Film is from the homonymous tale of Edgar Allan Poe, adapted to Appennino Toscoemiliano, in the same period of the Author, so like in the tale. Two men, a rider and his servant, escaped from an ambush, arrive to a deserted castle. The servant takes care of his sir offended, as he can, and so the night passes. The sir, lying on the bad, look at numerous paintings appended on the walls and reads their characteristics on a catalogue there founded. Among them, an Oval Portrait, represents a young and nice woman, of whom the rider peruses her sad history: she is the painter’s wife, who, portraying her, for a long time of pain, grabs slowling and unconsciously, her vitality, removing her life and her soul into his lofty portrait.