and Barthes. In The Decameron, Pasolini feigned the role of Giotto; in The Gospel According to Matthew, Italian scholars portrayed the apostles, Pasolini's mother, and Mary, the mother of Christ.