Margherita Sarfatti and Italian Cultural

PAUL AND ZACZEK / margherita sarfatti & italian cultural nationalism
889
Margherita Sarfatti & Italian

Cultural Nationalism
Catherine E. Paul and Barbara M. Zaczek
From the early 1920s when Benito Mussolini rst came to power MODERNISM / modernity
through the end of the rst decade of the fascist rule, Margherita VOLUME THIRTEEN, NUMBER
Sarfatti played a dominant role in the formulation of a new va- ONE, PP 889916.
riety of Italian cultural nationalism. A cultural advisor, art critic, 2006 THE JOHNS
socialist turned fascist, and Mussolinis lover, she both directly HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
and indirectly shaped the cultural policies of the Italian regime.

As Victoria de Grazia suggests, Sarfatti wielded immense per-
sonal power through her capacity to bring together intellectuals,
artists, and the political personnel of the regime. Over time, she
manipulated the regimes burgeoning patronage networks to
promote the Novecento as a national school, helped to found
the review Gerarchia, largely created the public image of the
Mussolini in her authorized biography Dux (1925), and reigned, Catherine Paul is
doyenne of ofcial intellectual life. 1 In their biography of Sar- Associate Professor
fatti, Philip V. Cannistraro, and Brian R. Sullivan have argued of English at Clemson
that Margherita had brought a degree of cultural respectability University. She is
author of Poetry in the
to a movement that otherwise appeared to be nothing more than
Museums of Modernism:
a gang of violent, anti-intellectual thugs.2 Nancy Harrowitz has
Yeats, Pound, Moore, Stein
addressed Sarfattis complicated identity as a Jewish woman (she (University of Michigan
later converted to Catholicism) involved in a largely masculinist Press, 2002) Barbara
and later anti-Jewish regime. Sarfatti, she writes, was to a great Zaczek is Professor of
degree the author of fascism itself and thus also the author of Italian at Clemson Uni-
those conditions which produced such profound identity shifts versity. She is author
of Censored Sentiments:
within herself.3 Despite her importance to this period of cultural
Letters and Censorship
history, however, Sarfattis writings remain unavailable in English
in Epistolary Novels
translation: a situation that the present dossier sets out to remedy and Conduct Material
in the form of a brief but representative sampling of her early (University of Delaware
writings on art for Mussolinis newspaper Il Popolo dItalia. Press, 1997).
13.1paul.indd 889 12/2/05 7:38:58 AM

M O D E R N I S M / modernity
890 Margherita Grassini Sarfatti was born in Venice in April 1880 to wealthy, unassimi-
lated Jewish parents. Thanks to her private teachers Pietro Orsi, Pompeo Molmenti, and
Antonio Fradeletto, whose careers combined investment in art with political engage-
ment, her education included signicant exposure to art and art criticism. Despite her
parents social position, she became a committed socialist early on, in 1898 marrying
the socialist lawyer Cesare Sarfatti, the member of another prosperous Venetian fam-
ily. The Sarfattis moved to Milan in 1902, and about this time Margherita began her
career as an art critic. In 1903, she was awarded a prize for her articles on the Fifth
Venice Biennale, published in Gazzetta degli Artisti (Venice) and La Patria (Rome).
From 1903 to 1908, Margherita contributed art criticism to such periodicals as Avanti!
(Milan), Avanti della Domenica (Florence then Rome), LAdriatico (Ancona), Varietas
(Milan), and the Gazzetta di Venezia, securing a regular post at the socialist daily Avanti!
in 1908.4 These early years demonstrate the extent to which her thinking about art was
from the beginning intertwined with her ideas about politics and social change.
Sarfattis inuence in the art world was greatly aided by her political and amorous
involvement with Benito Mussolini. Mussolini was a rising star in the socialist party,
and in December 1912, he took over the editorship of Avanti! This was the period in
which Sarfatti rst cemented her ties to the avant-gardes, and such gures as Achille
Funi, Leonardo Dudreville, Carlo Erba, and Antonio SantElia became frequent guests
of her salon.5 Although they still identied themselves with futurism, Sarfatti saw in
them the beginnings of a calmer classicizing trend in the modern movement. In 1914,
she reviewed their New Tendencies exhibition for Avanti!, celebrating the work of
Funi and Dudreville in a review that marks a transition in her career from being a
mere observer of the art world to that of advocate and promoter.6
As the political situation shiftedin Italy in general, and in the socialist party in
particularSarfatti gained additional clout. In October 1914, Mussolini broke with
the socialist party over the question of Italian neutrality in World War I: although the
socialists opposed the war, he believed Italy should intervene. Sarfatti, too, jumped
ship in the summer of 1915 and started publishing articles about contemporary art in Il
Popolo dItalia, the newspaper Mussolini founded in the immediate wake of his break
with socialism. Her friendship with Mussolini intensied, and although their affair was
on-again-off-again for many years, it grew more serious in the fall of 1918, at which time
she became his principal advisor on cultural matters. The collaboration was cemented
because Sarfattis cultural objectives converged with Mussolinis political goals: he was
committed to restoring social and economic order in Italy in the name of moderniza-
tion; she sought to establish a school of artists whose work was at once modern and
classicizing, invested in innovation and committed to a return to order.7
By this time, both as a response to the war and to the gurative turn marked by the
work of Metaphysical school painters like Giorgio de Chirico, artists like Gino Severini,
Mario Sironi, and Carlo Carr were also drifting out of the futurist fold. They were
gravitating towards various forms of modernist classicism, seeking to innovate through
the modeling of simple forms and drawing their inspiration from early Renaissance
artists such as Masaccio. Sarfatti was one of the catalysts of this classicizing turn and
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891

Mario Sironi, Portrait of Margherita Sarfatti, 1916-17, Private Collection.
dreamed of a second Italian Renaissance that would restore the supremacy of her
nations art and return the center of the art world from France to Italy. With Mus-
solini she co-edited Ardita (19191921), conceived as the literary review of Il Popolo
dItalia, and later Gerarchia (19221943).8 And during the early years of his regime,
Sarfatti took an active role in educating Mussolini about the role that art could play
in his vision of a politically revitalized Italy, encouraging him to study Machiavelli and
the history of ancient Rome.9
This new advocacy role thrust her into the world of public relations and patronage
battles. In the spring of 1920, she fought successfully to gain entry for Achille Funi, Ma-
rio Sironi, and other modern Italian painters into the twelfth Venice Biennale, protesting
their exclusion from the exhibition. From its foundation in 1895 until the mid-1920s,
the Biennale had been a conservative affair; by 1914, it had become a conrmed stop
on the grand tours of an increasingly mobile bourgeoisie. In the early 1920s, Vittorio
Pica brought modern European artespecially French Post-Impressionist artinto
the Biennale, but the Italian artists represented remained conservative, academic paint-
13.1paul.indd 891 12/2/05 7:38:59 AM

892 ers such as Ettore Tito, Telemaco Signorini, and Pietro Fragiacomo. To add insult to
injury, during the rst thirty or so years of the Biennali, there were nearly two foreign
artists for every Italian artist.10 Sarfattis attempt to introduce modern Italian art into
the Biennale succeeded: Pica offered exhibition space to a number of the artists she
had championed.11 In this way Sarfatti became identied with a group of artists who
soon came to call themselves the Novecento italiano. The name echoed art historians
use of the term quattrocento to describe such artists as Piero della Francesca, Paolo
Uccello, and Masaccio. The painters of the Novecento sought a distinctly Italian and
Mediterranean road to modernity: one that embraced the new but animated by the
same interplays of elementary forms and volumes found in early Renaissance masters.
While Sarfatti did not tell them what direction to take in their art, she helped to shape
the movements identity.
After Mussolini assumed power in October 1922, Sarfatti brought additional at-
tention to the Novecento by inviting Mussolini to speak at the openings of the groups
exhibitions. At its rst exhibition, in March 1923, Mussolini spoke of the interrelation
between the art of politics and the politics of art. I too am an artist, he declared,
who works a certain material and pursues certain determined ideals. He explained
the states responsibility to artists: The state has a single duty: that is to not sabotage
art, to create conditions humane to artists, to encourage them from the artistic and
national points of view. 12 Some of the Novecentisti worried about the implications of
Sarfattis ties to Mussolini, as they did not want to be perceived as working openly for the
fascist regime. Though Sarfatti would later reply that fascist art was not a product of
the regime, but rather that fascism and this form of art are born of a single rootstock,
tensions mounted about who was in charge of the movement.13 By April 1924, the rst
incarnation of the Novecento collapsed as a result of the resignation of four members,
including Leonardo Dudreville, Anselmo Bucci, and Gian Emilio Malerba.14
Over time, however, these artists came to appreciate the value of Sarfattis support
and the Novecento Italiano was reborn in February 1925, at the instigation of Achille
Funi. The new group included such prior members as Anselmo Bucci, Leonardo
Dudreville, and Mario Sironi, but added to their ranks Carlo Carr, Alberto Salietti,
Arturo Tosi, and Adolfo Wildt. It mounted an exhibition at the Palazzo della Perma-
nente in Milan from February to March 1926, and the participants work showed a
much greater stylistic range than had the original Novecento group. In addition to the
Novecentisti, there were representatives of the Roman Scuola Romana (including Carlo
Socrate and Primo Sinopico), second generation futurists (Fortunato Depero, Enrico
Prampolini, and Luigi Russolo), representatives of the Florentine strapaese group
(Ardengo Sofci, Libero Andreotti, Antonio Maraini), and artists no longer strictly af-
liated with particular currents (such as Giorgio de Chirico, Giorgio Morandi, Cipriano
Esio Oppo, Gino Severini).15 This rebirth of the Novecento marked the beginning of
Sarfattis period of greatest cultural inuence.
In 1925, the rst edition of Sarfattis biography, The Life of Benito Mussolini, was
published in England. In June 1926, the Italian edition was published under the title
Dux, the Latin form of Duce: a title that linked the cult of Mussolini to that of romanit
13.1paul.indd 892 12/2/05 7:38:59 AM

(romanness) in line with Sarfattis and Mussolinis dream of remaking Rome into the 893
political and spiritual capital of a new fascist empire.16 Sarfattis husband Cesare died in
1924, and after spending much of 1926 in Rome, Sarfatti moved to the nations capital
in 1927, her proximity to Mussolini further strengthening her power and consecrating
her policymaking role. 17
Sarfatti also encouraged Mussolini to found institutions to rejuvenate Italian culture.
In 1926, he created the Royal Academy of Italy, and Sarfatti was widely thought to
have chosen the rst members.18 Mussolini declared that the Academy would be a
vibrant center of national culture that augments and promotes the intellectual move-
ment according to the genius and tradition of our people.19 Members of the Academy
included prominent gures in the arts, humanities, and sciences, including Giovanni
Gentile, Luigi Pirandello, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Guglielmo Marconi, Ottorino
Respighi, and Enrico Fermi. They received a stipend of 3,000 lire a month, three
times the average shopkeepers salary and [i]n exchange for subsidy, the regime
required members to appear at public ceremonies wearing ornate fascist uniforms.20
The Academys activities included nancing an attempt to rid the Italian language
of foreign borrowing, establishing a State Record Library (Discoteca dello Stato) to
preserve regional dialects and traditional songs, sponsoring conferences that drew
important cultural personalities to Italy, and supporting revivals of the decorative arts.
Its most important contributions to cultural production, however, were probably the
grants and awards it sponsored, including the prestigious Mussolini Prize (Premio Mus-
solini). Recipients of this prize include Ada Negri and Emilio Cecchi; others, including
Mario Mafai, Anna Maria Ortese, and Elio Vittorini received smaller encouragement
prizes (premi dincoraggiamento).
Over time, Sarfattis ability to inuence government policies and patronage practices
diminished. In part, this came about due to personal jealousies within Mussolinis inner
circle; in part, due to increasing concerns within certain conservative sectors of the
fascist party regarding foreign and Jewish inuence. Much of the art she advocatedin-
cluding the Novecento and Rationalismprofessed the value of italianit (Italianness)
but also identied itself with broader international currents, thereby drawing the wrath
of ultranationalists. That Sarfatti was born a Jew was also a problem, though more often
an unspoken than a spoken one given fascisms early rejection of anti-Semitism. Starting
in the late 1920s, however, a small but increasingly inuential segment of the regime
and party began to invoke Judaism as a threat to Italian national identity. Although
Sarfatti had converted to Catholicism in 1928, her Jewishness was still exploited by
her opponents as a quick means of dismissal.21 And in January 1930, Mussolinis wife
Rachele demanded that he end his affair with Sarfatti and that Il Popolo dItalia cease
publishing her work, and he gradually acquiesced. The governments ofcial cultural
policies remained pluralistic in character, and even though the proponents of mod-
ernism won numerous victories, nativist voices were growing inuential. As the 1930s
progressed and Italys partnership with Germany led to a series of steps culminating in
the promulgation of Nazi-style racial laws in 1938, Sarfatti recognized that she must ee
her homeland. She began to spend extended periods abroad, working for the Hearst
13.1paul.indd 893 12/2/05 7:39:00 AM

894 newspapers in the US in the mid-1930s. On November 14, 1938, she departed Italy once
and for all, without encountering any obstructions. Even if she exerted little inuence
over the fascist regime during its nal decade, Sarfatti had left such an indelible mark
that some would remember her as Mussolinis dictator of culture.22
This selection of pieces from Il Popolo dItalia follows the evolution of Sarfattis
thought between 1919 and 1926. The rst is an abridged version of a three-part re-
view of the Great National Futurist Exhibition, organized by Marinetti and held at the
Central Gallery of Art in Milan from March 11April 30, 1919. It points out how the
show actually marks a departure from futurism, and observes how artists like Sironi
and Funi were working to restore plastic values to art, looking to an earlier period
in which painting had been integral to architecture.23
The second piece, published in February 1920, bemoans the lack of representation
of members of the Italian avant-gardes at the 12th Venice Biennale. Because Sarfatti
had begun her career writing about this international exhibition, the Biennale became
the focal point of her critique of a contemporary arts scene on which modern Italian
painting was neglected, while artists from across the Alps were granted prominence.
This polemic represents the beginning of her successful campaign to bring recognition
to the artistic and cultural innovations taking place in contemporary Italian art.
The third piece, published in April 1921, celebrates an exhibition of Italian paintings
in Berlin, seizing the opportunity to call for a new art at once modern and rooted in
Italian artistic tradition. The artists it embraces had rejected futurisms advocacy of a
complete break with the past, choosing instead to look back to quattrocento art in the
pursuit of a sober and elementary forms of guration. In so doing, their work resonated
with Mussolinis general conviction that Italys cultural heritage should provide the
main basis for new artistic creation.24
The fourth piece concerns the foundation of the Italian Royal Academy, formalized
by a decree passed on January 7, 1926. Sarfattis account of this institutions mission
demonstrates the extent to which she believed in the states responsibility to enrich the
nations culture through the sponsorship of artists, intellectuals, and scientists.
The values that Sarfatti championed in her essay on the April 1921 Berlin show
provided the aesthetic grounds for the Novecento italiano, and her review of the latters
March 1926 exhibition is the fth and nal piece in this anthology. Richly illustrated,
it was published in La Rivista Illustrata di Il Popolo dItalia, a monthly supplement to
the newspaper. It represents Sarfattis most comprehensive account of this important
show.25
There are many strands of Sarfattis work that are barely touched upon here. There
is no trace of her contribution to building up the myth of Mussolini as il Duce. Nor are
there indications of her frequent attention to the role of women in modern life. What
these ve pieces document, however, is Sarfattis sustained effort to dene modern
Italy as a cultural nation.
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1. The Futurist Exhibition in Milan (April 4, 10, 13, 1919)26 895
I. Concerning Some General Principles (April 4, 1919)

First, art is not the reproduction of reality. Painting has nothing to do with pho-
tography.
These are commonplace, obvious truths, and in stating them one risks making a
pitiful show of oneself in front of individuals of less than mediocre intelligence. But if
we analyze how most of them understand these principles, we notice at once that the
essential core of these so-called truisms is a truth still hard to grasp for the common
mind.
Compromise has always pleased the public.
Water tends naturally to run downhill; and the human mind, just as naturally, fol-
lows the same law of minimal effort. But, by fortunate contradiction, there is also a
child in us who is eager to see the newest thing, to play with an unfamiliar toy. Men
thus express great gratitude to whoever presents them with what is already seen and
known, seasoned with a savvy, pleasing dose of obvious and supercial novelty. The
mind exerts no effort to acclimate itself to an essentially familiar environment, while
the eye is delighted by the distraction of a brilliant new thing that proves quickly ac-
cessible and readily assimilable. In painting and, more generally, in the plastic arts,
commercial success has been achieved by those who know how to reproduce the com-
mon features of reality with an illusionism that only slightly and supercially diverges
from photography, especially by softening a gure and smoothing distinctive angles
and harsh edges.
***
On the contrary, the avant-garde painting and sculpture of today doesnt even bother
to reproduce a man, woman, watermelon, or dog in the rigid photographic manner
of ordinary vision. Hence the anger of the public: a revolt founded upon mental slug-
gishness and deep disorientation.
Why might this be?
Painting and sculpture were the handmaidens of a greater unifying art throughout
the solemn centuries of austere unity and hierarchy that were the Middle Ages and
throughout all previous centuries: namely, architecture. At a certain inevitable point,
the architectural tree was destined to blossom with more graceful, subtle, and fragile
plastic gurations: the architrave, the metope, the capital, the spire, bas-relief garlands.
Sharpened and gloried, these ornaments culminated in statues.
Paintingfrescos, mosaics, altarpiecescame to inscribe itself in the at spaces
and to reveal its signicance and value in rhythmic lines and luminous colors.
What did the overly-praised Renaissance do? It set canvases standing on solitary
easels. Worse still, it uprooted statues from their necessary and logical architectural
setting.
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896 The disciplines of painting and sculpture developed over too many centuries and
millennia for grace to abandon them all at once. Architectural and exterior stylistic
needs continued to leave a rhythmic mark on their inner architecture: consciously so
in great works; unconsciously so in minor counterparts. But during this long era of
anarchic wandering, little by little, the sense and synthesis of stylistic logic became
obscured and obliterated.
As always, when substance runs short, it is replaced by sticking blindly and fanatically
to formulae. Ritual and superstition are born out of destinys rubble and ashes.
So developed the academicism and the rigid schematics of neo-classicism. And, as
a reaction, came the Romanticism of Delacroix and the realism of Courbet, to sweep
clean the terrain. They owed as a river does toward its mouth, into the magnicent
anarchic impetuosity of impressionism and post-impressionism.
With post-impressionism (Seurat, Signac, Pissarro), the process of fragmentation
and molecular decomposition to which the great constructive unity of painting was
subjected reached its apex, resulting in the breakdown of surface colored planes into
splintered rainbow shards with the stroke of a Divisionist brush.27
Analysis in painting has already produced everything that could be expected.
With Paul Czanne, not by chance a Frenchman of Italian origin, begins the age
and the classical task of undertaking a great synthetic reconstruction.
***
There is still plenty of confusion and chaos, plenty of hasty mucking up of commonly
accepted notions regarding art. Among artists themselves (those who have ideas) and
even among avant-garde painters, there are many who in their efforts to dene this
movement still struggle to understand their own aims. Perhaps more than a few of them
believe that they inhabit a realm of unbridled and unprecedented individual freedom.
And perhaps they are offended to be assigned to a school: a label that smacks of
reproach and suggests a lesser reputation.
They are mistaken. School does not mean the elimination of individual artistic
personality. Those endowed with more intelligence and more subtle and robust sensi-
tivity emerge, and will always emerge, from the pack. But it does mean coordination
and collaborative effort.
The lyrical composition and decomposition of form, which these avant-gardist
tendencies champion, may also mislead them. In reality, these formal operations are
permissible only so long as, serving the higher interests of art, they become the neces-
sary components of a more solemn recovery of uniform synthesis.
These laws of balance and proportion, these secrets of stylistic composition by means
of which individual talent owers and grafts itself upon the musical and geometrical
rhythms of profound and spontaneous destiny in diverse forms and for diverse reasons:
all the great epochs knew this secret of the grand style. We now stand on the verge of
a radical revision of artistic values. So the challenge faced in todays fervid vigil is to
13.1paul.indd 896 12/2/05 7:39:00 AM

rediscover this secret according to the intimate and essential laws of internal develop- 897
ment, not according to the external contours of a nonexistent architecture that is still
in swaddling clothes.
The duty of the Italian art of today and tomorrow will perhaps be that of rising to
this task, successfully carrying out this mission.
II. Concerning Some Painters (April 10, 1919)

Funi, Sironi, Russolo, Dudrevilleall are painters already known to the publicand,
among the younger and still unknown, Baldassari, Rosai, Primo Conti; and the witty and
amusing decorator Depero; as well as a sculptor of unexpected grace like Palafacchina:
how many exhibitions have taken place in Milan or, for that matter, in Italy, that bring
together such an abundance of serious and authentic artistic authorities?28
The public does well to swarm about the exhibition every day. Not everyone under-
stands, but many discuss and some reect. It is quite something.
I am not referring to pseudo-intellectual connoisseurs, brimming over with cultural
foolishness, but rather to the arrogant experts who holler despite the total lack of un-
derstanding of the plastic arts, their form, style, or time period. I speak for the genuine
public, free from pretexts and preconceptions, which attends the exhibition in order
to make an honest effort to understand. This public might well be more able to grasp
the intimate substance of the artworks exhibited if it could be persuaded that there is
no need for wholesale acceptance of all of futurism.
The puzzle alphabets [alfabeti a sorpresa], for example, are considered an ingenious
and amusing variation of the rebuses and anagrams already in vogue in the venerable
puzzle magazines.29
The Portrait of the Marchesa Casati by Giacomo Ballaamusing and extremely
faithful as a portrait with its complicated structures of wood, glass, and sparkling tin-
foilrepresents little more than the elaboration of an ephemeral, elegant, and ingenious
toy: an artistic plaything, if you wish, but without the construction of a work of art.30
To claim that every one of the thirty plus artists in this exhibition of Italian avant-
garde painting was an exceptional talent would be misleading. Some of them are. Better
(because more serious and honest) to acknowledge that not all the works of even the
best artists are completely successful. Even the most seasoned painter-cooks [pittori-
cuochi] are not always skilful in varying the unpublished recipes they prepare for the
public. Sometimes they stumble along even well-trodden paths. The risk is greatest
for the courageous explorers of unfamiliar paths, for those who seek out traces of an-
cient forgotten streets or try to pry open new passages toward horizons of unfamiliar
sensitivity. But for them, unlike the exploiters of tried and true formulas, some fertile
leads may result in the process (even by dint of error). Glory may well be achieved
even through failure.
***
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898 Why then insist on the fate and name of an exhibitor who brings the mild fanati-
cism of his own mediocrity to art or who is lled with good will, at once obstinate and
disparate, or gives evidence of a disinterested and respectable but unfortunate love
of painting?
Funi, Russolo, Dudreville, Sironi: these four well deserve to have people lingering
before their art works, together with the other two or three already named. (One might
perhaps add the names of Giudici, Lega, Venna, and other younger men to the list, if
only they could be judged on the basis of more or more substantial works.)31
***
Asia is very present in the chromatic schemes and assemblages of the set painter
Fortunato Depero: the Asia of Persian and Chinese miniatures interpreted through the
Russia of Lon Bakst and the ballets of Diaghilev, and especially through the corpulent
and gargantuan burst of Mikhail Larionovs mock-heroic laughter. There is a little of
Adolphe Sturzwages dissective cubism in his compositions, a bit of Larionov, again,
and a bit of Sironi in his conception of the human form, squared off in great masses
and geometric planes.32 I prefer his little drawings in black and white, where he reveals,
especially in the representations of animals, a solid sense of mass, and a purity of line
in the manner of Pisanello.33
An interior nocturnal scene in a tavern or an elegant night club also succeed in being
pleasant and tasteful, decorated with the tumultuous and not discordant uproar of the
at hues and lively colors of which he is fond, done deliberately to prompt a desire for
the distractions and eeting gaiety and forgetfulness of the moment.
***
Lets be clear: the true colorist doesnt cling to and accumulate colors in the name of
a sort of orgiastic, Dionysian insatiability. Rather, the profound colorist is an Apollonian
for whom, for example, a chord of grays, broken and exalted by sobbing improvised
reds or by a serene glitter of blues is enough to provoke and satisfy vibrations of intense
voluptuousness.34
In this rened and authentic sense, Sironi is a formidable colorist. The quality of
his grays is an acute innovation, delicate and balanced in tonal values, which I would
not hesitate to dene as classical. (Do you recall the intoxicating sobriety of the intense
coloration in Raphaels Transguration?)
Lets take the case of Sironis Group of HousesNight, and his Dancer, and Lady
in the Rain. It is difcult to explain in words the nostalgic preciousness and precise
harmony of the moderate golden tones, of the shadows, and the cool whites and blacks.
He knows how to juggle these elements without affectation or mannerism, placing
special emphasis on the contrast between the delicacy of color and a powerful sense
of force, verging on brutality, in the treatment of form.
13.1paul.indd 898 12/2/05 7:39:01 AM

Here are the sketches for Il Montello, newspaper of the trenches, with such auda- 899
cious elasticity of spirit, founded and directed by Massimo Bontempelli:35 Guglielmone
on a Horse is stylized through a succession of massive planes, themselves stylized and
exemplied, like a monument of Assyrian sculpture.
Next comes The Cyclist. Its edge is blue as the sky. Rectilinear apartments are cut
by the rectangular geometry of windows. In the middle of the street, under a bored and
immortal solitary street lamp, a rolling person arrives: a rapid ash of form in synthesis
and in movement; the cyclist, light and formidable, wheels and muscles, spinning rays
and curved body. His handlebar and hat shine in the sun.
***
Another approach to form, another sensibility, another unitary synthesis of move-

ment can be found in the work of Achille Funi. This young painter moves uently and
quickly towards his target with a clear sense of direction, a wonderful simplicity, and
an unwavering will not to allow himself either to disturb or to slow down his journey
with sentimental detours towards the past. He has the robust, square shoulders of the
pioneer who never gets exasperated or lost in minor details, but instead moves cleanly
and rmly in medias res.36 Funi is the artist in this group who seems to be setting out
with the fewest hesitations and uncertainties, with a distinctive emphasis on concise
and sober energy, towards denitive expressions of his personal style.
Look at the pleats of the tablecloth and the objects on the table in Family at the
Table; and at the characteristic deformation of heads under the diffuse light raining
down from a lamp. And then consider Construction of a Woman and above all, the
Motorcyclist: a work I would not call perfect and denitive, but certainly fully self-
sufcient. It leaves behind the realm of experimentation to dig deep into the core of
its own unmistakable vital force. Never before has the graphic and plastic synthesis of
movement been captured by means of such rm and precise lines. Funi has summed
up the sight of the motorbike with the greatest simplicity. The sky-blue haziness of the
air that palpitates and cools down in bluish hues around the hub of the wheels. The
speed of the wheels themselves establishes an elliptical spiral for our eyes. The riders
head is reduced to a mere pink-colored oval. The painter has implied all the particulars
by means of solid lines and supple color, forcing the viewer to guess.
Achille Funi solved these arduous and ultradelicate problems with a rm sense of
modern beauty, of precision and elegance that is both modern and classical.
***
A closing word for reection on the part of cultured, illustrious, and above all,
know-it-all, semi-witty critics:
50 years ago, everyone in Italy laughed at Daniele Ranzoni and Tranquillo Cre-
mona;37
13.1paul.indd 899 12/2/05 7:39:01 AM

900 40 years ago, everyone laughed at the Macchiaoli;38

30 years ago, everyone laughed at Giovanni Segantini;39
20 years ago, everyone laughed at Gaetano Previati;40
Today, everyone laughs at Funi, just like 10 years ago they laughed at Boccioni, and
still laugh at Carr.41
The last wordthe last laughdid not belong, does not belong, and will not belong
to the deriders of modern art.
2. The Italian Artistic Avant-garde and Invitations to the Venice

Biennale (February 29, 1920)
Matisse, in front; and just behind him, quite a few other Frenchmen from audaciously
innovative movements; not to mention Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Czanne: great names,
great works so dense with meaning that even hallowed death and the passage of time
could not blunt their combative and hard-fought pictorial modernity. It is said that these
will be the artists for whom the doors of the next Venice Art Biennale will open.
Perhaps owing more to circumstances than to his personal faults, Antonio Fradeletto
had recently allowed Venices periodic art exhibitions to come under the dominion of
a gang of mediocre ofcials from various countries.42
Vittorio Pica succeeded Fradeletto as Secretary General of Exhibitions. He seems
to have gone to Paris in the mode of an indebted subject to freshen up the shabby
canvases and statues of the foreign pavilions, which had become rather like replace
trimmings.43
The same can be said of Switzerland regarding its individual exhibitions of the work
of painters Buri and Hodler.44
***
France, and even Switzerland. But Italy?

Oh, Italy! In Venice, Versailles-style, one might think that Italy is a quantit nglige-
able.
We haveI do not mind repeating it forcefully for those who nd it comforting,
even chic to continue snobbishly to ignore itwe have, thank God, avant-garde art
in Italy.
Can you explain why, amidst all the avant-garde and innovative art from other
countries, we have allowed Italy to be forgotten? Or rather, did we deliberately decide
to ignore and exclude Italy?
***
Evidently there is no real reason why invitations are extended to foreigners who
have already achieved wealth, among other things, due to their access to an audience
13.1paul.indd 900 12/2/05 7:39:01 AM

more vast and cosmopolitan, more lively, shrewd, moneyed, and exible, like that found 901
in a city like Paris. Why, I say, are such enormous opportunities offered to foreign-
ers, while innovative Italian artists have to face the expense, risk, and uncertainty of
submitting their work for the verdict of a jury? The very artists whose honorable and
often heroic struggles against poverty, against a public smothered under a blanket of
opaque indifference, and against so-called connoisseurs and critics, armed with a
sneer of stilted incomprehension and malicious derision, are legion. What justice or
recognition might ever be expected from our usual juries? Italian artists have good
reason to refusethey do so energeticallythe humiliation and degradation of this
disparity in treatment, which works to their detriment.
Yet there are Italian invitees to the coming 1920 Biennale and their numbers are
far from negligible. Who are they? The usual familiar and mostly rancid names and,
in addition, numerous youth, by only those who have been tamed.
Pomi is one of them. He is a Venetian who remakes Ettore Tito timidly and cunningly
by moonlight, with more pettiness and less high-class smoothness. In the postwar year
1920, can you imagine a Petrarchan whose Petrarch is named Ettore Tito?45
I wouldnt hesitate to state that if the Venice Biennial goes forward as currently
planned and if its guiding lights do not aim for more balanced, reasonable, and healthy
outcome, it will be the most disastrous assault on Italian art that has ever occurred on
Italian soil.
Until present, the Venice Biennali maintained a staid, and in a certain sense, tradi-
tional appearance, at once routine and ofcial: traditional not in the sense of any true
and great tradition. One could deplore the event, but it at least remained consistent
and, given its unilateral tendencies, it maintained a certain uniformity of impartial bal-
ance among countries. It was, in this respect at least, unassailably correct and honest.
Today that is no longer the case.
***
The Venice Biennali are not the drawing-room or private homes of the Secretary
Generals who have directed them over the years, where they can give free reign to
their personal likes and dislikes.
They are, instead, public undertakings, conducted and subsidized by the public
expenditure of cities and the state. With the money, that is, of the Italian taxpayer.
Therefore, a rigid and objective criteria and impartiality are among the key qualities
required of whoever directs them.
Whether or not the Secretary harbors sympathies for avant-garde Italian art mat-
ters little with respect to his duty to invite representative artists. From the moment he
drops the veil of modest reserve towards the art of the combative extreme of Frances
left, with what right can he exclude from the list of invited artists Italians in the land
of Italy whose effort is essentially synchronous and parallel with that of their foreign
brethren?
13.1paul.indd 901 12/2/05 7:39:01 AM

902 Artists like Carr, Sironi, Funi, Sofci, Dudreville, Depero, Russolo, Severini, De
Chirico, Balla, have every right to enter through the front door of an exhibition whose
doors are thrown open to the likes of Henri Matisse.46 This is no longer a question of art,
but of common sense and simple rectitude on the part of an ofcial who is, after all, the
administrator of someone elses money. Accordingly, he is not permitted to spend such
monies according to his own private whims, demonstrating partiality to somewhether
great foreign artists or tame little local darlingsand hostility to others.
The long and painful experiences of modern history should have taught us something,
given the systematic repudiation by ofcial exhibitions, galleries, and museums, of works
of art recognized later for their artistic merit, originality, and great signicance. It is
high time that men belonging to the establishment learn modesty and stop claiming
that they possess infallible judgment. This system has made too many outrageous errors
on too many occasions. The problem isnt with the not-so-illuminated preferences of
individual director Joe Blow [Tizio] or his secretary John Doe [Caio]. 47 We are resigned
to bad choices; they are inevitable. (Axiom: A successful man is inevitably a man who
has been surpassed.) It is choice itself that we, of course, deplore: the right that some
men claim for themselves to referee trends, fashions, and artistic schools.
***
Does avant-garde painting exist in Italy today?

This is the question; the only real question that a man presiding over an institution
like the Venice Biennale should have the right to pose. This art exists. It has been
around now for years and shown a vital tenacity and undeniable combativeness. Who
are its greatest, most famous, and inuential exponents?
These are the questions that it is right and proper to pose. Whether the honorable
secretary is subsequently free to shrug his shoulders and declare that the work of
these artists is idiotic, empty, or execrable, matters not. He is entirely free, as a critic,
to berate them or ignore them, reserving his enthusiasm for such an innovator as
Edoardo Dalbono.48 No one questions his nor his successors freedom of taste, good
or bad though it may be.
What we formally contestwe hope to have a minority on our side made up of the
most lively and sensitive individuals who deserve to be taken seriously by the press
and by Italys intelligent and impartial artists, even those who are not innovativeis
the right to deny avant-garde Italian artists the possibility of proving themselves in the
presence of a large Italian and international public. All the more so in an exhibition
in which one grants this very right to a Frenchman like Henri Matisse, who is no less
violently abhorred, ignored, and decried in France by the ofcial art world than are
Funi or Sironi, Sofci, or Dudreville among Italians.
13.1paul.indd 902 12/2/05 7:39:01 AM

3. Letter from Berlin: An Afrmation of Italian Art 903
(April 30, 1921)
A splendid afrmation of new trends in Italian plastic and pictorial art recently took
place in Berlin, thanks to the initiative and merit of Mario Broglio, who organized a
rich and organic exhibition of the leading artists of the Roman journal Valori Plastici
at the Kronprinz Palais.49
The journals work hinges on such names as Carr, Picasso, de Chirico, Sofci, Melli,
Morandi, and Archipenko and requires little in the way of illustrations. It is one of the
most agreeable and signicant artistic forces combatting the illusion of novelty.
Through a curious paradox, the very names that were previously leading the charge in
favor of various artistic -isms are today leading the turn towards pure classicism. They
are lining up against the theories of Monet that preach that painting should limit itself
to soliciting the sensuality of the eye. Instead they are exploring the supreme harmony
of mass, the profound renement of an ensemble of well-constructed forms.
The theatrical mannerisms of Impressionism, Cubism, dynamism, . . . fanfarism,
led art to forget charm and softness, and to replace the picturesque and the lyrical
with the grotesque and the simplistic. By returning to the painting of an earlier era, to
its uncertain virginity, to its faithful imitation of visual reality, what is lost in outward
appearance will be regained in substance, spiritual composure, power, and nobility.
Italian art must return to method, order, and discipline. It must achieve a denite,
full-bodied form, a precise sense of gravity, analogous to and convergent with that of
the ancients; independent of foreign fashions and mercantile considerations.
Originality and tradition are not contradictory terms. By returning to the purest tra-
ditions of Giottos, Masaccios, Paolo Uccellos, one does not renounce the originality of
modern times, but only polishes off the rust and puries our art of imitative alloys.
This is the philosophy, the spiritual program of the new school, conveyed in the
Berlin exhibition by names like de Chirico, Francalancia, Morandi, Carr, Martini,
and Zur-Muehlen.50
The largest number of works in the show are by De Chirico. He stands out for his
rough boldness, his return to tradition, his attempt to achieve classicism by means of
geometric technique. He is the rst intrepid gure to abandon modern curves. Being
the rst, it was perhaps inevitable that he should fall prey to the original sin of imita-
tive mannerism.
Morandi, on the other hand, is the poet of form; an Italian spirit saturated with
kindness. With rustic grace, ingenuous and fresh, he practices the art of color in order
to approach nature. His still lifes are without a doubt the most beautiful objects in
the exhibition.
As always, Carr is powerful but is too philosophical-critical to be spontaneous
and lyrical at the same time. His works are more interesting as profound studies of a
dramatic state of mind than as the products of a pictorial instinct.
With a variety of canvases and sculptures, Francalancia, Zur-Muehlen, Martini, and
Zabbrine complete the small world of new Italian art: a world that has captured the
13.1paul.indd 903 12/2/05 7:39:01 AM

904 interest of the entire Berlin arts community and conrmed that our awakening knows
no boundaries. Rather, its light is radiating in all directions.51
4. Promises and Actions: The Italian Academy (January 15, 1926)
Having faced problems of necessity and moved them toward resolution, I have
turned my attention to addressing questions of greatness. This is how the head of
the Government [Mussolini] responded to a heated appeal from the National Board
of Directors of the Corporation of the Plastic Arts on 27 October of last year. 52 In so
doing, he took on the obligation of placing himself at the head of a grand and energetic
crusade for the benet of modern art. After the Battle for Grain, less urgent but no
less necessary is a campaign for modern art.53
The speech given last December 31 lays the groundwork for one of the rst chal-
lenges of greatness: building the new Rome.54
Respect ancient Rome, restore it, and leave as much of its noble space intact as
possible. The crowd, that dense and shameless human swarm gathering at the foot
of the citys ruins, has beautiful and sacred vital needs that cannot be ignored. But
respond to them by means of an appropriate, freshly built place, so that the new city
and the old can coexist in harmony, with a variety of interconnections (narrow, digni-
ed, majestic) between the two.
When France took over Tunis in 1885 (where we Italians should have beenalas
for us!), everything worked just as it should. Not a single stone was demolished in the
ancient Arab city core, which was left serene and secure in all its local color. Even the
smallest of picturesque and artistic delights found themselves safe behind the ancient
walls of the souk and the Casbah (the castle). But outside the ancient city, toward the
harbor, a new city was born: a city free and spacious, with wide tree-lined avenues
and large open-plan houses designed according to western concepts of airiness, light,
hygiene, and creature comfort. The old was not maliciously sacriced to the new. Nor
was the new twisted, altered, and falsied into the ancient.55
According to Theodor Mommsen, second only to the great historians of the Empire
(Titus, Suetonius, and Tacitus) in his understanding of the spirit of imperial Rome,
Rome can only be considered as a universal idea.56 For this same reason, the idea of
the empiretoday less a material reality than a consolidated spiritual ideal-in-the-mak-
ingashes in the consciousness of fascism like a profound intuition.
This imperial unity of Italys soul and self-awareness is also evoked and promised in
the recent decree announcing the foundation of the Italian Academy. At issue is not
an imitation or a servile and unoriginal (and, therefore, useless) copy of the French
Academy, conceived of by Cardinal Richelieu three centuries ago [ . . . ].57 Rather,
what is envisaged will be similar to the Institut de France, graced by the genius of
Richelieu, Mazarin, Colbert, and the French Convention in the course of its history,
where, thanks to the recognition accorded the visual arts alongside the scientic disci-
plines, creation was consecrated as the key to the life of the spirit.58 Still at its infancy
in the seventeenth century, science today impregnates our entire lives, not only with
13.1paul.indd 904 12/2/05 7:39:02 AM

its ndings, inventions, and discoveries (whether in the elds of the physical sciences 905
or mechanical applications), but also thanks to the vaster, more rigorous forms and
methods with which it infuses contemporary thought. Accordingly, the Academy of
the fatherland of Galileo and Leonardo will be composed ex aequo of twenty scientists,
twenty artists, and twenty men of letters.59
Italy achieved greatness when there were thirty centers of lively, impassioned, intel-
ligent, and energetic work in the sciences, the arts, and letters among its universities
and among the courts of its magnicent rulers. Then, because there were too many
centers or because they declined, so too did the arts, sciences, and letters. And Rome
was no longer the capital. And no other city or center achieved the decisive, crucial
importance of Versailles, Paris, or London. So much so, that Italys artistic and literary
capital lay beyond the Alps for the entire nineteenth century. From Paris came the
Word as well as fashion.
Why so? Above all, because the difference between sleep-inducing provinces and
a capital that energizes is determined by the vital importance that is attributed (or
not attributed) to the idea of art, to problems of culture and beauty, of the spirit and
of ideas.
It is essential that, between a dance and a glass of champagne, the bejeweled lady and
the elegant gentleman speak of art and literature; that the industrial tycoon feel obliged
to discuss these matters with his colleagues and tablemates at the annual banquet of his
management board; that [ . . . ] the banker and his wife, and the bankers mistress, as
well as the suitors of the banker and his wife, assess the value of fashionable paintings,
statues, books with no less zeal than they do the value of nancial undertakings at the
exchange [ . . . ] Why not? Isnt it essential that every lady from the provinces, every
Madame Bovary thirsty for love and its elegant accompaniments, be made aware of
certain names and certain works, or that every coarse merchant of silkworm cocoons,
grain, or oxen feels obliged to demonstrate an interest in these matters if he wants to
complete a sale when an important city client comes to visit?60
Fashion, artice, vanity fair, snobbery? Certainly, they play a role. Art and litera-
tureall things of the spirit including the general principles of sciencemust become
objects of snobbery and fashion in order to become basic necessities, as fundamental
as they are widespread. It is right and good that Baudelaire exalted Brummel and
dandyism.61 Snobbery has a sovereign duty to create the atmosphere that, in turn,
informs the intellectual environment. Every posture is the confession and profession
of an ideal. Anything goes so long as it conforms to the ideal. Errant judgments, dilet-
tantism, superciality? Of course, they all abound. Each real achievement implies a
decline, a violation: the desecration of an unsullied ideal. But an ideal becomes fecund,
which is to say vital, only thanks to this contamination. Virgins enclosed within solitary
convents are deprived of the glory of maternity.
Something of this urry of action, turmoil, and expanding interest is already evident
in Italy so far as ancient art is concerned. Sufce it to compare todays atmosphere with
that of forty or even twenty years ago. How many collectors were there then? Today,
there are legions. The much mocked war-proteering was useful in this regard. One
13.1paul.indd 905 12/2/05 7:39:02 AM

906 may think little of buying books by the meter to furnish study shelves or imitations
of art works by the kilo for libraries and salons. But at least they were buying. And to
buy means to become engaged. The book, once acquired, nds its pages cut and leafed
through. One begins to read, to get comfortable with books. One develops the habit
of looking at a painting and begins to build a natural familiarity with the work. After
all, those who have made something from nothing and learned how to hold onto their
wealth are no imbeciles. Taste is formed and rened by dint of looking and buying, by
dressing up ones opinions and tastes in money, by endorsing the opinions and tastes
of ones advisors, by dint of committing blunders. How many similar (and sometimes
celebrated) shifts from initial crude and tentative rst steps to shrewd and clever deci-
sion making, have we seen rapidly unfold before our very own eyes?
Now, what happened to the market for Titians and for more or less authentic an-
tiques and furniture needs to extend to modern art. Illegitimate counterfeits of true
intelligence, true talent, true modern genius will triumph initially. I am well aware that
all human works are imperfect and defective. But woe betide he who would limit us
to negation and inertia because of this acknowledged and uncontested imperfection
of humankind.
It is necessary to overcome this impasse.
It is necessary to have faith.
It is necessary to ght.
***
To ght so long as one can do battle, whether this means fencing, a duel, or facing
machine-gun re. To ght seriously, gloriously, authentically, amidst the clangor of
arms, under the tense and impassioned attention of judges!! To do battle with swords or
cannons or even against windmills is a marvelous risk or at least an amusing adventure.
But to perpetually bang ones head against the same deaf punching bag of indifference,
ironic insensitivity, and materialistic skepticism: such unfortunately has been our lot
over the last fty years: a mortifying undertaking, a labor of lunatics that leads to mad
fury or dejected atony and mortal inertia.
The greatest merit of futurism was that it jolted this public indifference twenty years
ago with the force of its sts (and not only metaphorically so).62 It is necessary to keep
todays public awake in a positive, sustained manner by less drastic means.
An Academys appointments yield multiple results. They breed hopes and disappoint-
ments, aspirations and ambitions, intrigues, applause, and condemnation. The prizes
that it confersboth those that it actually confers and those that it refusesprovide a
superb showcase that magnetically attracts all eyes. It is a hearth, a center of interest,
a perpetual subject of conversation.
Too many people busy themselves with politics, with the conceited incompetence
of big words mastered by none, assembling in too many workshops as well as in less
open gatherings. To discuss art, science, or letters, it is necessary to have at least read
something more than just the news. The art of a man of state, ruler, and shepherd of
13.1paul.indd 906 12/2/05 7:39:02 AM

the people, does not consist in suffocating human nature (which will always avenge 907
itself) but instead in channeling that nature toward higher or more fruitful outlets. The
Italian Academy represents a formidable step toward the worship of culture, ideas in
general, deeds of the spirit, moral events and conquests. It represents a formidable
push toward the precise and concise study of disciplineseven the most high, the
most ideal of disciplinesalways approached with a scrupulous respect for technique
and even love. (I employ the word love even at the risk of having dispensed it too
lightly and easily).
Verbal bombast and mental slothpassions more closely intertwined than one might
expect because the bluff of maximum result is always sought via minimal effortcon-
tinue to poison Italian life. They have unleashed themselves without restraint in the
domain of political theory on a terrain that is at once subjective and arbitrary. What
if one were to discuss these general topics in greater depth, topics for which serious
preparation is indispensable?
***
The path to the summit of thought and creation in the sciences, letters, and arts is
arduous and fraught with sacrices. The more one climbs unexplored paths, the smaller
the number of men capable of following such a path, of comprehending it, of judging
it. This exile from the hot, noisy communion of sheep into the rapture of great solitude
is harsh. So easy, by contrast, is the inertia and make-do attitude that accepts any and
all outcomes, that avoids the distilling process implied by great effort sustained by per-
sonal drive [talentaccio] (something the supercial and the simpleminded, always the
majority, dismiss as mere spontaneity). The frozen thin air of high altitudes freezes
and rarees the enthusiasms of the majority, unprepared for work that is to be endured
and enjoyed profoundly. That air is the bearer of the new.
Who would tackle such hardshipthe mocking of fools, poverty, the jests of the
rich, and the long delay in achieving recognitionif he were not sustained by a sense
of the vital importance and urgent necessity of his own work? This can come only
from the self. But to stimulate and sustain this longing for betterment, to ght off
discouragement and the lure of desertion, requires an inner circle of initiates able to
appreciate the effort and to nourish it [ . . . ] For this inner circle, the more formally
recognized and consecrated its authority, the greater its impact on the general public
and the latters judgment.
Even the Academy will sometimes make mistakes (though it will not always err).
But its errors will translate a higher logic and reason into the realm of deeds and ideas.
Even its potential errors will provoke discussions, explanations, and passions of the
highest usefulness.
But keep in mind that one of Florences neighborhoods was long ago dubbed Vil-
lage of the Merry [Borgo Allegri] because a minor painter and former shepherd
had painted a beautiful Madonna that the people carried triumphantly through the
city streets! Those people sensed that the life of Italy depends upon its art. A Madonna
13.1paul.indd 907 12/2/05 7:39:02 AM

908 both human and divine sundered the shackles of inert rigidity. And Italian life suddenly
shone under the sunlight of a new grandeur.
It is this atmosphere of sensitivity and passion and sharing that we now require.
5. At the First Exhibition of the Novecento Italiano (March 1926)63
There was a true Italian art in the trecento (which still exists), the quattrocento, the
cinquecento. Then came the eclipse. The seicento was all Spanish, Flemish, and Dutch,
and, eventually, French. Artistic hegemony in the settecento and ottocento was in the
hands of English and French citizens.64
A secret premonition tells us that the novecento will once again be a century of
Italian art. This premonition was born with the men and women who came to life in
the rst decade of the century. They were the grandchildren of the great generation
that made modern Italy: the children of a discouraged and relatively inert generation
[ . . . ]. Hypnotized by German Realpolitik between 1870 to 1900, their immediate
descendents treated the most active and worthy workers to nothing but bitterness,
while allowing the cunning to busy themselves with rhetoric and commerce.
Faith is the substance of hope and a strong and secure premonition of greatness
in the spirit of those mysterious diviners known as artists. When faith spreads and
becomes universal, it is already in and of itself the reason and cause for greatness to
come, afrming its purpose, expressing its promise.
The phrase Novecento italiano isnt intended to dene a tendency or to christen a
group or to bind together a school or a sect. The label denotes a proud striving toward
the creation of a singular style of art or living visage for the new century that gathers
together all of Italys strengths: an imprint, a style, a distinctive Italian face that can
endure for centuries. As if the members of a militia, these artists dedicated themselves
with tireless love to creating a new tradition worthy of Italys ancient past.
The exhibition that the Head of Government inaugurated a few days ago in Milan is
the rst attempt to sound the roll call of this new militia. The call is crucial inasmuch
as it will ensure that the lead cohort senses itself united, compact, endowed with cour-
age, and emboldened. If nineteenth-century French art was so much more daring than
ours, the reason was Italys lack of a feverish focal point, a hearth heated by risk and
bold ideas. Our artists toiled in isolation. Their efforts were scattered into the void,
disappearing without an echo. Often they pulled back, discouraged, into their own
shells to ounder and grope in the darkness. The result was some works of singular
intimacy and deep interiority. Yet they lacked systematic construction and were without
consequence. There were stupendous fragments, but never a great edice. At least
one of themFattori or Ranzoni, Grandi or Cremona, or the young Medardo Rosso
when he still resided in Milan?uncovered a patch of the heavens but never managed
to open a path on earth either for themselves or for others.65
***
13.1paul.indd 908 12/2/05 7:39:02 AM

The rst exhibition of the Novecento italiano starts off with homage to the pio- 909
neers of the late ottocento with a retrospective of the work of Medardo Rosso: those
unfortunate pioneers who, at best, received belated recognition in their fatherland.
Medardo Rosso had to leave for France in order to nd work, struggle, and glory. Only
now does he return among us, fatigued by the many years of difculties. And still he
is appreciated only by a few.
His is an art of sensitivity, it is often said. Certainly, sensitivity plays a major role in
his work. But within him there is austere courage, science, and profound experience,
all of which permit him to give clear expressions to his sensitivity. He rejects all that
is ornament and ller, sticking rigorously to his rst direct impression. Thats why he
still adheres to an extreme type of impressionism. He rejects as inferior and detestable
any and all art that subjects the geniuss pure acts of intuition and deep feelings to the
labor of intellect and willful elaboration.
This has nothing to do with laziness. Here lies the knot that differentiates Rosso
from actual and eventual imitators. They cultivate hermetic airs yet trafc in what is
facile. Rosso contemptuously rejects the facile, which is to say all secondary and exterior
products of mere technique, in order to excavate and closely scrutinize the deep feel-
ings that he brings to the surface from the depths of a trembling mysterious spring with
remarkable artistic delicacy. There is something medium-like in the apparitions that he
evokes by means of wax or bronze. But nothing unsteady. To an attentive spectator, the
mystery of the spirit is captured by means of the play of light in the material, by means
of denite, concrete, and certain signs [segni]: signs that, for all their distinctiveness,
remain as still as those of a Donatello.66 The sublime head of the Ecce Puer, especially,
is as great as an Egyptian sculpture from the era of the Pharaohs. Like that ancient art,
it omits all superuous things and homes in on the essential.
***
Between an artist like Medardo Rosso and one like Adolfo Wildt, the divide is great.67
Wildts art refuses to host corners of mystery or shadow. Where Rosso barely grazes the
wax with an almost feminine delicacy in order to confer a sense of shadow or revealing
light, Wildt thrusts the scalpel into hard marble, determined to prove that it cannot
resist penetration. To worship mystery by means of respect or to confront mystery in
order to uncover it: these are two styles, both intent on overcoming the inert heaviness
of material, demanding of it some beautiful secret of life. The solitary memorial to our
poor comrade that adorns the rooms of Il Popolo dItalia, exhibited in the show, is a
beautiful example of Wildts logical, incisive, and arduous art.68
Domenico Rambelli from Faenza represents yet another artistic temperament,
simpler, purer, and closer to mainstream sculptural tradition.69 He tends toward gran-
diosity and monumentality as evidenced by the powerful lines found in the fragments
of his colossal monument to Viareggios fallen soldiers.70 His cheerful and exuberant
temperament is perhaps more clearly on display in the playful cartoon-like portrait of
honorable Ciarlantini.71
13.1paul.indd 909 12/2/05 9:27:02 AM

910 The challenges of religious-monumental decoration are confronted in Antonio

Marainis Stations of the Cross, designed for the cathedral of Rodi.72 There is a tempt-
ing supercial seductiveness to this decorative trend to which Romolo Romanelli and
Arturo Martini also succumb, and, to a lesser degree, the Tuscans Amerigo Focacci
and Libero Andreotti.73
More profound are two heads, entitled The Blind Woman and The Old Man by
Evaristo Boncinelli, a marvelous artisan and self-taught sculptor whose cruel illness
has hindered his art.74
His compact modeling clings tightly to the reality of form, which is to say to the
truth of spirit.
Painting hesitates at a crossroads between impressionism and renewed neoclassical
certainty. One could say that the drama of modern painting consists in not renouncing
the modern while attempting to infuse it with the eternal. To dene the actual momen-
tum of the human spirit and our modern vision through enduring things; to untangle
the essential, which alone is simple and immutable, from the tangle of eeting and
complicated impressions.
Tosi, Carr, Sofci, Sironi, and Funi confront this problem in various ways in both
their landscapes and human gures.75 Among the landscape painters, Tosi gives the
purest and most original solution by means of his plain and sober modesty. He departs
from impressionism, and arrives at constructionism. By force of simplicity, by dint of
proceeding from the momentary toward the essential, his spontaneous and limpid
art nds forms and models itself on classical accents. Carr is impeded by his excess
renement and archaism; but also in him such trends attain notable lyrical heights.
His Lecce, acquired from the Gallery of Milan, is a work worthy of a museum.76 The
Tuscans, with Ardengo Sofci at the head of the pack, remain more closely tied to
the reality of their land. Besides which Tuscany, with its dry limpidity and the elegant
thinness of its lineaments, offers examples and warnings of inimitable style.
Regarding Sironi, I dont know why people continue to repeat the obligatory truisms
about his seventeenth-century style and putative Caravaggioism.77 Certain patinas,
certain softnesses of tone in the arrangement of tawny and gray shades do recall this
or that form and color. But Sironis paintings are glazed, compact, without ourishes
of brushstrokes carelessly applied, and his spirit is austere and sad, entirely lacking in
magniloquence, enclosed in a rmness that I would describe as taciturn.
There is a desire for grandeur and splendor in other works belonging to the Mila-
nese group, the core nucleus of the Novecento, cases in point being two of the three
canvases by Achille Funi. In the third, the Venetian mask, there is an airy lightness
and spirited manner that display a perfectly palpable mastery acquired less by study
than possessed by instinct.
Alberto Salietti has taken many forward steps.78 Beside him are Pietro Marussig and
Ubaldo Oppi with their female nudes of great carriage and of grand style; Casorati with
certain new revelations of an art that, no longer chromatic and at in its approach to
form, now also investigates corporeal plasticity.79 And Virgilio Guidi, Ren Paresce,
Monti, Piatti, Esodo Pratelli, Achille Lega, Tozzi, Trombadori, and Esio Oppo with the
13.1paul.indd 910 12/2/05 7:39:03 AM

Carabinieri and with the self-portrait done in a beautiful array of colors; Nino Berto- 911
letti, Socrate, Sinpico, Viani, De Grada, Dani, the most delicate Costetti, Montanari,
Battaini; many names, many works, notable and praiseworthy.80 The median level of
the show is very high and this matters a great deal because geniuses are not created,
but talents can be nurtured. And genius itself is thereby encouraged and elevated.
Leonetto Cappiello sent his posters to Italy from Paris as a greeting, bringing from
the French metropolis the fervor of life and a smile of art and joy.81
Notes
1. Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 19221945 (Berkeley, Los Angeles,
London: University of California Press, 1992), 22930.
2. Philip V. Cannistraro and Brian R. Sullivan, Il Duces Other Woman (New York: William Morrow
and Company, 1993), 331. This introduction is much indebted to Cannistraro and Sullivans work.
3. Nancy Harrowitz, Margherita Sarfatti and the Culture of Fascism, Il Veltro 40:12 (Janu-
aryApril 1996), 143.
4. Cannistraro and Sullivan, Il Duces Other Woman, pp. 3033, 41, 56, 63.
5. On Sarfattis salon, see Barbara Sarfatti, Lo studio del mercoled sera, in Da Boccioni a Sironi:
Il mondo di Margherita Sarfatti, ed. Elena Pontiggia (Milan: Skira, 1997), 7577.
6. Sarfatti published two pieces in Avanti! on this exhibition, Dal sepolcro dei vivi (9 June 1914)
and I pittori delle nuove tendenze (17 June 1914), discussed briey in Cannistraro and Sullivan, Il
Duces Other Woman, 93, 117.
7. Cannistraro and Sullivan, Il Duces Other Woman, 139, 204. Although Margherita Sarfatti and
Mussolini used discretion in their handling of the affair, it was widely known about in the party and
in Italian society. Cannistraro and Sullivan suggest that both Margherita and Cesare Sarfatti had
extramarital relations.
8. Sarfatti handed over editorial responsibilities to Mussolinis nephew Vito in 1934 (Cannistraro
and Sullivan, Il Duces Other Woman, 195, 252, 286, 417).
9. Cannistraro and Sullivan, Il Duces Other Woman, 14344, 193, 219.
10. Marla Susan Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1998), 3435.
11. Cannistraro and Sullivan, Il Duces Other Woman, 223.
12. Mussolinis remarks were quoted in Alla Mostra del Novecento. Parole di Mussolini sullarte e
sul governo, Il Popolo dItalia, 27 March 1923, reprinted in Rossana Bossaglia, Il Novecento italiano:
Storia, documenti, iconograa (Milan: Feltrinelli Editore, 1979), 8384. Unless otherwise noted, all
translations in this piece are our own.
13. Sarfatti, Larte e il fascismo, in Giuseppe Pomba, La Civilt Fascista (Torino: Unione Tipi-
graco Editrice Torinese, 1928), 217, translated as Art and Fascism, trans. Olivia E. Sears and
Jeffrey T. Schnapp, in A Primer of Italian Fascism, ed. Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Lincoln and London:
University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 250.
15. For a full list of participants and reproductions of the works displayed, see Novecento Italiano:
Catalogo della prima mostra darte (Milano, 1926).
16. Cannistraro and Sullivan, Il Duces Other Woman, 304, 315, 327.
17. When Giuseppe Luigi Pomba published La Civilt Fascista (1928), Sarfatti was chosen to
write the piece on Art and Fascism, where she laid out her views of the relationships between art
and the state. See Larte e il fascismo, translated by Olivia E. Sears and Jeffrey T. Schnapp as Art
and Fascism, in A Primer of Italian Fascism, ed. Schnapp, 24255.
19. La relazione del Primo Ministro sullAccademia dItalia, Il Popolo dItalia, 3 February 1926,
p. 3.
13.1paul.indd 911 12/2/05 7:39:03 AM

912 20. Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 111.
21. While it is well known that anti-Semitism became a part of fascist doctrine after the Rome-Berlin
Axis in 1938, well before that there were inuential gures in the fascist regime who worried about
Judaisms threat. Sarfatti worked hard to distinguish the aims of Zionism from those of most Italian
Jews, asking individual Italian Jews to pledge their allegiance to Italy and thereby attempt to thwart
attempts to erode Jews Italianness (Cannistraro and Sullivan, Il Duces Other Woman, 34347).
22. Cannistraro and Sullivan, 334, 384, 38788, 51019. See also her obituary in Corriere della
Sera, which notes that many called her dictator [dictatrice] of the gurative arts (Arnaldo Geraldini,
Si spenta Margherita Sarfatti, biografa di Benito Mussolini, Corriere della Sera, 31 October 1961,
p. 8).
24. Schnapp and Spackman (eds.), Selections from the Great Debate on Fascism and Culture,
235, reprinted in A Primer of Italian Fascism, ed. Schnapp, 207.
25. Other pieces she published in Il Popolo dItalia concerning this exhibition include Alcune
considerazioni intorno alla prima Mostra del Novecento italiano, 12 febbraio 1926, p. 3; Alcuni
scultori alla Mostra del Novecento, 26 febbraio 1926, p. 3; and Alcuni problemi e alcuni pittori alla
Mostra del Novecento, 12 marzo 1926, p.3.
26. For a complete listing of works in this show, as well as a number of introductory essays by F.
T. Marinetti, see the original catalogue, Grande Esposizione Nazionale Futurista: Quadri, Complessi
plastici, Architettura, Tavole parolibere, Teatro plastico futurista e Moda futurista (Milan: Galleria
Centrale dArte, 1919). We have translated only the rst two parts of this three-part review; the third,
titled Third and Last Article, appeared in Il Popolo dItalia on 13 April 1919.
27. Georges Pierre Seurat (18591891), Paul Signac (18631935), and Jacob Abraham Camille Pis-
sarro (18301903) were French practitioners of post-impressionism. Seurat is known for his technique
of pointillism, applying pigment in small dots of paint. Like pointillism, Divisionism breaks elds of
color into brushstrokes, leaving the eye to reconstruct the colored image.
28. Sarfatti rst lists four painters central to futurism, and later in the essay she discusses their
exhibited works: Achille Funi (18901972), Mario Sironi (18851961), Luigi Russolo (18851947), and
Leonardo Dudreville (18851975). Then she turns to Roberto Marcello Baldessari (18941965), Ottone
Rosai (18951957), Primo Conti (19001988), Fortunato Depero (18921960). The catalogue does
not give a listing for Palafacchina, but it does include an illustration of one sculptural work, Dancer.
29. After an explanation of the genre by Marinetti, the catalogue for the exhibition included three
puzzle alphabets: one by the poet Francesco Cangiullo (18881977), one by Pasqualino, and one
produced by their collaboration.
30. Giacomo Balla (18711958) made Marchesa Casati with Eyes of Mica and a Heart of Stone
in 1915.
31. The artists here are Luigi (Gigi) De Giudici (18871955), Achille Lega (18991934), and Lucio
Vnna (Giuseppe Landsmann, 18971974).
32. Sarfatti mentions four artists afliated with the Ballets Russes, a project that brought together
avant-garde artists, designers, dancers, and musicians to create a modern ballet derived from folklore,
cubism, futurism and constructivism: Lon Bakst (18661924), painter and stage designer; Sergei
Diaghilev (18721929), choroeographer; and Mikhail Fedorovich Larionov (18811964), painter. In
mentioning Adolphe Sturzwage, Sarfatti may be referring to Lopold Sturzwage (Survage) (18791968),
Russian painter, designer and illustrator, known for abstract compositions. Of the eighty-four works
by Depero that appear in the catalogue, there were eight costumes for The Song of the Nightingale, a
production by the Ballets Russes of the work by Igor Stravinsky. That the second mention of Larionov
reads Sarionoff in the original seems to be a misprint.
33. Pisanello (c.13951455) was one of the foremost practitioners of International Gothic style in
Italy during the fteenth century.
34. Sarfattis comparison here is based on Friedrich Nietzsches distinction in The Birth of Tragedy
(1872) between the Apollinian and Dionysian elements, whose duality, he argues, drives the develop-
ment of art. The Dionysian, he associates with intoxication, ecstasy, and enchantment: it is the realm
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of music and dance (non-imagistic arts), and involves self-forgetfulness and revelry associated with 913
the Greek Bacchic choruses or the dancing crowds of the Middle Ages. The Apollinian, on the other
hand, is best represented by sculpture, and is connected to the world of dreams. Nietzsche emphasizes
Apollos association with sunlight, truth, and perfection, and Apollinian art exhibits restraint, a freedom
from wilder emotions, a sense of calm repose, and even sublime expression. Friedrich Nietzsche, The
Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967).
35. Sironi founded Il Montello, a short-lived bi-monthly published from September to November
1918 for soldiers at the Piave front, with the futurist writer Massimo Bontempelli (18781960). Emily
Braun has noted that Sarfatti likely inuenced Sironi to take up the task of beginning and illustrating
Il Montello (Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism [Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2000], 38, 231).
36. Sarfatti uses the Latin in medias res, or in the middle of things.
37. Daniele Ranzoni (18431889) and Tranquillo Cremona (18371878) were known for portraits
and occasional literary-historical subjects, and for paintings full of luminosity. The two at times shared
a studio, and each has acknowledged inuence from the other.
38. The Macchaioli were Florentine impressionist painters.
39. Giovanni Segantini (18581899) was an Italian painter and draughtsman, and exponent of
Divisionism, the practice of dividing color elds into a cluster of dots of color. Segantini enjoyed a
strong international reputation, exhibiting in Munich, Berlin, and Vienna.
40. Divisionist painter Gaetano Previati (18521920) is known also for his technical and theoreti-
cal writings.
41. Umberto Boccioni (18821916) and Carlo Carr (18811966) were members of the rst group
of Futurist painters, whose work dened the early contours of the movement and grew together with
Marinettis dicta.
42. In addition to innaugurating the Venice Biennales in 1895, Antonio Fradeletto was one of
Sarfattis own tutors. On her disagreements with him over modern art, see Cannistraro and Sullivan,
Il Duces Other Woman, 3133.
43. Vittorio Pica, secretary-general of the Biennale from 19001926, was responsible for brining
the French Post-Impressionists to the Venice Biennale.
44. Swiss painters both, Max (Alfred) Buri (18681915), known best for his paintings of the people
of the Bernese Oberland, was inuenced by Ferdinand Hodler (18531918), who helped to revitalize
mural arts and his work is often connected to Swiss national identity.
45. Ettore Tito (18591941) was one of many painters who gained new energy from the reunica-
tion of Venice to Italy in 1866. One of the regular Italian representatives at the Biennale, he worked
in a conservative or salon style. Alessandro Pomi (18901976) was his student at the Accademia di
Belle Arti in Venice.
46. The artists Sarfatti lists represent an array of Italian avant-garde movements, including the
Milanese futurists, the Roman Valori Plastici group, and the Florentine vociani: Carlo Carr (1881
1966), Mario Sironi (18851961), Achille Funi (18901972), Ardengo Sofci (18791964), Leonardo
Dudreville (18851975), Fortunato Depero (18921960), Luigi Russolo (18851947, Gino Severini
(18831966), Giorgio de Chirico (18881978), Giacomo Balla (18711958).
47. In this passage, Sarfatti refers to direttore Tizio o . . . segretario Caio, using the names Tizio
and Caio to refer to unspecied persons who might ll the roles of director or secretary.
48. Sarfattis ironic reference to the innovations of the Neapolitan painter and illustrator Edoardo
Dalbono (18411915) plays on his achievement of commercial success by appealing to, rather than
challenging, the tastes of the upper and upper middle classes.
49. Founded by Mario Broglio (18911948), Valori Plastici was published in Rome from 19181922.
Its contributors included most of the artists identied in Sarfattis next paragraph, among others.
Although the group did not have a denite program, writings addressed matters of Italys cultural
heritage, the values of classicism, and the accomplishments of foreign artists and art movements. For
a thorough discussion of this journal and its contributors, see Paolo Fossati, Valori Plastici, 191822
(Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1981).
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914 50. In addition to artists discussed previously, Sarfatti mentions Riccardo Francalancia (18861965),
who attached himself to the Novecento group in the mid 1920s, and was a regular participant in the
Rome Biennali and Quadriennali; probably Arturo Martini (18891947), a sculptor who had been
afliated with Broglios Valori Plastici group and who exhibited in Berlin. Although the text as printed
in Il Popolo dItalia gives the last name in this list as Zur-Muelden, Sarfatti refers to the Lithuanian
painter Edita Walterowna zur Muehlen (18861977), a prominent member of the Valori Plastici
group, and we have corrected the name.
51. When Sarfatti refers to Zabbrine, she may mean the French sculptor, draughtsman and
printmaker of Belorussian birth, Ossip Zadkine (18901967), a member of the Valori Plastici group
by 1921.
52. Mussolinis meeting with the Direttorio Nazionale della Corporazione delle Arti Plastiche was
one of many events marking the third anniversary of the March on Rome. On 28 October, Il Popolo
dItalia published A message from fascist artists to the President of the Council. The group, which
included Carlo Carr, Achille Funi, Mario Sironi, and Margherita Sarfatti, stressed the importance
of art to the state, and that the state should support modern art (Un messagio degli artisti fascisti al
Presidente del Consiglio, Il Popolo dItalia, 28 October 1925, p. 4).
53. Initiated on 20 June 1925, the battaglia per il Grano, aimed to increase wheat production
in Italy.
54. The speech to which Sarfatti refers, The New Rome, was given in Rome in the Palace of
the Conservators in the Capitoline Museums, in the Hall of the Horatii and Curiatii, when Mussolini
installed the senator Filippo Cremonesi as the rst governor of Rome (Opera Omnia, ed. Edoardo
and Duilio Susmel, 36 vols. [Florence: La Fenice, 195163], XXII:4749).
55. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat has demonstrated, Italys city planning in Addis Ababa in the late 1930s
included a structural plan that enforced racial segregation. She notes that because the agenda of
maintaining racial boundaries was at the heart of fascist colonial culture, [a]rchitects and urban
planners utilized race as the overriding criteria of spatial organization in Ethiopia, following mandates
to keep Italian and African cultures separate and unequal (Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 128).
56. (Christian Matthias) Theodor Mommsen (18171903) wrote numerous works of Roman his-
tory, including Rmische Geschichte (about Roman republic from its beginnings to the death of Julius
Caesar), Rmisches Staatsrect (a history of Roman constitutional law), Rmisches Strafrecht (about
Roman criminal law), as well as contributions to the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum and the The-
saurus Linguae Latinae. Sarfatti uses three important ancient Roman historiansTitus Livius (Livy,
59 BCE 17 CE), Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (c. 70 CE c. 135 CE), and Tacitus (c. 56 CE c. 125
CE)to represent the great historians of the Empire. Livy wrote during the Augustan era; his Ab
urbe condita traces Romes history from its mythical foundation to his present day. Suetonius De vita
Caesarum covers the lives of the Judio-Claudian emperors through the Flavian dynasty. In addition to
his Germania (about the customs of the German tribes) and Dialogus de oratoribus (concerning the
decline in Roman oratory), Tacitus major historical works trace the history of the Flavian emperors
(his Histories) and the period from the death of Augustus through the death of Nero (his Annals).
57. The Acadmie Franaise was founded in 1634 by Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richilieu
(15851642) to maintain standards of literary taste and standardize the literary language. Richelieus
position as cardinal, rst minister of France, and advisor to Louis XIII, and his activity during the
Wars of Religion and Thirty Years War, secured his inuence on the French monarchy.
58. The Institut national des Sciences et des Artslater renamed the Institut de Francein 1795
replaced ve learned societies suppressed in 1793, including the Acadmie Francaise (literary arts),
Acadmie royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (painting and sculpture), Acadmie royale des Inscriptions
et Mdailles (inscriptions and medals), Acadmie royale des Sciences (sciences), and Acadmie royale
dArchitecture (architecture). Jules Mazarin (16021661) and Jean Baptiste Colbert (16191683) were
successors to Cardinal Richelieu, and inuential in French political and economic matters.
59. Sarfatti interjects the Latin phrase ex aequo, meaning on even terms or equally, into
her explanation of the make-up of the Academy. Her designation of Italy as the fatherland of Galileo
Galilei (15641642), perhaps the best-known Italian astronomer and physicist, and Leonardo da Vinci
13.1paul.indd 914 12/2/05 7:39:04 AM

(14521519), one of Italys most famous and revered painters and inventors, bolsters her assertion 915
that the Italian Academy should equally represent these disciplines.
60. Sarfatti here names a type of woman after the main character, Emma Bovary, of Gustave
Flauberts Madame Bovary (1857), who hungered for richer life than she found in her bourgeois
environment. Her mention of silkworm cocoons (she uses the older word bozzolo, though a modern
speaker might refer to one as baco da seta) refers to silk production, a large industry at the time.
61. George Bryan (Beau) Brumell (17781840), was an English dandy, leader of London fashion,
and gambler.
62. Sarfatti refers here not only to the well-known rhetoric of futurist manifestos, but also to the
violent confrontations between the futurists and other schools of the Italian avant-garde. On battles
between the futurists and the Florentine vocianithe group centered around the journal La Voce
published by Giuseppe Prezzolinithat began with an published critique, turned into a caf brawl,
and culminated in a train station ambush, see Walter L. Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence: From
Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), 14849.
63. This article includes fourteen illustrations: Massimo Campigli, Lady with folded arms; Alberto
Salietti, Woman of Ciociaria; Mario Sironi, Solitude; Arturo Tosi, Village Street; Franco Dani, Stone
quarry (1924); Esodo Pratelli, Landscape; Carlo Carr, Il Monticino; Giovanni Colacicchi, Anagni
(countryside); Ugo Piatti, The Fishermans House; Ferroni Guido, Humble Life; Domenico Rambelli,
Dying sailor; Antonio Maraini, The Crucixion of Jesus, low relief in aretina, One of fourteen stations
of the Cross that will adorn the Cathedral of Rodi. Many works from the show appear in the exhibition
of Novecento art coordinated by Rossanna Bossaglia and mounted at the Palazzo della Permanente
(Milan) in JanuaryMarch 1983. See Mostra del Novecento (19231933) (Milan: Mazzotta, 1983).
For a complete listing of works exhibited, see the original catalogue for the show, Novecento Italiano:
Catalogo della prima mostra darte (Milano, 1926).
64. Sarfatti uses the standard Italian method of naming centuries: quattrocento refers to the four-
teen-hundreds, or fteenth century. We retain it because it is popular in English-language writing
about art, and because the name Novecento italiano, meaning roughly Italian Twentieth Century,
is meant to resonate with these designations. Trecento = fourteenth century, quattrocento = fteenth
century, cinquecento = sixteenth century, seicento = seventeenth century, settecento = eighteenth
century, ottocento = nineteenth century, and novecento = twentieth century.
65. Sarfatti here mentions the painter and etcher Giovanni Fattori (18251908), painter Daniele
Ranzoni (18431889), sculptor and etcher Giuseppe Grandi (18431894), painter Tranquillo Cremona
(18371878), and sculptor Medardo Rosso (18581928).
66. Sarfatti links Rossos work to that of the Florentine Renaissance sculptor Donato di Niccolo
di Betto Bardi, better known as Donatello (1386 or 13871466), famous for his rendering of human
character.
67. Sarfatti refers to sculptor Adolfo Wildt (18681931).
68. Sarfatti is referring to Wildts marble bust of Nicola Bonservizi (18901924), a contributor to
the earliest issues of Il Popolo dItalia, which was displayed in the rst room of the exhibition.
69. Sarfatti addresses two of the three works exhibited by Domenico Rambelli (18861972).
70. Two pieces from this monument were included: Dying Mariner and The Planter.
71. Rambellis sculptural Portrait of the Honorable Ciarlantini depicts Franco Ciarlantini
(18851940), a publicist who worked on Il Popolo dItalia and would become a member of the fascist
hierarchy and a cultural leader.
72. Three pieces from this sculptural series by Antonio Maraini (18861963) were exhibited: Je-
sus Encounters His Most Holy Mother (station I), Jesus Condemned to Death (station IV), and Jesus
Crucied (station XI).
73. The sculptors are Romolo Romanelli (18821967), Amerigo Focacci, and Libero Andreotti
(18751933).
74. Evaristo Boncinelli (18831947) suffered from madness that kept him from working: ve or
six busts made by him are known, together with many drawings, produced during 191219.
75. Arturo Tosi (18711956) exhibited works in oil.
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916 76. Sarfatti may be referring here to Carrs work Il Leccio (1925).
77. In using the term caravaggismo, Sarfatti gestures to Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
(15711610), known for his bold, naturalistic depiction of martyrs and apostles, and his dramatic use
of light and shade.
78. The painter Alberto Salietti (18921961) exhibited three works in oil.
79. The artists discussed here are Pietro Marussig (18791937), the self-taught Bolognese painter
Ubaldo Oppi (18891942), and Felice Casorati (18861963).
80. The artists here are Virgilio Guidi (18911984), Renato (Ren) Paresce (18861937), Cesare
Monti (18911959), Ugo Piatti (18801953), Esodo Pratelli (b. 1892), Achille Lega (18991934), Mario
Tozzi (18951978), Francesco Trombadori (18861961), Cipriano Esio Oppo (18901962), Nino
Bertoletti (18891971), Carlo Socrate (18891967), Primo Sinpico, the pseudonym of the painter
Raoul de Chareun Corrias (18891949), Lorenzo Viani (18821936), Raffaele De Grada (18851957),
Franco Dani (18951981), Giovanni Costetti (18741949) Giuseppe Montanari (18891976), and
Rino Gaspare Battaini.
81. Two lithograph posters and six tempera paintings by the French artist of Italian birth Leonetto
Capiello (18751942) adorned the vestibule of the exhibition hall. The catalogue does not illustrate
the posters or give clear indication of their subject matter.
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Margherita Sarfatti and Italian Cultural

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Margherita Sarfatti and Italian Cultural

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PAUL AND ZACZEK / margherita sarfatti & italian cultural nationalism

Margherita Sarfatti & Italian

Catherine E. Paul and Barbara M. Zaczek

and indirectly shaped the cultural policies of the Italian regime.

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I. Concerning Some General Principles (April 4, 1919)

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II. Concerning Some Painters (April 10, 1919)

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Another approach to form, another sensibility, another unitary synthesis of move-

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900 40 years ago, everyone laughed at the Macchiaoli;38

2. The Italian Artistic Avant-garde and Invitations to the Venice

France, and even Switzerland. But Italy?

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Does avant-garde painting exist in Italy today?

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4. Promises and Actions: The Italian Academy (January 15, 1926)

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5. At the First Exhibition of the Novecento Italiano (March 1926)63

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910 The challenges of religious-monumental decoration are confronted in Antonio

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