Baroquemania: Italian visual culture and the construction of national identity, 1898–1945 9781526153180

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B a ro qu e m a n i a

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Baroquemania Italian visual culture and the construction of national identity, 1898–1945 L au r a M ou r e C e c c h i n i

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Laura Moure Cecchini 2021 The right of Laura Moure Cecchini to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 5317 3  hardback First published 2021 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Adolfo Wildt, Santa Lucia, 1926. Paolobon140 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Typeset by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

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For my parents and Mimmo, whose love has made everything possible

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Contents

List of figures

page viii

Acknowledgements xv Introduction 1 1. Decadent Seicento: the emergence of the Baroque in the Italian fin de siècle

17

2. The Baroque’s revenge: the 1911 jubilee exhibitions and the search for an Italian style

55

3. Baroque Futurism: Roberto Longhi, seventeenth-century art, and the Italian avant-garde

88

4. Classical Baroque: the Seicento and the return-to-order

122

5. Baroque memories in the architecture of interwar Rome

160

6. Form and formlessness: the reimagination of Baroque sculpture during Fascism

197

Conclusions 237 Selected bibliography

246

Index 254

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Figures

0.1. Casa Editrice Nerbini, ‘Cartoline Patriottiche. Serie Roma. 12 cartoline in Quatricromia’, 1911. ITAL. XB1992.1283. Wolfsonian Library and Collection. Published with the permission of The Wolfsonian––Florida International University, Miami, Florida. page 2 0.2. Francesco Hayez, The Unnamed, 1845, oil on canvas, 108 × 63 cm. Private collection. 6 0.3. Mosé Bianchi, The Nun of Monza with a Portrait of Her Lover Egidio, 1865, oil on canvas, 130 × 98 cm. GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, Italy. Courtesy Fondazione Torino Musei. Photo by Studio fotografico Gonella 2012. 7 1.1. Ettore Ferrari, Plaque on the façade of via della Mercede, 12, Gianlorenzo Bernini’s presumed residence in Rome, 1898. Photo by the author.17 1.2. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Bust of Giovanni Battista Santoni, 1613–1616, Basilica of Santa Prassede, Rome. Photo by the author. 17 1.3. Giuseppe Cellini, Masthead of Cronaca Bizantina V, no. 1 (15 November 1885).20 1.4. Drawing by Achille Beltrame, Gabriele D’Annunzio at his studio in his villa in Francavilla al Mare, from L’illustrazione Italiana XXV, no. 5 (30 January 1898). 21 1.5. Façade of Palazzo Zuccari before 1904/1907. Photographic Collection, Biblioteca Hertziana, Rome, Italy. Foto by Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rome, Italy. 24 1.6. Mario de Maria, The Plague in Rome in 1600, 1886, oil on canvas, whereabouts unknown. Published in Romualdo Pantini, ‘Artisti Contemporanei: Mario de Maria,’ Emporium XV, no. 86 (February 1902): 83–107, 89. Photo by Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. 25 1.7. Ernest Hébert, Indignant Rome, 1885, oil on canvas, 120 × 92 cm, Museo di Roma, Rome, Italy. © Roma – Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali – Museo di Roma. 27 viii

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List of figures 1.8. Odoardo Borrani, The Extasis of Saint Teresa of Bernini, 1883, oil on wood, 56,4 × 42,3 cm. Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Palazzo Pitti, Florence, Italy.30 1.9. Giovanni Boldini, The Man who Smiles. Portrait of Enrico Nencioni 32 (1864–1871), oil on canvas, 45 × 35 cm. Private collection. 1.10. Ettore Ferrari reading his eulogy in front of Bernini’s plaque. Drawing by Dante Paolucci, ‘Commemorazione Centenaria al Campidoglio di Gian Lorenzo Bernini’, L’illustrazione Italiana (8 December 1898): 400. Photo by Lesley Chapman, Colgate University.37 1.11. Drawing by G. Galli, ‘Commemorazione di Gian Lorenzo Bernini,’ 39 Il secolo illustrato della domenica (18 December 1898), no page. 1.12. The Fountain of the Four Rivers illuminated at night. Drawing by Dante Paolucci, ‘Commemorazione Centenaria al Campidoglio di Gian Lorenzo Bernini’, L’illustrazione Italiana (8 December 1898), 400: Photo by Lesley Chapman, Colgate University. 40 1.13. Giovanni Bertoli or Augusto Viola, Bust of Bernini on the Pincio (Rome), post 1871. Photo by Andrea Dorliguzzo. 42 1.14. Esposizione Berniniana, Il Secolo Illustrato della Domenica (14 May 1899). Photo by Lesley Chapman, Colgate University. 43 1.15. Piancastelli, Postcard for Onoranze Centenarie al Bernini (1899). Photo by Lesley Chapman, Colgate University. 44 1.16. Gianlorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne. Foto Danesi, full-page photogravure in Stanislao Fraschetti, Il Bernini, la sua vita, la sua opera, 46 il suo tempo (Milan: U. Hoepli, 1900). 1.17. Francesco Jacovacci, Bernini nel suo studio, oil on canvas, 1877. Avvocatura dello Stato-Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples. Photo by Pedecini Fotografi.48 2.1. E. Abbo, illustration for cover of La tribuna illustrata (21 May 1911). Photo by Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome. 56 2.2. E. Abbo, ‘The Palace of Festivities at the Turin Exhibition after the Inauguration’, La tribuna illustrata (7 May 1911). Photo by Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome. 57 2.3. Plan of the exhibition, Torino esposizione 1911. Monografia illustrata edita dalla direzione generale del Touring club italiano col concorso della Commissione Esecutiva dell’Esposizione di Torino (Turin: Capriolo & Massimo, 1911.). Photo by Lesley Chapman, Colgate University. 62 2.4. Commemorative postcard, featuring the Pavilion of Fashion at the International Exhibition and Turin’s Palazzo Madama, 1911. Photo by Lesley Chapman, Colgate University. 63 2.5. Watercolour by Carlo Cussetti, Padiglione Arte applicata all’Industria, postcard, 1911. Photo by Lesley Chapman, Colgate University. 64

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List of figures 2.6. Pavilion of Italians Abroad, postcard, 1911. Author’s collection. 65 2.7. Pietro Fenoglio, Fenoglio-Lafleur House, 1902, Turin. Photo by the author.68 2.8. Map of Rome and of the Exhibition (Rome: Pola and Todescan, 1911). Author’s collection. 69 2.9. Sicilian Pavilion from publicity for Estratto Liebing, 1911. Author’s collection.71 2.10. Pavilion of Campania, Lucania, and Calabria, La tribuna illustrata (21–24 September 1911). 72 2.11. Poster for Ethnographic Exhibition in Rome, 1911. Author’s collection. 73 2.12. Armando Brasini, Villa Laetitia, Lungotevere delle Armi 22/23, Rome, 1911. Photo by the author. 74 2.13. Parade for Queen Christine of Sweden, ‘Roma – Il Corteo Storico che si svolse nella Piazza d’Armi (22 ottobre). Una parte del corteo. Un’attesa (Costumi italiani del secolo XVII)’, Album dell’illustrazione 76 popolare, no. 45 (2 November 1911): 360. 2.14. Palace of Festivities, postcard, 1911. Author’s collection. 78 3.1. Amerigo Bartoli Natinguerra, Roberto Longhi, 1924, oil on canvas, 62.2 × 49.7 cm. Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome, Italy. Photo by Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea. © Roma Capitale Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali.89 3.2 Ardengo Soffici, Decomposition of the planes of a Sugar Bowl and a Bottle, 1913, oil on canvas, 35 × 25 cm. Museo Ardengo Soffici, Poggio a Caiano, Italy. Courtesy Heirs of Ardengo Soffici. Photo by Museo Ardengo Soffici. 98 3.3 Carlo Carrà, Rhythms of Objects, 1911, oil on canvas, 53 × 67 cm. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy. © CARLO CARRA’, by SIAE 2021. Photo by Pinacoteca di Brera. 99 3.4 Robert Delaunay, Eiffel Tower, 1910, oil on canvas, 202 × 138.4 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, by gift. 100 3.5 Umberto Boccioni, Elasticity, 1912, oil on canvas, 100 × 100 cm. Museo del Novecento, Milan, Italy. 100 3.6 Jean Metzinger, Woman on a Horse, 1911–1912, oil on canvas, 162 cm × 130.5 cm. Statens Museum der Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark. Reproduced in Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du ‘Cubisme’ (Paris: Eugène Figuière Éditeurs, 1912). 101 3.7 Carlo Carrá, The Gallery in Milan, 1912, oil on canvas, 51.5 × 91 cm. Collezione Gianni Mattioli, Milan, Italy. © CARLO CARRA’, by SIAE 2021. Photo by Collezione Gianni Mattioli. 102

List of figures 3.8

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3.9

3.10

4.1.

4.2.

4.3. 4.4.

4.5. 4.6. 4.7.

4.8.

4.9. 4.10. 4.11. 4.12.

Umberto Boccioni, Testa+Casa+Luce (Head+House+Light), 1912, destroyed, published in Roberto Longhi, Scultura Futurista Boccioni (Florence: Libreria della Voce, 1914). Photo by Lesley Chapman, Colgate University.106 Umberto Boccioni, Sintesi del dinamismo umano (Synthesis of Human Dynamism), 1912, destroyed, published in Roberto Longhi, Scultura Futurista Boccioni (Florence: Libreria della Voce, 1914). Photo by Lesley Chapman, Colgate University. 107 Carlo Carrà, The Carriage, 1916, oil on canvas pasted on plywood, 51.5 × 66.5 cm. MART, Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto – Collection VAF Stiftung, Rovereto. © CARLO CARRA’, by SIAE 2021. Photo by MART-Archivio Fotografico e Mediateca.109 Giorgio de Chirico, Self-Portrait in Black, 1948, oil on canvas, 152.5 × 89.5 cm. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy. © GIORGIO DE CHIRICO, by SIAE 2021. 123 Baccio Maria Bacci, Portrait of Matteo Marangoni, 1919, oil on canvas, 84 × 105 cm, Wolfsoniana – Palazzo Ducale Fondazione Regionale per la Cultura, Genoa, Italy. 125 Léon Bonnat, The Crucifixion, 1874, oil on canvas, 229 × 160 cm, Musée du Petit Palais, Paris, France. 128 Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Saint John Nepomucene Confessing the Queen of Bohemia, ca. 1740–1743, oil on canvas, 155 × 120 cm, Galleria Sabauda, Turin, Italy. 135 Ettore Tito, The Birth of Venus, 1903, 185 × 150 cm, Ca’ Pesaro – Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, Venice, Italy. 136 Antonio Maraini, Poster for ‘Mostra della Pittura Italiana del Sei e Settecento’, 1922, Civica Raccolta Achille Bertarelli, Milan, Italy. 137 Nicolò Cipriani, Firenze. Mostra Della Pittura Italiana del Sei e Settecento a Palazzo Pitti. Cappella. Sala del Caravaggio, photograph, 1922, Fondo Nicolò Cipriani, Fototeca, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, Italy 140 Felice Casorati, Portrait of Silvana Cenni, 1922, tempera on canvas, 105 × 205 cm, private collection. © FELICE CASORATI, by SIAE 2021. 142 Carlo Socrate, Sleeping Venus, 1921, oil on canvas, 93 × 169 cm, private collection.143 Gregorio Sciltian, Still life, 1925, oil on canvas, 80 × 120 cm, private collection.144 Baccio Maria Bacci, The Levee, 1922, oil on canvas, 182 × 190 cm, private collection.145 Armando Spadini, Still Life, 1922, oil on canvas, Villa Reale, Milan, Italy. 146

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List of figures 4.13. Antonio Mancini, Self-Portrait, 1927, oil on canvas, 80 × 70 cm, private collection.148 4.14. Cipriano Efisio Oppo, The Sleeping Girl, 1923, location unknown. Reproduced in Seconda Biennale Romana: mostra internazionale di belle arti, Roma MCMXXIII; catalogo, 4th ed. (Rome: Casa Editrice d’Arte Enzo Pinci, 1923). 149 4.15. Giorgio de Chirico, Still Life with Salami, 1919, oil on canvas, 30.8 × 40.4 cm, GAM- Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, Italy. © GIORGIO DE CHIRICO, by SIAE 2021. 150 4.16. Carlo Socrate, Martyrdom of Saint Mauritius, 1922, oil on canvas, 200 × 196.5 cm, private collection. Reproduced in Seconda Biennale Romana: mostra internazionale di belle arti, Roma MCMXXIII; catalogo, 4th ed. (Rome: Casa Editrice d’Arte Enzo Pinci, 1923) 151 5.1. Pier Maria Bardi, Tavolo degli orrori, 1931. Reproduced in Pier Maria Bardi, ‘Tavolo degli Orrori (tavola fuori testo e commento)’, Quadrante I, no. 2 (June 1933): 10. 160 5.2. Vincenzo Fasolo, Liceo Terenzio Mamiani, 1921–1924. Fondo Fasolo, Archivio Capitolino, Rome, Italy. 162 5.3. Giuseppe Capponi, Palazzina Nervi Nebbiosi, 1927–1930. Photo by the author.162 5.4. Courtyard of the Liceo Mamiani. Photo by the author. 167 5.5. Carlo Broggi, Middle-class housing in the Roman neighbourhood of Testaccio, also known as ‘the Cremlin’ (1924–1926), and detail. Photo by the author. 169 5.6. Frontispiece of Paolo Orano, L’urbe massima: l’architettura e la decorazione di 170 Armando Brasini (Rome: Formiggini, 1917). 5.7. Armando Brasini, Bird’s-eye view of the Foro Mussolini, 1927; in Armando Brasini, Sistemazione del Campo Marzio: La Via Imperiale, il Foro 173 Mussolini (1927). Author’s collection. 5.8. Armando Brasini, ‘Modello della Mole Littoria, più grande di S. Pietro’, 7 February 1937. 71. Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome.176 5.9. Armando Brasini, Istituto Nazionale per la Assicurazione contro gli Infortuni sul Lavoro (1926–1929). Photo by the author. 179 5.10. The INAIL building as an American skyscraper, Marc’Aurelio (23 March 1931).179 5.11. Armando Brasini, Convent of the Good Shepherd under construction (1929–1943), Archivio Armando Brasini. 182 5.12. Courtyard of Convento del Buon Pastore. Photo by the author. 183 5.13. Giuseppe Capponi, Façade of Palazzina Nervi Nebbiosi, 1927–1930. Photo by the author. 185

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List of figures 5.14. Staircase of Palazzina Nervi Nebbiosi. Reproduced in Giò Ponti, ‘Palazzina Nebbiosi al Lungotevere Arnaldo da Brescia Architettata da Giuseppe Capponi’, Domus. L’arte della casa IX, no. 57 (January 1931). 186–187 5.15. Mino Maccari and Leo Longanesi, ‘Tempesta barocca sul razionale’, Il 191 Selvaggio (October 1933). 6.1. Adolfo Wildt, Santa Lucia, 1926, marble, 54.8 × 45 × 32 cm. Palazzo Romagnoli-Musei Civici, Forlì, Italy. Photo by the author. 197 6.2. Detail of Gianlorenzo Bernini, Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 1647–1652, marble,height 3.5 m. Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome, Italy. 197 6.3. Lucio Fontana, The Baroque Chair, 1946, plaster, 120 × 65 × 80 cm. Private collection. © Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan, Italy. 198 6.4. Adolfo Wildt, Mask of Pain [Self-Portrait], 1909, marble, 201 37 × 31 × 17 cm. Musei Civici, Forlí, Italy. Photo by the author. 6.5. Adolfo Wildt, The Victory, 1918–1919, bronze and marble with golden details, 35.5 × 42.5 × 11.3 cm. Palazzo Berri Meregalli, Milan, Italy. Photo by the author. 202 6.6. Adolfo Wildt, Benito Mussolini, 1923. Reproduced in the cover of a 203 limited edition of Margherita Sarfatti, Dux (Milan: Mondadori, 1934). 6.7. Photo by Emilio Sommariva, of Adolfo Wildt, The Prisoner, albumen gelatin print, 24 × 30 cm. Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Milan, Italy.207 6.8. Photo by Antonio Paoletti, Margherita Sarfatti. Reproduced in Roberto Papini, ‘Prima Quadriennale. Arte nazionale esposta a Roma’, Emporium LXXIII, no. 435 (1931), no page. 208 6.9. Medardo Rosso, Ecce Puer, 1906, modern contact print from original glass plate, private collection. 209 6.10. Umberto Boccioni, Riot in the Gallery, 1910, oil on canvas, 74 × 64 cm, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy. Image courtesy of Pinacoteca di Brera. 211 6.11. Adolfo Wildt, Nicola Bonservizi, 1924–1925, marble, height 55 cm. MART- Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Rovereto, Italy. Photo by the author. 212 6.12. Mario Tozzi, Mattutino, 1927, oil on canvas, 166 × 118 cm, Museo del Novecento, Milan, Italy. © Archivio Tozzi Faiano. 217 6.13. Lucio Fontana, Women on the Sofa, 1934, painted plaster, 40 × 43 × 20 cm. Private collection. © Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan.222 6.14. Lucio Fontana, Paulette, 1938, coloured ceramic, height 70 cm. Museo del Novecento, Florence, Italy. Photo by the author. © Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan. 224 6.15. Duilio Morosini, Lucio Fontana. 20 disegni con una prefazione (Milan: Edizioni di Corrente, 1940). 226

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List of figures

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6.16. Archivio Farabola, Fontana in the ruins of his studio in Milan, 1946. © Archivi Farabola. 7.1 Caravaggio, il pittore maledetto (Caravaggio, the Cursed Painter), director Goffredo Alessandrini, 1941. Photo by the author. 7.2 Leoncillo Leonardi, Roman Mother Killed by the Germans in via Giulio Cesare, ceramic, 1944. Private collection.

228 239 242

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders, and the publisher will be pleased to be notified of any omissions for future editions of the book.

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Acknowledgements

A

s with any book that takes years to write, mine would be incomplete without an extensive and heartfelt list of thanks. First and foremost, I am indebted to Mark Antliff. His tough love and critical rigour, coupled with boundless generosity and patience, were vital to my intellectual development and helped turn this quasi-analytical philosopher into a quasi-social art historian. With their scholarship and generous conversations, Patricia Leighten, Neil McWilliam, Roberto Dainotto, and Gennifer Weisenfeld helped me attend to both Italian culture’s specificity and its broader interwar context – which would have been impossible without their guidance and encouragement. Since my graduate studies Emily Braun, too, has been a staunch supporter and unstinting critic of my work, and our dialogue throughout the years has been crucial to shaping this book. This book has benefited enormously from the scholarly community of Italianists on both shores of the Atlantic. In Italy, Carmen Belmonte, Francesca Billiani, Francesca Castellani, Sergio Cortesini, Ludovica Galeazzo, Sharon Hecker, Laura Iamurri, Davide Lacagnina, Lucia Simonato, Giuliana Tomasella, and Tristan Weddigen offered unsparing feedback when I was conducting research and presenting my work. On this side of the Atlantic, Mariana Aguirre, Raffaele Bedarida, Silvia Bottinelli, Adrian Duran, Vivien Greene, Jennifer Griffiths, Ruth Lo, Jaleh Mansoor, Laura Mattioli, Ara Merjian, and David Rifkind helped me reframe my argument while offering much-needed encouragement. Years after we left graduate school, Lis Narkin, Alexis Clark, Matt Woodworth, and Mimi Luse continue to be essential interlocutors and friends. I would also be remiss in failing to mention The Art Bulletin, in which a version of Chapter 3 appeared in 2019. I wish to express my appreciation to the two readers and the editor Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer for their thorough reading and suggestions. Research for other chapters, which I presented in different public talks, benefited from the constructive criticism of colleagues and friends. My thanks go to the organisers and attenders of the College Art Association (2015 and 2018), the American Association of Italian Studies (2016), Transnational Italies: Mobility, Subjectivities and Modern Italian Cultures (The British School at Rome, 2016), Reuse Reconsidered (Brown University, 2017), and Les nomenclatures stylistiques à l’épreuve de l’objet (Institut Suisse – Académie de France in Rome, 2018). When I presented my work at Columbia University Seminar xv

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Acknowledgements in Modern Italian Studies (2018), Ernest Ialongo, Romy Golan, Maria Antonella Pelizzari, and above all Mimi Braun and Richard Etlin offered substantive criticism that inspired my reorganisation of Chapter 5. When the book was almost finished, the feedback I received from Alina Payne, Estelle Lingo, Lorenzo Pericolo, Jesús Escobar, and Peter Krieger at Baroque to Neo-Baroque: Curves of an Art Historical Concept (Kunsthistorisches Institut, 2019) strengthened the core of my argument in pivotal ways. Furthermore, I would like to thank all my colleagues at the Art and Art History Department at Colgate University (Hamilton, NY) for supporting my work and vision for our modernism curriculum. Since my first day on the job, Elizabeth Marlowe and Padma Kaimal donated their time, effort, and expertise to show me how teaching and research should sustain each other, and supported me as both mentors and friends. Wide-ranging discussions with Lakshmi Luthra, Ani Maitra, Margaretha Haughwout, Brynn Hatton, and Carolyn Guile were indispensable, as was their cheer and solidarity. I would also like to thank Lois Wilcox and Angela Kowalski for helping me navigate Colgate, as well as Lesley Chapman for her stellar digital imaging work. In addition to intellectual and emotional support, this book could not have been written without the many forms of financial support I was fortunate enough to receive, and, therefore, I must thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, CIMA Center for Italian Modern Art, The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, and the Italian Art Society for making my research possible. At Colgate a Picker Major Grant and a junior sabbatical leave allowed me to finish the book, while several grants from the Research Council enabled my travel to archives and offset the enormous costs of securing image rights. A summer residency at Villa Medici and the Lauro de Bosis Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University provided me with library resources and uninterrupted time for writing. Conversations with Francesco Erspamer and Giovanna Bruno, sadly cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic, helped redefine the stakes of my project. Readers’ reports from Manchester University Press provided cogent and fruitful suggestions for revision. Emma Brennan, Lianne Slavin, and Alun Richards of MUP, and Rachel Nishan of Twin Oaks Indexing guided me throughout the production process. Matthew Somoroff, Erin Hoffman, and Lisa Regan patiently edited the entire manuscript, fixed glaring mistakes, and provided continuous encouragement and support. Research for this book was conducted at the Lilly Library at Duke University, the Widener Library at Harvard University, the Biblioteca Hertziana in Rome, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, the Biblioteca di Storia dell’Arte del Castello Sforzesco in Milan, and the Wolfsonian Library in Miami Beach. The staff in all these libraries were extraordinarily helpful, but Lee Sorensen and Yunyi Wang at the Lilly deserve a special mention, as do Lisa King, Rob Capuano, Bonnie Kupris, and Ricki Mueller at Colgate. I would also like to thank the archivists at the Archivio ASAC (Venice), Archivi del ‘’900 (Rovereto), Centro APICE (Milan), Fondazione Roberto Longhi (Florence), Fondazione Primo Conti (Fiesole), Centro di Ricerca sulla Tradizione Manoscritta (Pavia), Fondazione Corrente (Milan), Archivio Lionello Venturi (Rome), and Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (Rome).

Acknowledgements

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My deepest gratitude goes to my parents, whose unconditional love and support over the years gave me the confidence and means to pursue an academic career. Everything I do is in the hope of making them proud. ¡Gracias, chicos! I could not have written this book without my Hamilton family – C. J. Hauser, Monica Mercado, and Marta PérezCarbonell – who taught me what sisterhood is and who gave to this rootless cosmopolitan a home. As always, my most heartfelt thanks go to Mimmo Cangiano: every page of this book is a testimony to our travels, constant conversation, and peripatetic life.

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Introduction

Each generation unearths the teachers it needs and invests them with urgent relevance. Henri Focillon, ‘Delacroix et l’art moderne’ (1930) I should define as Baroque that style which deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) all its possibilities. Jorge Luis Borges, Historia universal de la infamia (1954)

W

h y another book on the Baroque, a style so recurrently evoked in the scholarship on theatricality, multimedia, and kitsch? Surprisingly, despite the Baroque being so closely associated with Italian art, an analysis of its legacy in post-unification Italy has not been written yet.1 The following pages argue that, by reinventing Baroque forms in their artistic and architectural practices, Italians confronted their fears about the past and imagined the future of their nation. Challenging dominant narratives about the fundamental role of the classical tradition in modern Italy, I show that crucial discussions over the relation between regionalism and nationalism, Italy’s cultural ties to other nations, and the country’s role in the emergence of modernism were shaped by heated debates over the Baroque and its afterlives in modern Italy In the period that this book addresses the role of the Baroque in the construction of modern Italy was often expunged. For example, in 1911, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Italian unification, a Florentine publisher issued a series of twelve ‘patriotic postcards’ illustrating the history of Rome. The series depicts images integral to the historical and mythical identity of the city, from the figures of Romulus and Remus, symbolising the foundation of Rome, to Julius Caesar’s triumphal entry in the city, its burning under Nero’s rule, and the so-called Barbarian invasions. Other historical moments are captured in this historical pastiche, including the popular anti-Papal insurrection led in the fourteenth century by Cola di Rienzo. Two episodes epitomise the Renaissance: Michelangelo painting St Peter’s Basilica to a stunned Julius II – a historical impossibility, given that the Pope died in 1513 and the cupola was completed in 1590, twenty-six years after Michelangelo’s death; and Lucrezia Borgia’s debauched parties. 1

Baroquemania

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2

0.1  Casa Editrice Nerbini, ‘Cartoline Patriottiche. Serie Roma. 12 cartoline in Quatricromia’, 1911.

Passing over almost three hundred years, the next postcard illustrates the fraught relationship between Napoleon I and Pope Pius VII, imprisoned by the French emperor from 1809 to 1814. Other postcards show key episodes leading to the unification of Italy: a meeting of the ‘carbonari’, the secret revolutionary societies that took up arms against the Papal state and the Austrian occupiers; popular demonstrations against Pope

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Introduction Pius IX; and the proclamation of the Roman Republic in 1849, which briefly replaced Papal rule and guaranteed religious freedom and universal suffrage. The final postcard depicts the 1870 breach of the Porta Pia in Rome, marking the defeat of the temporal power of the Popes and the end of the Risorgimento, the Italian unification process. It is only by piecing all twelve ‘patriotic postcards’ together that a hidden image is revealed: Rome personified as an imposing female figure standing on a pedestal. Dressed in a toga, armed with a lance, shield, and centurion helmet, Rome’s likeness is both belligerent and nurturing; she is in full military regalia but has an exposed breast. It is clear from this political, militaristic framing that Rome is also resolutely secular: the history of the city presented in these postcards – metonymically signifying the history of the Italian peninsula – is an indictment of the Catholic Church’s temporal power. Only in one case, the scene with Julius II and Michelangelo, is a Pope presented in a positive light, but even this scene has to do with the Pope’s artistic patronage rather than his political influence. All the other postcards exemplify the submission of the spiritual to the temporal power, and the ultimate triumph of the Italian nation over those forces that for centuries prevented its unification. Given the series’ celebration of Italian unification, its omission of the three hundred years between Lucrezia Borgia’s death in 1519 and Pius VII’s Papal induction in 1800 – which roughly coincided with the emergence of the Baroque style – is curious. The resulting question, then, is this: Why was this historical period elided from the postcards’ patriotic narrative? The goal of this book is twofold. First, to demonstrate that, contrary to what the ‘patriotic postcards’ seem to imply, the Baroque was repeatedly evoked in modern Italian visual culture and intellectual history, that there was a ‘Baroquemania’ in the period under review. Second, to suggest an explanation for this phenomenon: that between the fin de siècle and the end of the Second World War, narratives and representations of the Baroque enabled Italians to probe the fraught experience of national unification and address their ambivalent relationship with modernity and tradition. The afterlives of the Baroque in modern Italy, and its temporal and conceptual destabilisation, allowed Italians to work through a crisis of modernity and develop a distinctly Italian modern approach to visual culture. Constructing a shared national modern Italian narrative became urgent when what had been an ‘imagined community’ was finally unified.2 At the time regional and class allegiances were far more influential than any sentiment of being Italian. To forge cohesion and locate the essence of an Italian identity, its illustrious heritage was frequently held up.3 The signs of a budding national consciousness were discerned in the political unity achieved during the Roman Empire, in the struggles of medieval communes against the Holy Roman Emperors, in the cultural accomplishments of the Renaissance, and in the heroism of nineteenth-century patriots who fought for the unification of the country.4 Yet what about the time between the Renaissance and the Risorgimento? Why does this period seem to be often omitted from the national narrative? Did post-unification Italians neglect it because of its troubled nature or – and this is my contention – was it

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Baroquemania deployed too to shape a national visual culture and we just need to reveal its singular manifestations? Ignoring the role of this era in Italian modern art and architecture has distorted our view of the relationship between cultural memory and nation-building in modern Italy. It has also obscured the Italian contribution to the transatlantic Baroque revival that emerged in England, Germany, Austria, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina – nations that, like Italy, regarded their culture as having been long marginalised, and that similarly conjured the Baroque to fashion their modern national identities. True, the interval roughly spanning the end of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth century was an era that Italians would have been justified in wanting to forget, not least because of its upsetting similarities with their recent, pre-unification past. Unlike the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, or the Risorgimento, which were readily idealised, this period could not easily be reoriented in a positive light. It was often perceived as a time of decline coinciding with the Catholic Church’s meddling in the peninsula’s political affairs, as its absence in the heroic narrative of the ‘patriotic postcards’ shows. What we now know as Italy was, during the period, divided into several states, and a significant part of its territory was under foreign control. The emergence of a global economy shifted the centre of trade from the Mediterranean sea to the Atlantic ocean, so the peninsula lost much of the strategic importance it had until the colonisation of the Americas.5 The legacy of this period represented a latent danger that needed to be constantly exorcised if Italy was to continue as a unified country. Post-unification Italians knew that it was necessary to avoid Italy’s fragmentation at all costs, as well as the ensuing risks of recolonisation and irrelevance in European politics – and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries exemplified such risks. At the same time, this period was considered by many art historians and intellectuals as a precursor of modernity. The locus for such proto-modernity was the emergence of the Baroque, a style that – through decorative exuberance, theatrical artifice, and highstrung emotional engagement – profoundly challenged artistic conventions. The Baroque was commonly understood as the last artistic style developed in the peninsula to profoundly shape the art of Europe and its colonies. Thus, it both symbolised the cultural primacy that Italy once enjoyed and projected on to the artistic sphere Italians’ nostalgia for their heroic past and expansionist aspirations for the future. The Baroque was also one of the few cultural experiences shared by the entire country and thus could be seen, too, as a precedent for Italian unification. It is important to note that most of the Italian writers and artists whom I address in this book devoted their intellectual energies to assessing the modern legacy of the Baroque, rather than to defining its stylistic traits and periodisation. This lack of stylistic demarcation might be considered the original sin of Italian reflections on the Baroque well into the twentieth century. As Alois Riegl noted in The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome (1908), ‘an explanation of the character and essence of the Italian Baroque style’ is absent in most of the Italian texts that I consider in this study.6 At the same time, this lack of interest in defining Baroque’s ontology allowed Italian artists and writers to conceive it as a portable concept that translated well their own shifting anxieties and desires.7

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Introduction Since the 1880s the Baroque has been defined as the product of a dialectical tension and internal contradiction: between painterliness and linearity, for Heinrich Wölfflin; between feeling and will, for Riegl; between form and matter, for Georg Simmel; between immanence and transcendence, for Walter Benjamin; between classicism and naturalism, for Erwin Panofsky.8 Scepticism regarding these opposites’ ability to render a coherent definition and the relatively late emergence of the term ‘Baroque’ in the eighteenth century has led art historians to progressively replace it with the more neutral ‘early modern’.9 By contrast the Italian artists and writers analysed in the present book had none of these qualms. Most often than not they used ‘Barocco’, ‘Seicento’ (seventeenth century), and ‘Secentismo’ (pertaining to the seventeenth century) as synonyms, and to refer to all the art and culture produced between the mid-sixteenth and the early eighteenth centuries. With few exceptions, they were not as interested in the policing of periodisation, stylistic features, or essential traits of the Baroque as are art historians of our time. For this reason, like them, I use these terms interchangeably. Despite the apparent indeterminacy of their terminology, these writers and artists approached the Baroque neither metaphorically nor as a pure term of abuse. Though some associated the period with decadence and others with modernity, some with fragmentation and others with integration, some with avant-garde strategies and others with classical art, these writers and artists all had in mind a specific historical referent. This unfixed definition differs from the way the term ‘Baroque’ is often employed in contemporary cultural and aesthetic debates: to describe a transcultural and transhistorical fascination with artifice, mass culture, and sensory overstimulation.10 The latter is but one of the possible significations of the Baroque in the period that I study in this book, where the style also stood for political dominance, for discipline and control, and for authority. Instead of trying to find a set of formal traits that could be univocally considered ‘Baroque’, I study significant episodes in which Italian art historians, artists, critics, and architects explicitly referred to what they considered a Baroque reference for their practice. This hopefully avoids projecting on to the visual and material culture that I address here a definition of the Baroque resulting from our contemporary interpretation of (and uneasiness about) the term. My aim is to do a cultural history of the reception of the Baroque and the various notions with which it was associated – not to assess these through the lens of contemporary historiography. Rather than treating the Baroque as a stable concept, I study it as a dynamic cipher that underwent multiple transformations, mobilised in response to volatile historical conditions.

The Baroque, an Italian problem In 1797 the art historian Francesco Milizia – one of the first Italian critics to apply the term ‘Baroque’ to the visual arts – famously defined it as ‘the superlative of the bizarre, the excess of ridicule […] a plague of taste’.11 Most of Milizia’s contemporaries accused the previous generation of artists and poets of an unscrupulous desire to dazzle with false erudition and aesthetic complication. Some explained this taste for exaggeration

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Baroquemania and excess as the result of cultural saturation; only empty displays of virtuosity could possibly follow the inimitable Renaissance.12 Others accused the Council of Trento and the Jesuits, claiming that the ideology of the Counter-Reformation placed excessive attention on formal issues and emphasised emotional engagement over rational reflection.13 Others yet blamed the pernicious influence of the peninsula’s occupiers. According to the poet Paolo Rolli, for example, the Spanish and French taste naturally veered towards the bombastic and pompous, so subjugated Italians also pursued this style out of a mimetic impulse.14 Critics thereby associated the Baroque with defeat and disempowerment – they saw Italian artists as blameless imitators of the bad taste of their colonisers, a bad taste that ran contrary to their own (allegedly natural) inclination towards classical harmony and serenity. Italian Romantics largely endorsed their predecessors’ critique of Baroque artistic production. Yet a slow reassessment of the period was under way. Alessandro Manzoni, for instance, set his historical novel The Betrothed (1827/1840) in seventeenth-century Milan, recounting the Spanish occupation of Lombardy and the devastating 1630 epidemic. A thinly veiled attack on the Austrian takeover of northern Italy, and still today a key

0.2  Francesco Hayez, The Unnamed, 1845

Introduction

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novel in the construction of Italian identity (it is mandatory reading in high schools), Manzoni’s book famously drew attention to the moral bankruptcy of seventeenth-century society. Manzoni described how the influence of a corrupt clergy and aristocracy transformed Italians into self-serving, dishonest individuals. However, a genuine interest in all the cultural manifestations of the Seicento appears throughout the novel, too. Manzoni highlighted the positive achievements of the period, including the founding of institutions devoted to knowledge, such as Milan’s Biblioteca Ambrosiana, and the emergence of a 0.3  Mosé Bianchi, The Nun of Monza with a Portrait of Her Lover Egidio, 1865

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Baroquemania socially invested Catholicism. Manzoni’s indebtedness to Baroque sources permeates The Betrothed in the repetition of seventeenth-century idioms and dialectal choices, the meandering structure of the plot, and the inclusion of historical events.15 Through these positive references to the Seicento, this previously shameful era could be reconfigured as the origin of many faults, but also virtues, of Italians. The success of The Betrothed also prompted many artists to illustrate episodes from the novel, revealing a nascent interest in seventeenth-century visual culture. The foremost Italian academic painter Francesco Hayez employed pictorial techniques associated with the Baroque in his intense portrait of the Unnamed. A wicked baron who initially kidnaps The Betrothed’s protagonist Lucia but then converts to Catholicism and protects her from her enemies, the Unnamed is integral to the novel’s happy ending. In this historical portrait, Hayez evoked Anthony Van Dyck’s and Diego Velázquez’s style in the careful reproduction of seventeenth-century clothes as well as in the darkened background, single source of lighting, and intense psychological introspection. Other artists, by contrast, such as Mosé Bianchi, avoided any historicising reconstruction of the seventeenth century and rather focused on conveying the period’s moral decadence. Instead of depicting one of the book’s heroes, Bianchi painted one of the scandalous characters who, for Manzoni, were symptomatic of an entire era’s moral corruption: the Nun of Monza. This character had been forced to become a nun in early childhood and conducts a love affair with an aristocrat, whom she helps to kidnap Lucia despite having promised her protection. Bianchi uses dramatic chiaroscuro and a claustrophobic shallow space to convey the moral doubts of the Nun, whose hands are clenched in anguish, while representing her lover as a charismatic and sensual cavalier who would not look out of place in a Franz Hals portrait. These two examples indicate two poles in the interest in the Seicento that persist in the following decades: a historicist approach that focused on its careful reconstruction, and an imaginative sascination with its allegedly dissipated mores. Despite the interest in the Baroque among these artists, the negative moral and aesthetic view of the period persisted in Italy well into the later part of the nineteenth century. However, while Italians showed a budding yet limited interest in the Baroque, a new generation of poets and thinkers outside of Italy extolled its novelty and imaginativeness.16 It was precisely the seventeenth century’s presumably decadent character that Théophile Gautier and Friedrich Nietzsche, among others, celebrated. Such revaluation, in turn, profoundly shaped Italian debates on fin de siècle culture — much more than coeval debates in German-language art history, which reached Italy at a later date. For example, in his preface to The Flowers of Evil (1868), Gautier found similarities between the Baroque and Charles Baudelaire’s poetry: the rejection of the natural and the simple, the search for novelty at all costs, and the aim of épater le bourgeois with an anti-classical aesthetic. ‘There are, without doubt, Baroque and unnatural imaginations that are close to hallucination, and express the secret desire of an impossible novelty,’ wrote Gautier, ‘but we prefer them to […] platitudes, trivially bourgeois, or stupidly sentimental designs.’ 17 The Baroque taste for extravagance was seen as a necessary antidote

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Introduction to an ordered regularity that had turned tiresome and insipid. Whilst critics of the Baroque read its anti-classicism as a censurable move away from everlasting values, Gautier interpreted it as a quintessentially modern development of taste, enervated by overused subject matters and forms. Ten years later, in Human All Too Human, Nietzsche, too, exalted ‘the Baroque style’ as the answer to worn-out cultural models.18 Among its formal features Nietzsche mentions materials and subjects that enhance dramatic tension; an extreme and exaggerated rhetorical style; and a passion for novelty. Nietzsche claimed that the peculiar sensibility of the Baroque arises when great art decays, but such decadent connotations should not prevent aesthetic appreciation. For him the Baroque did not appear in a given historical moment, but rather is present ‘from Greek times onward’, and in all the visual and literary arts.19 Nietzsche viewed his generation as particularly well-positioned to reconsider Baroque aesthetics, as it was witness to a moment of keen existential crisis. He claimed, for example, that the music of Richard Wagner was ‘a baroque art of exaltation, and bombastic pomposity’, and nineteenth-century audiences longed for such extravagance, excess, and disorder.20 Nietzsche framed the Baroque as an unavoidable aspect of culture rather than one left behind by the relentless march of progress. His view of the Baroque as a style that recurred over time, and with a dignity equal to that of classicism, was key for its revised reception. Nietzsche’s reassessment of the Baroque style and its theatricality anticipates the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin’s famous distinction between the Classic and the Baroque published in his 1888 study Renaissance and Baroque: An Investigation into the Nature and Origin of the Baroque Style in Italy, a fundamental text in the reconsideration of the Baroque.21 Describing his topic as ‘the disintegration of the Renaissance’, and his goal as ‘investigat[ing] the symptoms of decay’, Wölfflin appears to continue the negative assessment of the post-Renaissance period central to both Giorgio Vasari’s and Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s narratives.22 However, although he sometimes views Renaissance architecture as morally superior to Baroque architecture,Wölfflin recognises both styles as being equally important. In his account, the Renaissance is an art of serenity – Apollonian, in Nietzschean terms – concerned with form and individuation; the Baroque, by contrast, is an art of excitement and ecstasy – Dionysian – which aspires to dissolution. Wölfflin described the Roman Baroque (which he considered emblematic of what had replaced Renaissance art) as the style in which form struggles to restrain materials that are increasingly out of control. According to Wölfflin, Renaissance art did not face this problem because its forms were matched to their material whilst the adequacy of classical forms is challenged in the Baroque.23 It is hard to overestimate the importance of Wölfflin’s book – as well as his Classical Art (1899) and Principles of Art History (1915) – to the recuperation of the Baroque in the nineteenth century. His stylistic approach, his analysis of the relation between architecture and the bodies who experience it, and his assessment of the Baroque as the upending (rather than the decay) of Renaissance values profoundly shaped studies on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art, as well as the discipline of art history itself.Yet the Italian reception

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Baroquemania and reimagination of the Baroque - at least until the first decade of the twentieth century, when art historians of a younger generation began regularly reading German-language art publications – proceeded independently from Wölfflin’s and his students’ re-evaluation of the style, and often arrived at profoundly different conclusions. Such reassessments of the Baroque have inspired the story that I narrate in this book: I begin with the fin de siècle, in which Italian Decadentists like Gabriele D’Annunzio celebrated the Baroque to signify their elitism and sense of alienation from Italian society. Such anti-classical and decadent taste marked them as modern and attuned with panEuropean taste shifts, as well as pessimistic about modernity itself.24 In 1894 Enrico Nencioni (one of D’Annunzio’s mentors) exhorted his contemporaries to admit that, despite their nostalgia for Antiquity and the Renaissance, ‘today our life is always artificial and always agitated: the nervous organism is continuously overexcited, restless and eager of new, strange and excessive sensations. […] We are all today quite baroque.’ 25 Nencioni’s talk, titled ‘Baroquism’, was the first in Italy to acknowledge explicitly the profound existential similarities between his own time and the seventeenth century, and thus is the starting point of this book. To probe how the international Baroque revival was translated into the peculiar idioms of Italian modern culture, this book explores reimaginations of the style in a variety of media, in different intellectual circles, and to various (and often conflicting) political ends. It furthers the assessment of the diversity and ubiquity of neo-Baroque discourses by analysing texts, exhibitions, photographs, ephemera, paintings, buildings, sculptures, and films that demonstrate the Baroque’s considerable impact on Italian modern visual and material culture. In order to emphasise the style’s dialectical treatment in the time between Nencioni’s assessment and the end of the Second World War – that is, as a legacy of potential annihilation but also of potential consolidation, and as a critique of modernity and a celebration of an intrinsically Italian road to modernity – the book consists of six chapters, each of which focuses on a key episode in which the period and the style were discussed in terms of their problematic afterlife. Chapter 1 studies an episode that represents a crucial shift in the assessment of the Baroque: the staging of lavish celebrations to commemorate the third centenary of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s birth, which hailed him as the paradigm of a multi-regional artist (with links to Naples, Rome, and Florence) who expressed the essence of Italian artistic genius. In the aftermath of these ‘Berninian celebrations’, Italian photographers finally began intensive campaigns to record Baroque art and architecture, and a new generation of scholars addressed this period. An example of such a rediscovery was the publication of the first academic monograph on Bernini, written by the young art historian Stanislao Fraschetti in 1900 and richly illustrated by photographs of the sculptor’s most important works. I examine this reassessment’s intellectual stakes by investigating how Italian art historians struggled to do justice to Baroque art and architecture’s formal innovations while still condemning the period as decadent. Following this discussion of professional art historians and their reconsideration of the Baroque, Chapter 2 studies its popularisation, analysing the neo-Baroque pavilions

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Introduction of the 1911 international exhibitions organised to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification. These jubilee pavilions were designed as tributes to local seventeenthcentury architecture: in Turin celebrating Filippo Juvarra, in Rome Bernini. The organising committee and many observers regarded the Baroque as the first properly national, rather than regional, style to have emerged on the peninsula.Therefore, it was the most appropriate to display the young nation’s cultural assets and political importance. While neo-Baroque architecture was also common in other European nations, especially in Germany, Austria, England, and France, in Italy it was deployed as proof of a national identity that anticipated the country’s political unification. The style seemed an apt metaphor for the tensions between modern Italy’s nationalism and regionalism and its colonial aspirations on the eve of the invasion of Libya. Chapter 3 considers the Baroque’s reassessment among a new generation of Italian art historians, focusing on a young academic and his relationship to the avant-garde: Roberto Longhi. One of the most important twentieth-century connoisseurs of Baroque art, in his youth Longhi was quite sympathetic to the Futurists. On the eve of the First World War he described Futurism’s superiority to Cubism by comparing the former to the Baroque and the latter to the Renaissance – using the formal schema developed by Wölfflin in Renaissance and Baroque (1888). Such a comparison between the avant-garde and the historical Baroque led Longhi to argue that the Baroque was quintessentially Italian and was also the origin of modernism, putting into question both French-centred narratives of the birth of modern art and German-centred interpretations of that style. The Baroque was a style that German-speaking art historians had interpreted for decades as quintessentially Nordic. In the aftermath of the First World War, however, Italians deployed it as an anti-Germanic strategy. Chapter 4 studies one of these episodes, the 1922 organisation of a massive exhibition of Italian Baroque painting in Florence’s Palazzo Pitti. This exhibition marked one of the first times in which these paintings were described as ‘Italian’ rather than Venetian, Florentine, Neapolitan, or Roman. Vienna’s Baroque Museum would open a year later, in 1923. The Pitti show used the Baroque to attack Austrian culture and its claims to the style and bolster Italy’s victory in the First World War on the artistic sphere. The Pitti show and other exhibitions and editorial initiatives of the 1920s popularised the Baroque, seen no longer as an aberration in Italian art history but instead as part of an uninterrupted homegrown tradition of Italian ‘classical’ painting that spanned from Giotto to the 1920s. Conceptualising the Baroque as a form of classicism encouraged proponents of the return-to-order to promote the imitation of Seicento masters among young artists such as Baccio Maria Bacci, Carlo Socrate, and Armando Spadini, marshalling the Baroque against the alleged excesses and internationalism of the avant-garde. The show at the Pitti Palace triggered a wave of discussions in the Italian press over the Baroque legacy. Some commentators, such as Giorgio de Chirico, decried the public’s interest in a period of art that they perceived as decadent and corrupt; others, though, saw positive similarities between the authoritarian politics of the Counter-Reformation and the ascent to power of the Fascist regime. Therefore, in the last two chapters, I delve

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Baroquemania further into the relationship between Fascism and the Baroque. Chapter 5 looks into a little-known episode of Fascist architecture: Baroque features in a significant number of public and private buildings built during the interwar period. Allusions to Borromini’s, Bernini’s, and Maderno’s work in schools, ministries, convents, and apartment buildings require an understanding of Fascist architecture beyond the framework in which it is usually written - beyond the opposition of classicism and rationalism, nostalgia and modernism. Instead I show that during the Fascist ventennio the Baroque was considered an appropriate style to display Italy’s imperialistic ambitions, much as it had been in the 1911 jubilee fairs. Finally Chapter 6 compares the 1930s and 1940s reception of Adolfo Wildt’s and Lucio Fontana’s work as examples of the Baroque, studying how it reveals crucial shifts in the style’s interpretation. Wildt’s work – inspired by Michelangelo and Bernini, but also by German symbolism – was seen as Baroque in so far as seventeenth-century art was perceived as addressing the disciplining of matter through technical prowess. By contrast, in the reception of Fontana’s amorphous ceramic and maiolica sculptures of the interwar period the Baroque signified a clear-eyed engagement with materials and social reality, and a critique of Fascist-endorsed forms of art although not of the regime itself. This shift is linked to new theories of the Baroque that would gain even more currency after the fall of Fascism. A new generation of young Italian philosophers replaced Benedetto Croce’s well-known disdain for the Baroque by adopting the more benign outlook on the style of the Catalan fascist ideologue Eugeni d’Ors. These six interrelated chapters reveal how the meaning and cultural politics of the Baroque profoundly shifted in a little over fifty years’ time. Until the First World War, the style helped Italians imagine the relationship between their cultural heritage, collective identity, and colonial ambitions, mediating discussions on the relation between regionalism and Italianness, and between Latinity and the German culture Italians both admired and feared. In the interwar period, the Baroque was instead framed as an integral part of an uninterrupted tradition that proved a national ‘essence’ existed prior to 1871 – an indicator of a unifying concept of Italian culture revealed in its Seicento painting, sculpture, and architecture. Finally, as the regime came to its catastrophic end, the Baroque was mobilised to challenge Fascism’s classicising notions of order and discipline – although not yet in favour of anti-Fascist policies. The present book complements most recent scholarship on the modern rediscovery of the Baroque, which focuses on either the German-speaking or the Spanish-speaking contexts. The former demonstrates that, since the mid-nineteenth century, the Baroque was evoked in Germany and Austria as a model of national culture, in contrast to classical Latinity. Observing that this style originated as a response to the Protestant Reformation, art historians such as Cornelius Gurlitt, Wölfflin, Riegl, Wilhelm Worringer, and others aligned the Baroque with the Middle Ages and Romanticism (and later Expressionism) as proof of a continuous Germanic culture that reached its fulfilment in the recently consolidated nation-state. Germany, like Italy, concluded its unification process in 1871. The Baroque, then, was viewed here as the counterpoint to the Renaissance, which helped

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Introduction locate the starting point of modernity in the North rather than in the Mediterranean.26 As in these Germanic contexts, ideology and nation-building also played a comparable role in Italian assessments of the Baroque from the fin de siècle to the collapse of the Fascist regime. Such similarities are not incidental. The present book, therefore, makes the case that Italian critics, artists, and architects had, exactly like their German and Austrian peers, a fraught relationship with this style and its afterlives, and deployed it to claim a national essence that preceded the birth of the nation-state. In Latin American studies, too, the Baroque has become crucial to analyses of national aesthetics. In this context, the Baroque designates a hybrid art stemming not only from the colonial subjugation of indigenous traditions but also from the rebellious de-colonial thrust of Latin American culture against prevailing European narratives – proof of the existence of alternative forms of modernity.27 In Italy, as well, the Baroque was viewed as an essential point of reference for an Italian way to modernity, one that aspired to be of its own time but also to revive its peculiar and local tradition. In Italy, too, just as in Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, or Argentina, the Baroque proved to be an unstable signifier that served to reinforce but also subvert the ideological status quo.Yet by contextualising the intellectual, artistic, and political investments in Italian theorisations of the Baroque, I also call attention to the extent to which the modern Baroque revival has been implicated in racial and national politics that are inextricably intertwined with the historical catastrophes of twentieth-century Europe. Such focus on Baroque reimaginations points to a peculiar phenomenon. In the twentieth century a curious convergence led writers, critics, philosophers, and poets from different linguistic traditions to look back on the Baroque as a period with notable resonances with the aesthetics of modernity. Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Severo Sarduy, Jacques Derrida, and Jorge Luis Borges, among many others, used the concept of the Baroque to challenge canonical approaches to periodisation, epistemology, and aesthetics.28 Books that address this phenomenon have generally neglected the coeval reflections on the Baroque that took place in Italy and that were affected by and influenced those in other national contests — for example, those of Benedetto Croce, who was key for Benjamin’s own reflection on the topic and shaped studies on the Baroque in Italy and abroad, or those by Eugeni d’Ors, who not only influenced Argentine and French interwar reflections on the Baroque but also received much attention among young Italian philosophers working during the last years of the Fascist regime. This book aspires to reposition Italian post-unification visual and textual reflections on the Baroque at the very centre of any consideration of the neo-Baroque. Furthermore, most studies on the theory of the modern Baroque emphasise its textual afterlives but rarely acknowledge that these reinterpretations permeated visual culture and the built environment; indeed, artists and architects, like philosophers and writers, looked to this style for inspiration and re-created it to express their ambivalent relationship with an identity caught between modernity and tradition, between fascination with the future and nostalgia for a supposedly organic past.29 The present book, therefore, fills in the gaps of previous studies by examining the ways many of the visual works Italian artists

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Baroquemania created over a fifty-year span mobilised Baroque forms to wield power over their spectators, and to shape and construct their identity as Italians. Intervening in the art-historical narratives of both Italian visual culture and Baroque revivals, I hope to shed new light on the heuristic role of style in the cultural politics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Reinventions of the Baroque, arguably the first transcultural and transnational aesthetic spread by trade, travel, and colonial conquest, I will argue, were central to the construction of a distinct Italian modern identity. Unearthing the contradictory legacy of the Baroque in modern Italy shows that its revivals and appropriations were not repositories of exact facts about the seventeenth century but rather clues to how visions of modernity and tradition merged to form such identity. Imagining the Baroque, in sum, was essential to imagining Italy.

Notes 1 Rare exceptions, chronologically more contained than this book, are Concetta Leto, Attraverso il Novecento: polemiche e equivoci sul barocco in Italia (Florence: Le lettere, 1995); Anna Mazzanti, Lucia Mannini, and Valentina Gensini, eds, Novecento sedotto: il Fascino del Seicento tra le due guerre (Florence: Polistampa, 2010); Lucia Simonato, Bernini scultore: il difficile dialogo con la modernità (Milan: Electa, 2018). 2 The Kingdom of Italy was officially declared in 1861 (an anniversary commemorated by these ‘patriotic postcards’) but after its annexation Rome was proclaimed as the capital of the new country in 1871. 3 Luciano Canfora, Ideologie del classicismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1980); Jan Nelis, From Ancient to Modern: The Myth of Romanità during the Ventennio Fascista (Rome: Belgisch Historisch Instituut te Rome, 2011); Joshua Arthurs, Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012); Emily Braun, ‘Political Rhetoric and Poetic Irony: The Uses of Classicism in the Art of Fascist Italy’, in On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910–1930, ed. Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer A. Mundy (London: The Tate Gallery, 1990), 345–358; Rosanna Pavoni, ed., Reviving the Renaissance:The Use and Abuse of the Past in Nineteenth-Century Italian Art and Decoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Medina Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); Diane Ghirardo, ‘Inventing the Palazzo Del Corte in Ferrara’, in Donatello among the Blackshirts. History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy, ed. Roger J. Crum and Claudia Lazzaro (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 97–112; Roger J. Crum, ‘Shaping the Fascist “New Man”: Donatello’s St. George and Mussolini’s Appropriated Past of the Italian Nation’, in ibid., 133–144. 4 Albert Russell Ascoli and Krystyna Von Henneberg, eds, Making and Remaking Italy:The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento (Oxford: Berg, 2001); Norma Bouchard, ed., Risorgimento in Modern Italian Culture: Revisiting the Nineteenth-Century Past in History, Narrative, and Cinema (Cranbury: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005); Patrizia Laurano, Consenso e politica di massa: l’uso del mito garibaldino nella costruzione della nazione (Acireale: Bonanno, 2009); Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall, eds, The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Italy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 5 John Marino, ed., Early Modern Italy: 1550–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Dino Carpanetto and Giuseppe Ricuperati, L’Italia del Settecento: crisi, trasformazioni, lumi (Bari: Laterza, 2008).

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Introduction 6 Alois Riegl, The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome, trans. by Andrew Hopkins and Arnold Alexander Witte (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010), 99. 7 On the ‘portability of art’, that is, its capacity ‘of allowing a history of serendipitous encounters […] as a result of the vicissitudes of the road’, see Alina Payne, ‘The Portability of Art: A Prolegomena to Art and Architecture on the Move’, in Territories and Trajectories: Cultures in Circulation, ed. Diana Sorensen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 91–109, 99. 8 Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock: eine Untersuchung überWesen und Entstehung des Barockstils in Italien (Munich: Theodor Ackermann, 1888); Alois Riegl, Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom, ed. Arthur Burda and Max Dvorák (Vienna: A. Schroll, 1908); Georg Simmel, Michelangelo ([1910] Milan: Abscondita, 2003); Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama ([1928] New York: Verso, 1998); Erwin Panofsky, ‘What Is the Baroque? (1934)’, in Three Essays on Style (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 17–88. 9 Helen Hills, ed., Rethinking the Baroque (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011). 10 Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Timothy Murray, Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Electronic Mediations) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); William Egginton, The Theater of Truth:The Ideology of (Neo)baroque Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); Walter Moser, Angela Ndalianis, and Peter Krieger, eds, Neo-Baroques: From Latin America to the Hollywood Blockbuster (Leiden and Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2017). 11 Francesco Milizia, Dizionario delle belle arti del disegno estratto in gran parte dalla Enciclopedia metodica (1797). Cited in Giovanni Getto, Il Barocco letterario in Italia (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2000), 391. Here as elsewhere, when not otherwise indicated, my translation. 12 Carlo Denina, Discorso sopra le vicende della letteratura (Turin: Nella Stamperia Reale, 1761), 3–6. 13 Luigi Settembrini, Lezioni di letteratura italiana ([1867] Turin: Unione tipografico-editrice torinese, 1927), 226. 14 Paolo Rolli, Osservazioni critiche (1728), cited in Getto, Il Barocco letterario in Italia (note 11), 380. 15 Mina Gregori, ‘Ricordi figurativi di Alessandro Manzoni’, Paragone 1 (May 1950): 7–20; Giovanni Getto, ‘Echi di un romanzo barocco nei Promessi Sposi’, Lettere Italiane XII (1960): 141–167; Glenn Palen Pierce, Manzoni and the Aesthetics of the Lombard Seicento (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1998). 16 Rodolfo Macchioni Jodi, Barocco e manierismo nel gusto otto-novecentesco (Bari: Adriatica, 1973), 7–8. 17 Théophile Gautier, ‘Charles Baudelaire’, in Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal ([1868] Paris: Aubry, 1942), 18–19. 18 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘144. Baroque Style’, in Human All Too Human. A Book for Free Spirits ([1878] Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 245–246. 19 Ibid., 245–246. 20 Friedrich Nietzsche, Epistolario. 1865–1900, ed. Barbara Allason (Turin: Einaudi, 1962), 130; Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche Contra Wagner (London: H. Henry, 1896). 21 Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock. 22 Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon ([1888] London: Collins, 1964), ‘Preface’, no page. 23 Ibid., 30. 24 Anna Mazzanti, Simbolismo italiano fra arte e critica: Mario de Maria e Angelo Conti (Florence: Le lettere, 2007); Luca Cottini, ‘D’Annunzio, Bernini, and the Baroque Prelude of Il Piacere’, Forum Italicum 51, no. 2 (1 August 2017): 1–20.

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Baroquemania 25 Enrico Nencioni, ‘Barocchismo’, in La vita italiana nel Seicento (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1897), 297. 26 Keith Moxey, The Practice of Persuasion: Paradox and Power in Art History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Jane Newman, Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Ute Engel, Stil und Nation: Barockforschung und deutsche Kunstgeschichte (ca. 1830 bis 1933) (Paderborn: Fink, 2013); Evonne Levy, Baroque and the Political Language of Formalism (1845–1945): Burckhardt,Wölfflin, Gurlitt, Brinckmann, Sedlmayr (Basel: Shwabe, 2015); Maarten Delbeke, Andrew Leach, and John Macarthur, eds, The Baroque in Architectural Culture, 1880–1980 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). 27 Lourival Gomes Machado, Barroco mineiro (São Paulo: Editôra da Universidade de São Paulo, 1969); Severo Sarduy, Barroco (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1974); Alejo Carpentier, ‘Conciencia e identidad de América: Lo barroco y lo real maravilloso’, in La novela latinoamericana en vísperas de un nuevo siglo y otros ensayos (México, D.F.: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1981), 11–135; José Lezama Lima, ‘La curiosidad barroca’, in Confluencias: selección de ensayos, ed. Abel Enrique Prieto (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 1988), 229–246; Lois Parkinson Zamora, The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Monika Kaup and Lois Parkinson Zamora, eds, Baroque NewWorlds: Representation,Transculturation, Counterconquest (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Monika Kaup, NeoBaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature,Visual Art, and Film (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012). 28 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason:The Aesthetics of Modernity, trans. Patrick Camellier ([1984] London: Sage Publications, 1994); Bolívar Echeverría, La modernidad de lo barroco (México, D.F.: Era, 1998); Robert Harbison, Reflections on Baroque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Nicolas Goyer and Walter Moser, eds, Résurgences baroques (Brussels: Lettre volée, 2001); William Egginton, How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); Gregg Lambert, On the (New) Baroque (Aurora: Davies Group, 2008); Nadir Lahiji, Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). 29 Some exceptions are: Paula Barreiro López, ‘Reinterpreting the Past: The Baroque Phantom during Francoism’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 91, no. 5 (28 May 2014): 715–734; Miriam M. Basilio, Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War (Burlington: Routledge, 2014); Jane Stevenson, Baroque between theWars: Alternative Style in the Arts, 1918–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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Decadent Seicento: the emergence of the Baroque in the Italian fin de siècle

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n 7 December 1898, on the third centenary of his birth, a plaque was erected on the façade of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s home in Rome. The weathered inscription still reads, ‘Here lived and died Gianlorenzo Bernini, sovereign of art, revered by Popes, Princes, and Nations’.1 Made by the sculptor Ettore Ferrari, the plaque was modelled on one of Bernini’s earliest works, his funerary monument for Bishop Giovanni Battista Santoni, and thus became an overt homage to Bernini’s work. In their monuments both 1.1  Ettore Ferrari, Plaque on the façade of via della Mercede, 12, Gianlorenzo Bernini’s presumed residence in Rome, 1898

1.2  Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Bust of Giovanni Battista Santoni, 1613–1616, Basilica of Santa Prassede, Rome

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Baroquemania Ferrari and Bernini included a lifelike effigy of the man whom they celebrated, and broken pediments decorated with Baroque curlicues. Equally Baroque are the grotesque faces decorating the plaques, which Ferrari carefully copied too. Whilst Bernini sculpted a cherub, Ferrari included the tools of the sculptor, but both artists carved a similar fruit garland. Although Bernini framed his monument with putti, Ferrari with two grinning satyrs, the resemblance persists: both placed them on decorative spirals.2 Regardless of the minor discrepancies between the two monuments, Ferrari’s reverence for the Baroque and its iconic sculptor is explicit – as if close emulation were the only possible tribute to Bernini’s genius. True, Ferrari may not appear to be a conspicuous champion of Seicento sensibilities. In 1889 Ferrari, an anticlerical and republican freemason, had even gone so far as to make the polemical statue of Giordano Bruno still extant in Campo dei Fiori, in the exact location where the Renaissance philosopher was burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition. Projects like this would not render Ferrari the most obvious choice to design a monument honouring an artist as associated with the Catholic Church as Bernini. However, years before, the Accademia di San Luca had rejected one of Ferrari’s statues because its animated composition and expressiveness were considered excessively ‘Berninian’.3 Lucia Simonato has shown the importance of Bernini for an entire generation of Italian and French sculptors in the nineteenth century, from Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux to Auguste Rodin, from Antonio Canova to Vincenzo Vela; Ferrari was by no means the only one to be influenced by Baroque aesthetics.4 More important than his espousal of a Baroque style, Ferrari had also made the celebratory monuments to several heroes of Unified Italy (Bruno, Victor Emanuel II, and Giuseppe Garibaldi, among others) and copies of these statues were distributed throughout Italy to create a sense of shared heritage around the Risorgimento. Choosing Ferrari to design the commemorative plaque of Bernini thus reveals the desire to appropriate the Baroque sculptor as another heroic model figure for modern Italy. Through Ferrari’s hand Bernini was transformed into a genius who rebelled against the decadence of his time and anticipated Italian unification. The inauguration of Ferrari’s plaque and the attending ceremonies celebrating Bernini were phenomena not unique to Italy alone. Instead they were part of a pan-European trend of ‘rediscoveries’ (to use Francis Haskell’s term) of Baroque artists: in 1898 Rembrandt was ‘rediscovered’ in Amsterdam and Velázquez in Madrid; in 1899 Goya in Madrid and Van Dyck in Antwerp (and London in 1900).5 The 1898 ‘Berninian celebrations’ concluded an intense decade in which Italians reconsidered the legacy of the Baroque and of Bernini in particular. Such reappraisal of the Baroque in Italy was first conducted in the literary field – albeit with some imprecise references to art and architecture – and only later in art history. Yet despite the recognition of Bernini’s genius and other exhumations of the Baroque, readings of the style in terms of decay still prevailed. The fin de siècle facilitated the study of uncharted historical periods, but negative assessments of the seventeenth century persisted. Psychologically, this refusal to reassess the period makes sense: Looking at one’s own time as one of decay and decline can make one sympathetic to other allegedly

Decadent Seicento decadent periods, yet both appraisals are permeated by historical pessimism. Such wavering between fascination for (or at least curiosity about) and disapproval of the Baroque is the leitmotiv of this chapter.

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1889: Gabriele D’Annunzio and the recasting of the Baroque as decadent The decades after Italy’s unification were marked by the growing political influence of Italian industrialists; by Italy’s diplomatic rapprochement with Germany and the former occupier of the peninsula, Austria; and by a political system based on nepotism. There were significant scientific, economic, social, and cultural changes, but also a pervasive sense of cultural decline.6 Allusions to degeneration and decadence during the fin de siècle manifested the suspicion that external signs of progress might be deceptive, that modernity could negatively affect human consciousness. This mistrust in progress, in turn, permeated the artistic sphere. The intellectuals and visual artists who evoked ideas of decadence rejected the values of the society they belonged to and instead pursued alternative and oppositional ways of life and expressions in art, cultivating ‘the consciousness of their own alienation, both aesthetic and moral’, as Matei Calinescu has observed.7 Italian Decadentists decried the Italian Romantic tradition for lacking the rebelliousness and sensuality that saturated other nations’ Romanticism.8 The Decadentists were sceptical about the usefulness of rational discourse and instead sought out words as evocative vehicles for sensual pleasure.9 Rather than conceiving of intellectuals as primarily committed to the moral uplifting of the nation, as the Romantics did, the Decadentists defended an aristocratic view of the artist, expressing contempt for the masses. Their love for exoticism and sensual refinement, for the archaic and the unusual, for the morbid and the ill, was an escape from what they saw as the squalid reality of post-unification Italy.10 At first, the Decadentists drew parallels between their own era and historical periods perceived as corrupt and degenerate, and condemned them all. The best example of this mutual historical censure was the bi-monthly periodical Cronaca Bizantina (Byzantine Chronicle). Founded in 1881 by the editor Angelo Sommaruga, its title’s reference to Byzantium – an imagined rather than accurately defined era – underlined the journal’s opposition against post-unification Italy. The masthead of the journal read, ‘Naive Italy asked for Rome to be its capital, and instead got Byzantium’, Rome symbolising the glorious, and Byzantium the corrupt Italian past. A poet who collaborated with the Cronaca confirmed this metaphorical distinction when he stated, ‘We call ourselves Byzantines to remind ourselves how distant reality is from our ideal; because among the boring rumours, petty rivalries, petty allegiances, petty ambitions, among this buzzing of lies and boasts, among the vulgarity that surrounds us, we are faithful to the ancient ideal of Rome’.11 However, the magazine’s content and presentation catered to the taste of the bourgeoisie whose corruption and lack of ideals it claimed to denounce.12 Cronaca Bizantina included literary and cultural criticism, but also sensational articles and gossip columns. The luxurious paper on which the magazine was printed, its unusual typographic characters,

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Baroquemania and the elaborate decorations of its cover contrasted with the purportedly anti-bourgeois position of the magazine. In 1884 the Decadentist orientation of the magazine became even more overt. In this year, Sommaruga was charged with fraud and fled Italy, leading the fashionable journalist Gabriele D’Annunzio to assume the direction of the magazine from November 1885 to its permanent closure in March 1886. Under D’Annunzio’s directorship, the Cronaca published literary pieces alongside gossip and the addresses of the most fashionable Roman couturiers and jewellers. Giuseppe Cellini, one of the most iconic artists of fin de siècle Rome, marked its new direction of the magazine by redesigning the Cronaca’s frontispiece. Embodying the publication’s flippant and ostentatious bent, Cellini ornamented the cover with arabesques and medallions – one of which contains the figure of Sagittarius,

1.3  Giuseppe Cellini, Masthead of Cronaca Bizantina V, no. 1 (15 November 1885)

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Decadent Seicento the Zodiac sign corresponding to the month of November during which the new Cronaca was launched. In a mandorla are three Pre-Raphaelite beauties, or three ‘Graces cloaked in the Byzantine fashion’, as D’Annunzio described them in an editorial.13 The Cronaca’s motto became ‘Non tristis gratia ridet’ (‘Cheerful kindness laughs’), a verse from Petronius’s Satyricon. Such evocation of Pre-Raphaelitism, as well as of the literature of the Roman Silver Age, manifested the Cronaca’s adherence to cosmopolitan Decadentism. In this last phase of the journal, the appellation ‘Byzantine’ was no longer a moral protest against contemporary politics in the name of an ideal ancient Rome. Rather, the term was a proud affirmation of an impure and corrupt taste, of an aristocratic and exquisitely erudite art. Like D’Annunzio and his circle, by the mid-1880s many European artists and intellectuals felt a profound affinity with the Byzantine period, considering it an era of moral corruption and depraved lust with important similarities to their own time of crisis.14

1.4  Drawing by Achille Beltrame, Gabriele D’Annunzio at his studio in his villa in Francavilla al Mare, from L’illustrazione Italiana XXV, no. 5 (30 January 1898)

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Baroquemania During his stint as director of the Cronaca, D’Annunzio’s fame as a Decadentist dandy solidified. His carefully constructed persona betrayed all the traits of the aesthete: the careful attention to dress, the scandalous romantic liaisons, and the cultivation of aristocratic hobbies. Representations of D’Annunzio’s living space in the popular press show him surrounded by a profusion of precious artworks and bric-à-brac, an overwhelming accumulation of objects that rejected any notion of utility or frugality in favour of sensual enjoyment – a Baroque excess.15 Though readily apparent in these materials, D’Annunzio’s consecration as the most visible example of Italian Decadentism occurred with the publication of his first novel Pleasure (1889). The book was inspired by D’Annunzio’s familiarity with Rome’s high society and borrowed many of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s flamboyant literary strategies.16 Though the novel includes few precise references to seventeenth-century paintings and sculptures, it is still rife with Rome’s Baroque atmosphere.17 The protagonist, Andrea Sperelli-Fieschi d’Ugenta, a rich and egocentric member of the aristocracy, conducts an idle existence in the city. The novel narrates his tormented love affairs with two women: Elena Muti, a femme fatale, and Maria Ferres de Capdevila, who embodies an ideal of purity and salvation. Political events of 1887 – such as the battle of Dogali, in which Ethiopian troops crushed near Massawa an Italian battalion that was attempting to establish a colonial empire in modern-day Eritrea – are briefly mentioned in the novel. However, D’Annunzio’s emphasis lies not with geopolitical news but with his hero’s contempt for modern life; by focusing on Sperelli’s keen longing to live in the seventeenth century, no other major novel of the Italian fin de siècle so markedly engages with the Baroque legacy. As D’Annunzio eloquently describes it, ‘Rome was [Sperelli’s] great love – not the Rome of the Cæsars, but that of the popes – not the Rome of the arches, of the thermal baths, of the fora, but the Rome of the villas, of the fountains, of the churches’. Sperelli ‘would have given the entire Colosseum for Villa Medici, Campo Vaccino for Piazza di Spagna, the Arch of Titus for the Fontanella delle Tartarughe’. In these passages, D’Annunzio replaces one set of values with another, trading the empty pomp of post-unification Italy with whimsical extravagance and sensual gratification. Sperelli modelled his life not on that of the self-controlled Romans of the Golden Age but on ‘the magnificence of the Colonnas, of the Dorias, of the Barberinis’, the princely families that for centuries had served the Pope and that, after the unification of Italy and the demise of the Church’s temporal power, were rapidly declining. Above all, such aspirations are embodied in Sperelli’s ideal living quarters: ‘His great dream was to possess a palace adorned by Michelangelo, and embellished by the Carraccis like Palazzo Farnese; a gallery full of paintings by Raphael, Titian, Domenichino, like the Galleria Borghese; a villa like that of Alessandro Albani [with] deep box hedges, red Oriental granite, white Luni marble, Grecian statues, and Renaissance paintings.’ As if there were any remaining questions about Sperelli’s desires, when asked, ‘What would you like to be?’ the protagonist plainly says that he aspires to be a ‘Roman prince’.18

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Decadent Seicento It should be noted that Sperelli is not a facsimile of D’Annunzio himself. In fact, D’Annunzio professed a marked preference for the early Renaissance painters, in no small part due to his love for the Pre-Raphaelites.19 When chronicling a visit to the Galleria Borghese in 1887, celebrated for its paintings by Bernini and Caravaggio, D’Annunzio mentioned only works by Sandro Botticelli.20 However, Sperelli’s frequent reference in Pleasure to late Renaissance and Baroque architecture and sculpture indicates a fascination with the seventeenth century. The novel abounds with mentions of places such as Sperelli’s home, Palazzo Zuccari (1590), colloquially known as ‘the House of Monsters’ due to the grotesque gaping mouths featured on its door and windows, threatening to swallow any visitor. Sperelli’s favourite nearby haunts, too, are iconic sites of Baroque Rome: the fashionable Piazza di Spagna and the Spanish Steps, as well as Piazza Barberini with the Fountain of the Tritone designed by Bernini. Sperelli goes to dinners in the Villa Pamphili on the Gianicolo, designed by Alessandro Algardi (1595/1602–1654). He waits for Maria in front of the Quirinale Palace and describes its portal, made by Carlo Maderno and topped with a loggia designed by Bernini, as possessing a ‘deformed magnificence’.21 Sperelli’s rendezvous with Elena take place in the Villa Medici (1605), Villa Borghese (1621–1623), and Villa Pamphili (1644–1655).The lovers also meet in the frescoed gallery of the Palazzo Farnese (1597–1607), and feel that the tortured loves of the Gods in the vaults mirror their own affair. Just as architecture betrays the novel’s Baroque inclinations, the moral differences between the female protagonists in Pleasure are conveyed by their living quarters. Elena, the femme fatale, lives in Palazzo Barberini, in which the three major Baroque architects – Carlo Maderno, Francesco Borromini, and Bernini – worked. The symbol of purity, Maria Ferres, by contrast, resides in Via Nazionale, a street opened during the post-unification transformation of Rome in the last decades of the nineteenth century, most probably in a building of new construction.22 Maria and Elena’s homes are not too distant from each other, however, and, as the novel proceeds, the two characters become more similar. Though these Baroque references cohere into a rough sketch of Sperelli’s taste, they also reflect the embryonic state of art-historical studies of the post-Renaissance. For this reason, D’Annunzio’s description of Sperelli’s taste conflated under a single (unnamed) style typified by Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Domenichino, Zuccari, Bernini, Borromini, and the Carracci brothers. In D’Annunzio’s decadent imagination, late Antiquity, Byzantium, Mannerism, the Baroque, and the Rococo all blend against order and progress – the official values of post-unification Italy. The Decadent references to the Baroque were not historically accurate but conveyed what was understood as a common condition of the Baroque artist and the late nineteenth-century intellectual: ignored by the political regimes of their day and seeking refuge in a world of unconventional beauty, powerless before the prevailing sense of crisis of their own time. The Baroque, in particular its Roman version, became associated with Decadent aesthetics because it evoked the search for artificial stimuli to enhance purely sensual pleasure. Perhaps due to this shared condition of crisis, Sperelli is more at ease in this imagined past than in his own time. His leisure is modelled on that of an imaginary seventeenth-century

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1.5  Façade of Palazzo Zuccari before 1904/1907

nobleman: the composition of poems and paintings, the pursuit of beautiful women, the broody contemplation of the meaninglessness of life.23 As a dilettante engraver, Sperelli takes Rembrandt as his model.24 D’Annunzio probably had not yet seen Rembrandt’s most famous works, but he was acquainted with the moody atmospheres of the Dutch artist through his friend, the painter Mario de Maria. The Bolognese de Maria – nicknamed by D’Annunzio ‘the painter of moons’ – was often compared to Rembrandt for his

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Decadent Seicento

1.6  Mario de Maria, The Plague in Rome in 1600, 1886

love of melancholic scenes and nocturnal imagery and imagined a bleak Baroque Rome in the throes of an epidemic in his 1886 La peste a Roma nel 1600 (The Plague in Rome in 1600).25 Other examples of Sperelli’s pastimes similarly illustrate the influence of the Baroque. When he is wounded in a duel, Sperelli retires to his cousin’s villa and plans to dedicate his convalescence to writing: a modern poem, books on the Italian Primitives, and, finally, one on Bernini, ‘a great study of decadence, gathering around this extraordinary man, the favourite of six popes, not only all the art but also all the life of his century’.26 Sperelli’s ambitious plans are, not surprisingly, sidetracked by a new love interest and never carried to completion, but this brief description summarises well the decadent connotations of the Baroque sculptor in fin de siècle Italy. Such mentions of Bernini in an 1889 novel are of the utmost importance because D’Annunzio’s celebration of seventeenth-century decadent Rome was a calculated rejection of earlier critical assessments of the period. Although D’Annunzio’s brief but admiring comments on the Baroque are relatively easy to identify, however, the sources that contributed to them are not. Wölfflin had published Renaissance and Baroque the year before, but the book was translated into Italian only in 1928, and D’Annunzio did not read German.27 It appears, then, that Sperelli’s admiration for Bernini and Baroque Rome as ‘decadent’ was simply the result of overturning the previous criticism of the period. As the Decadentists brazenly differentiated themselves from both the rest of bourgeois society and their literary predecessors, they rediscovered and re-evaluated the style most reviled by the previous generation of writers.28 D’Annunzio’s descriptions of Baroque Rome are also part and parcel of the writer’s polemic against the new political, social, and economic forces that rendered the Roman aristocracy and its way of life obsolete.29 This contention is most clearly manifested in his diatribes against speculators who, during the 1880s, were demolishing many historic

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Roman villas and gardens to build modern housing for the new post-unification bourgeoisie. Particularly scandalous was the destruction of Villa Ludovisi, the setting of Andrea and Elena’s love affair and one of the most magnificent Baroque private residences in Rome. After Prince Boncompagni Ludovisi sold the villa and gardens in 1885, the building was demolished and the land divided into lots in order to construct the modern buildings along the current Via Veneto, the heart of the post-Second World War Dolce Vita. D’Annunzio described in another novel the woeful felling of the centenary trees in the Villa Ludovisi’s gardens: It seemed as though a blast of barbarism were blowing over Rome […] In the midst of the incessant current of business, of the ferocious fury of appetites and passions, of the disordered and exclusive exercise of utilitarian activity, all sense of decorum had been lost, all respect for the Past laid aside. The battle for gain was being fought with unbridled, implacable violence. The weapons used were the pickaxe, the trowel, and bad faith.30 Despite the shocked reactions of the foreign press, which protested against the destruction of the city’s architectural treasures, the violent modernisation of Rome continued. Representing the indignant reaction of the scholarly community, in 1885, the academic painter and director of the French Academy of Rome Ernest Hébert depicted Rome as an outraged laurel-crowned and toga-clad woman, with St Peter’s Basilica in the background to represent her past glories.31 Sitting on the roof of Villa Medici, where the French Academy is located (and just a few metres from Sperelli’s residence at Palazzo Zuccari), the personification of Rome is dressed in mourning for the devastation of her heritage – a sentiment that D’Annunzio and his Decadentist cohort shared. In a scene from Pleasure when Andrea Sperelli is looking for Maria Ferres’s house on Via Nazionale, D’Annunzio deliberately ignores a neoclassical new construction in the street, the bombastic Palazzo delle Esposizioni (1883), as if rejecting the upheaval of Rome’s history and the vulgarity of post-unification Italy. D’Annunzio’s evocation of the Baroque Rome that was falling under the demolition hammer was thus not only an expression of the refined taste of the Decadent aesthete; it was also a condemnation of the mercantile values endorsed in post-unification Italy.32 For the Decadentists, the Baroque was an instance of what Malcolm Löwy called ‘romantic anti-capitalism’, the expression of an anti-modern consciousness that rebelled against modernity’s utilitarian values and mourned the accelerated destruction of its past.33

Adolfo Venturi and the first Italian modern art history on the Baroque Whilst novelists like D’Annunzio engaged with an imaginary Baroque because of its sentimental and emotional resonances with their present, Italian art historians became interested in systematically applying to seventeenth-century art the methodological tools

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Decadent Seicento

1.7  Ernest Hébert, Indignant Rome, 1885

of their budding discipline. As Seicento art had such negative connotations, it was the perfect ground to test the objectivity of a discipline that had only recently become academic and that still needed to prove its scientific credentials. Italy’s unification catalysed this scientific study of artworks. A considerable portion of the nation’s cultural patrimony was dispersed after the Napoleonic and Risorgimento wars and the subsequent expulsion of the royal families who had reigned over the Italian

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Baroquemania micro-states. The new King of Italy, Victor Emanuel II, considered the art collections belonging to the other Italian royal families to be his personal property, and he sometimes seized them to decorate his palaces across the peninsula. The founding of museums and an increase in the foreign art market demanded the accurate identification of artworks and improved safeguarding of national heritage. The connoisseurs Giovanni Morelli and Giovan Battista Cavalcaselle, both strongly committed to the Italian state, tirelessly campaigned for the enactment of stricter export laws in Rome and supervision over the restoration of ancient buildings.34 True, these connoisseurs were integral to the inception of scientific art study, but they were more interested in attribution than in interpretation; as such, they paid little attention to a comprehensive evaluation of artistic styles and their context of production, and, like most of their contemporaries, they endorsed the rejection of the Baroque espoused by art historians like Vasari and Winckelmann.35 Even when, as conservators of the Italian patrimony, Morelli and Cavalcaselle visited art collections with Baroque holdings, they mostly paid attention to the artists up to the end of the Renaissance. For example, when in 1890 Giovanni Morelli published his guide to the Borghese and Doria-Pamphili collections in Rome, now renowned for their Baroque sculptures and paintings, he focused exclusively on Renaissance art – as D’Annunzio had done.36 Despite the importance of Morelli’s and Cavalcaselle’s groundwork in assessing the Italian heritage, ‘the institutional architecture of art history in Italy was still to be built up’, as Laura Iamurri has pointed out.37 Most of this task was undertaken by Adolfo Venturi, who in 1890 was appointed the first Italian university professor of art history. Venturi’s methodology for the systematic evaluation of art was shaped by Hyppolite Taine’s belief in the importance of milieu, positivism’s emphasis on careful observation, and Charles Darwin’s studies on individual variations within the same species.38 As a result of such influences, in his 1887 programmatic article ‘Per la storia dell’arte’ (‘For the history of art’), Venturi proposed that philology and connoisseurship supported each other: ‘To the precise knowledge of the works of an artist, should we not add,’ he asked, ‘to properly understand their sentiment and interpret their character, a deep knowledge of the man and his life, of the tendencies of his time and the spirit of his milieu?’ Venturi suggested that philologists should rely on the visual to better assess archival information, whilst connoisseurs should use documents to solve controversies that could not be unravelled through formal analysis alone.39 The marriage between these two approaches became both the methodological mark of Venturi and his students and foundational to the conceptualisation of Italian art history, even to the present day. Like Morelli and Cavalcaselle, Venturi considered art history the best training ground for civil servants devoted to the protection of Italian cultural heritage, a task that was, until then, mostly entrusted to artists and art critics. Among his important contributions to the discipline, in 1888 Venturi helped found the first Italian academic art journal, the Archivio storico dell’arte (Historical Archive of Art), renamed L’Arte (The Art) in 1898.40 This journal encouraged Italian scholars to study their own heritage systematically, as well as to familiarise themselves with new methods developed abroad.41 Venturi also promoted the establishment of an art history graduate programme at the University of Rome, which

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Decadent Seicento accounts for the fact that virtually all Italian art historians until his retirement in 1931 were his students – including many of the figures whom I will study in the next pages. Venturi aimed to professionalise art history, but he also engaged with the broader public, writing guides to galleries, giving public conferences, and publishing articles in magazines and newspapers.42 As the rest of the book will show, this was also the case for Venturi’s students, whose debates over the Baroque were often conducted in non-specialist journals and magazines. Venturi broadcast these ambitions by publishing his multi-volume History of Italian Art, a publication that reflected his national, rather than regional, focus and exemplified his commitment to the cultural construction of post-unification Italy. Analysing both well-known and minor figures working in a plurality of media, Venturi aspired to present a complete overview of the artistic production of the entire peninsula. Venturi considered the Quattrocento and Cinquecento the two centuries in which the more interesting changes in form, style, and iconography had taken place in Italy. His Storia began at the dawn of the Middle Ages, and its twenty-fifth volume ended on the eve of the Baroque.43 Venturi was not exceptional in this preference for the Renaissance over the Baroque. Throughout his aforementioned article ‘Per la storia dell’arte’, he referred to Baroque art with the expression ‘the painting of the decadence’.44 Still, he understood that a complete history of Italian art also needed to map post-Renaissance painting, sculpture, and architecture. In 1893, only three years after Morelli, Venturi, too, wrote a guide to the Galleria Borghese for the general public. Unlike Morelli, however, Venturi also addressed post-Renaissance painting and sculpture. His brief but authoritative notes provided information on the iconography, conservation state, and provenance of the artworks, as well as the artists’ biographies. For example, when describing Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath (1605–1610), Venturi alluded to the dramatic life of the painter, his reaction against the Carracci brothers in the name of naturalism, and some doubts about the painting’s authenticity.45 He also devoted admiring pages to Bernini’s David, observing that the sculptor ‘gave to marble the rustling of silk, the splendour of satin, the colour of flesh, the lightness of hair’, and that he was ‘the greatest Italian artist of the seventeenth century’.46 In that same year Venturi published a richly illustrated magazine article on Bernini.47 In his account, at the end of the Renaissance artists felt compelled to imitate Hellenistic art. Venturi singled out the unearthing of the Laocoön in 1506 as the impetus for Italian art’s decadence, because it encouraged artists to ‘dazzle with pictorial effects and ingeniousness, rather than to study […] the simple and honourable expression of soul and life’.48 For Venturi, Bernini personified the art of the Seicento in both its positive and negative aspects: he was a versatile genius but was unable to enliven sculpture with authentic inspiration, and was thus a mere ‘set designer, a choreographer of art’,49 The Baldaquin of St Peter’s Basilica, for example, was made by a ‘magician who wants to blind and subjugate the plebeian believers, to see them prostrated in front of the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman religion’ – a judgement that belies the anti-clericalism that coloured many fin de siècle assessments of the Baroque.50

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Baroquemania Venturi’s reckoning is exemplified by a painting by macchiaiolo painter Odoardo Borrani. No longer using the synthetic notation of his earlier works, Borrani employs meticulous brushstrokes to convey with photographic precision the dazzling abundance of marble and gold in the Cornaro chapel. In Borrani’s painting Bernini’s art overpowers the small devout female figure kneeling at the altar – as if to say that, in its desire to subdue its spectators, the Baroque feminises audiences by turning them into docile, passive observers. Compounding this overwhelming effect for viewers, even the glittering frame of Borrani’s painting (which could have been chosen by the artist himself or by the curators of the royal collection, in which the painting was incorporated in 1886) overwhelms the small work. 1.8  Odoardo Borrani, The Extasis of Saint Teresa of Bernini, 1883

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Decadent Seicento A similarly negative assessment of seventeenth-century art, even of its most classicising exponents, appeared in a lecture on the Carracci brothers that Venturi gave in 1894.51 For Venturi, the seventeenth century was plagued either by a tedious imitation of the previous century or by a damning love of innovation; in both cases Seicento art was ‘soulless’ because ‘it wanted to dazzle with artifices as it no longer could captivate the soul’.52 The Carraccis resisted the alleged decadence of their time by trying to imitate classical and Renaissance art. ‘With their feet in the mud they looked up to the sky, Venturi wrote.53 Still, their art lacked creative force. Not even the imitation of ancient models could revive seventeenth-century art: artists were unable to experience reality directly and truthfully, and therefore could not produce authentic art. For Venturi, the Carraccis’ conundrum mirrored that of the Pre-Raphaelites, who also looked back to the Ancients for inspiration but still made soulless art.54 Here Venturi inaugurated an important rhetorical topos in the nineteenth-century reception of the Seicento: that of the (negative) similarities between the Baroque and modernity, both unable to produce genuine, vital art. Though sceptical of Baroque art’s worth, Venturi understood that it was necessary for both himself and his students to conduct its academic investigation. He facilitated such scholarship, albeit tentatively, by creating an infrastructure that favoured the exchange of ideas among Italian art historians and their foreign counterparts through graduate programmes, study trips, international conferences, journals, and museum catalogues. Despite such exchange Venturi was trapped in an interpretative conundrum. Since he believed that artists manifested their age and that political and religious decadence corrupted the entirety of seventeenth-century culture, he could not fully credit Bernini’s innovations. He recognised the Baroque sculptor’s greatness but was bound to criticise him. Italian art historians who aspired to transcend this deadlock, therefore, had to look elsewhere for methodological inspiration. On the one hand they corrected Venturi’s historicist approach with Benedetto Croce’s idealist aesthetic, which encouraged the analysis of artworks as individual objects unmoored from their historical context – as I will show in Chapter 3. On the other hand they took advantage of the pan-European intellectual conversations initiated by Venturi to acquaint themselves with German-language art historiography, which at the time celebrated the Baroque as a precursor of modernism. Yet despite their interpretative gridlock, Venturi’s texts reveal that in the Italian context a reassessment of the Baroque was already under way before the ideas of Wölfflin and other German-speaking art historians became known.

1894: Enrico Nencioni and ‘Barocchismo’ In 1894 the Italian literary critic Enrico Nencioni declared in a lecture in Florence, ‘We are all today quite Barbaric, quite Byzantine, quite Baroque’.55 As I mentioned in the introduction, Nencioni’s talk was the first in Italy to acknowledge explicitly the deep connection between fin de siècle Italy and the seventeenth century – not only for those

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Baroquemania who rejected their time, like Andrea Sperelli and the Decadentists but as an overall feature of European culture of the 1890s.56 The crisis of the fin de siècle resonated with the crisis of the Seicento; as in other countries, in Italy, too, ‘the reawakening of interest in the Baroque was impelled by the crisis of modernity’, as Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup have pointed out.57 Giuliana Pieri has described the Florentine Nencioni, a beloved mentor to D’Annunzio, as ‘probably the single most important cultural mediator of Umbertine Italy’.58 As if to underscore Nencioni’s import, Giovanni Boldini, another Italian cosmopolitan, made a penetrating portrait of a twenty-seven-year-old Nencioni. Here Nencioni appears as a lively young man with a slightly Byronesque air. Portrayed in what was probably Boldini’s studio, as implied by the unfinished paintings in the background, Nencioni is caught in mid-conversation, eagerly bending towards his interlocutor. Nencioni’s talent as a cultivated conversationalist was much celebrated in his time, and comes through his texts, which pair erudition with lively prose.

1.9  Giovanni Boldini, The Man who Smiles. Portrait of Enrico Nencioni, 1864–1871

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Decadent Seicento A journalist and literary critic conversant with French, German, and English literature, Nencioni moved to Rome in 1879 and lived there until 1883. In Rome he cultivated relationships both with the new generation of intellectuals who gathered around the Cronaca Bizantina and with aristocratic dilettanti such as the novelist Carlo Placci and Giuseppe Primoli, a photographer who recorded the Roman high society with which D’Annunzio mingled and which inspired Pleasure and his other novels. When he returned to Florence in 1883, Nencioni remained nostalgic for Roman society but actively participated in Florentine cultural life too. Nencioni admired, in the words of Croce, ‘even those forms of rough, violent, primitive, or Baroque art that seem the most distant of Italian and Florentine taste’.59 The sweeping range of his literary references can be gauged by the contents of his library. He was fond of the French playwrights and philosophes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among the French Romantics he favoured Stendhal, Victor Hugo, and Alphonse de Lamartine, but he was also an avid reader of Émile Zola and Gustave Flaubert. Other than Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift, his favourite English-language writers were Romantic poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron, and among his contemporaries George Eliot, John Ruskin, and Walter Pater. Nencioni admired Romantic poetry because he found that it described the complexity of human experience. By contrast, he believed the Decadentists’ frantic search for sensual pleasure was a cover-up for their inability to feel emotions. As he memorably put it, ‘A poet without a heart and only with an intellect is a monstrous animal that reminds me of fattened ducks […] And at least those produce the famous pâtés.’ 60 By contrast, Nencioni admired Walt Whitman because he celebrated contemporary life, cosmopolitan democracy, and modern inventions without veering into a purely sensual existence or escaping into a fictional past.61 Given these views, it is not surprising that Nencioni initially rejected the poetry and art of the seventeenth century. In 1890 he pointed out that the ‘annihilation of individualism and freewill’ of seventeenth-century mysticism was indicative of a ‘sinister and odious era in which the baroque, the monstrous, corrupted literature, art, theatre, fashion, furniture, gardens and tombs’.62 But unlike other intellectuals of his time, Nencioni considered the seventeenth century to be an extension of, rather than a radical break with, the Renaissance. In the latter, he identified a positive side, embodied by artists like Leonardo da Vinci who were committed to the pursuit of truth. Yet the period was also marked by ‘the blind idolatry of classicism’, which suffocated free expression and ‘led to the delusions of the grotesque and the baroque’.63 Nencioni’s account of the seventeenth century echoes his description of Decadent literature; both share a cult of art for art’s sake and an excessive attention to form over content. The modernity of the seventeenth century was cast in a negative light, as the Baroque anticipated fin de siècle pessimism and apathy. Four years later, however, Nencioni developed a more subtle approach to the seventeenth century. ‘Barocchismo’ (Baroquism) was part of a series of lectures on Italian life during the Seicento that took place in Florence in 1894.64 Aspiring to create historic and national

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Baroquemania awareness among the audience – and to reclaim Florence’s status as a cultural centre, lost when Rome replaced it as Italy’s capital in 1871 – these talks were part of annual cycles that explored Italian culture from the Middle Ages to the Risorgimento. The lectures, addressed to a predominantly female and upper-class audience, were organised by a group of Florence-based intellectuals and functioned as social events, delivered not in an academic setting but in the splendid palace of Marquis Carlo Ginori. Most of the lecturers were professors, writers, and journalists who aimed to provide accessible readings of the art, literature, history, and music of each period.65 Nencioni’s ‘Barocchismo’ began by establishing the geographical and chronological boundaries of his topic: ‘The Baroque is a characteristic of the seventeenth century, particularly in Spain and in Italy, and not only in Literature and Art, but in Life: in the costumes, fashions, ceremonial, spectacles, religion, love, war, even in crimes.’ 66 Nencioni employed the term Baroque to indicate neither an artistic style nor a transhistorical tendency towards anti-classical aesthetics, but instead the entire Weltanschauung of a historically delimited period. Nencioni himself had previously used the term as an adjective that connoted grotesqueness and extravagance. In the cycle in which Nencioni presented his lecture, no other participant used ‘Baroque’ to refer to the Seicento – not even an art historian such as Adolfo Venturi – thereby revealing the late adoption of the term in Italian academia.67 Not only did Nencioni delineate the boundaries of the Baroque but he also distinguished between positive and negative instantiations of the style, just as he had done with the Renaissance: ‘let us not confuse the audacious with the delirious, Bernini with Borromini’. He added that ‘there is a little bit of baroquism in all these Secentisti’, but the ‘true delirium started […] in the second half of the seventeenth century’.68 By mobilising three different concepts with fluid meaning (Baroque, Baroquism, and Secentismo), Nencioni proposed a dialectic vision of seventeenth-century culture, which he regarded as the artists’ legitimate reaction against both the Renaissance’s doctrinarian admiration of the classics and its unjustified dismissal. Like Nietzsche before him, Nencioni interpreted some manifestations of the Baroque as a reasonable response to cultural saturation. Other manifestations – especially later ones – were indeed ‘delirious’, but Nencioni maintained that they should not shadow the overall assessment of the period. Several factors enabled Nencioni’s re-evaluation of the Baroque. Firstly his admiration for Bernini and his ability to imbue sculpture with life.69 Secondly Nencioni’s love of Rome and his personal relationship with D’Annunzio, who encouraged him to look at the city’s Baroque heritage with new eyes. After all Nencioni mentioned that his encounters with princes, ladies, and cardinals in the Roman villas described in Pleasure ‘revived in [his] imagination Baroque Rome, or rather […] baroccheggiante Rome’.70 Finally, Nencioni deemed that the role of Rome in the seventeenth century was very similar to its function in post-unification Italy. In both cases Rome gathered artists and intellectuals from different Italian regions and foreign countries – for instance, Nencioni from Florence and D’Annunzio from Pescara – fomenting the city’s role as Italy’s cultural centre.71

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Decadent Seicento This renewed understanding of the Baroque, however, did not prevent Nencioni from condemning manifestations of the style that were ‘delirious’ rather than ‘bold and solemn’.72 Nencioni found dangerous similarities between the seventeenth century and the fin de siècle, particularly their common preoccupation with artifice. The rhetorical flourish of Baroque rhetoric persuaded him that some seventeenth-century theologians ‘would be all the rage in Paris today among some symbolists, no less extravagant and sibylline than them’.73 Nencioni called the late Baroque a ‘grotesque fin de siècle’ whose decadent taste resembled that of his own time.74 Yet Nencioni’s nuanced judgement of the Baroque, and his realisation of its similarities with the modern age, also led him to develop a new appreciation for his own era: ‘This baroquism […] is essentially modern, in its passionate search for novelty at all costs, and for some of its manifestations, before it becomes completely delirious, we are more sympathetic than for the irreproachable symmetria prisca [antique symmetry].’ Nencioni underlined the ambivalence inherent in the Baroque style, noting that the love of novelty can lead artists into a state of delirium but also produce dazzlingly original artworks. Nencioni carefully threaded his arguments to persuade his audience to reassess their opinion of the Baroque: ‘Forget for a moment the Manuals, the lessons, the Guides, and what one should say and what one should admire. Look with your own eyes, think with your own head, and feel with your own heart. And maybe you’ll feel closer to Bernini’s Dafne than to the Juno in Villa Ludovisi; to Saint Teresa than to the Capitoline Venus.’ 75 Nencioni made his audience reflect on the constructed nature of their aesthetic preferences: if the public freed itself from the prejudices ingrained by centuries of classical-centred education, would it not appreciate Baroque art? This was his moving conclusion: Maybe Goethe, Foscolo, and Keats were the last to feel or express in plastic verses divine Euritmia. We are all today quite Barbaric, quite Byzantine, quite Baroque […] Perfect Greek statues remind us of the happy equilibrium of senses and sentiments, they remind us of the soul’s spring. A moment when humanity was young and healthy and its dreams were not shattered; intelligence was not tortured yet by thirty centuries of precepts, systems, and doubts, and the heart was not broken by thirty centuries of pain. No painful doctrine, no interior crisis, had yet altered the happy harmony between life and human form […] Today, however, our life is always artificial and always agitated: the nervous organism is continuously overexcited, and is always restless and eager for new, strange and excessive sensations […] But we moderns feel something that the ancients were missing, something that is our tormented but glorious legacy: the sense of infinity and the consciousness of humanity.76 For Nencioni the fin de siècle, like the seventeenth century, lacked classicism’s serenity and direct contact with nature, but it possessed a deeper understanding of the nature of life itself. It traded self-possession with truth.

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Baroquemania Nencioni’s interpretation of the Baroque, and his understanding of its similarities with his own time, initiated a new appreciation for seventeenth-century art and literature. However, his linkage of the seventeenth century with the fin de siècle also became an anti-Baroque trope, and few regarded the Seicento as generously as he did. Whilst fin de siècle meditations on decline and degeneration inspired artists, writers, and critics to re-examine previously dismissed historical periods and emphasise their similarities to the present, such association also backfired. The connection of the Baroque to Decadentism led artists and intellectuals who rejected Decadentism to also reject other eras thought to have a similar sensibility, such as the Byzantine period or the Baroque. Twentieth-century scholars had to struggle to disentangle the Seicento from its decadent associations, even though these exact qualities had helped initiate its reappraisal.

The Berninian celebrations of 1898 The 1898 celebrations of Bernini’s third centenary were the most thorough attempt to unshackle the Baroque sculptor from his Decadent associations, by honouring him as a national hero rather than the epitome of an antagonistic aesthetics. Thanks to them the Baroque went from representing the crisis of modernity to being celebrated as the precursor of modern, unified, Italy. The unveiling of Ferrari’s plaque on 7 December 1898 was only one of the official events that took place that day to commemorate Bernini’s birth. That same morning, a group of notables had planned to deposit a wreath on Bernini’s tomb at the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, but this was forbidden by the church’s authorities, which protested against such a secular celebration.77 After quietly paying their respects at Bernini’s grave, at 11 a.m. the event moved to Via della Mercede. Ettore Ferrari, the individual primarily responsible for this homage, read Bernini’s eulogy under his newly inaugurated plaque, while several carabinieri (one of the oldest Italian military police forces) stood in attendance with ladders so that wreaths could be hung on the building’s façade. A tram line had even been diverted so that a sizeable audience could participate in the ceremony. Ferrari began his eulogy emphasising the connections between Bernini and the city of Rome, ‘which welcomed him when he was an astonishing prodigy, obtained from his works a prestige envied by all, and reverently holds his remains’. For these reasons ‘not celebrating Bernini would have been failing to perform a holy duty’.78 Ferrari went on to commemorate Bernini’s contributions to Rome’s beauty: ‘Bernini enriched our city with renowned works of difficult originality and grandeur that competed with the immortal marvels of ancient Rome and were admired alongside those for their different beauty.’ He observed that the Baroque sculptor had been vilified for centuries but finally, in 1898, ‘impartial critics’ had honoured him as ‘the sovereign of art’. Ferrari concluded by encouraging the audience ‘to bow to this noble Italian glory, the only one who could stand next to Michelangelo’. The recently unveiled plaque would remind future generations of the tribute that ‘the new Rome’ paid to Bernini, ‘glory of the fatherland’.79

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Decadent Seicento

1.10  Ettore Ferrari reading his eulogy in front of Bernini’s plaque. Drawing by Dante Paolucci, ‘Commemorazione Centenaria al Campidoglio di Gian Lorenzo Bernini’, L’illustrazione Italiana (8 December 1898).

Ferrari praised Bernini as a quintessentially Italian master, linked by birth, education, and career to cities as distant as Naples, Florence, and Rome, so that ‘all of Italy celebrates his immortal name’.80 D’Annunzio and Nencioni emphasised the connections between the Baroque and the Decadent mentalities – a temporal collapse. By contrast Bernini’s tercentenary celebrations cast him (and by extension the Baroque) as an expression of a proto-national identity, a style based in Rome but flourishing in different regions – a spatial collapse.

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Baroquemania After the inauguration of the plaque, a solemn ceremony took place in the Sala degli Orazi e dei Curiazi on the Capitoline Hill, the seat of the elective magistrature that administered the city of Rome since medieval times. The commemoration of Bernini reactivated the civic function of the space, and Rome’s mayor Emanuele Ruspoli was in attendance. The first to speak, Ruspoli echoed Bernini’s multiregional allegiances by reading the congratulatory telegrams sent to him by Florence’s and Naples’s mayors. Members of the Roman aristocracy, such as the princes Barberini, Chigi, Doria, and Rospigliosi (descendants of Bernini’s patrons) attended, although a socialist newspaper noted that representatives of the ‘highest official powers’ were absent, including Queen Margherita, whose presence had originally been anticipated.81 After the mayor, the art historian Corrado Ricci eulogised Bernini as the greatest Italian artist after Michelangelo.82 Ricci emphasised Bernini’s crucial role in the reshaping of Rome, noting that ‘the most famous views of Rome have been created by Bernini’, producing ‘a magnificence unique in the world’.83 A depiction of the event shows Ricci reciting his eulogy in front of notables and juxtaposes it with two other images: a self-portrait of Bernini from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and Apollo and Daphne (1622–1623) from the Galleria Borghese. This choice of imagery is unusual: Although we now consider that sculptural group as among the most iconic of Bernini’s production, in 1898 the public Borghese Gallery had not yet been acquired by the Italian state.84 In 1891 a promise of acquisition had been made to Prince Borghese, but funding to buy the villa and its collections would not be committed until August 1899, thereby preventing Villa Borghese from the tragic fate of Villa Ludovisi.85 Including the Borghese sculptural group in the iconography of Bernini’s celebrations, therefore, intended to nudge the Italian government towards this final acquisition. As the importance of the event would suggest, the peripatetic Berninan celebrations continued throughout the day. On the night of 7 December, public officials and the public congregated around one of Bernini’s masterpieces, the Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona, while a military band played passages from Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida and Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, as well as music by Anton Rubinstein and the now-forgotten Italian composer Cesare Fanchiotti.86 A surviving illustration of the event – enclosed by an appropriately Baroque frame – shows the dramatic effect of the spotlights and flares that illuminated the fountain especially for the event. Although streetlights in major roadways were common in Rome at the time, the illumination of monuments like the fountain was still rare, showing just how exceptional Bernini’s ceremony was.87 In his review of the Berninian celebrations, the journalist and art critic Diego Angeli observed that Rome owed an important debt to the sculptor: ‘All that is great, all that in the mind of the people expresses the idea of Roman power, is the work of Bernini.’ 88 In Angeli’s view Bernini transformed Rome into an emblem of the Catholic Church’s power; it is not a stretch to think that in 1898 the revived interest in his work was linked to the desire to reshape Rome to signify the ambitious aspirations of the newly unified

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Decadent Seicento

1.11  Drawing by G. Galli, ‘Commemorazione di Gian Lorenzo Bernini’, Il secolo illustrato della domenica (18 December 1898)

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Baroquemania

1.12  The Fountain of the Four Rivers illuminated at night. Drawing by Dante Paolucci, ‘Commemorazione Centenaria al Campidoglio di Gian Lorenzo Bernini,’ L’illustrazione Italiana (8 December 1898).

Italian state. Bernini, Angeli observed, unlike previous architects working in Rome, did not design around existing structures. He had few qualms about destroying buildings in order to reshape the city’s appearance. In this respect, then, he was considered the precursor for the destructive construction projects that, with little concern for the architectural preservation championed by nostalgics like D’Annunzio, were transforming Rome to bestow it ‘a form worthy of its station’, as Angeli noted.89 Framing Bernini,

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Decadent Seicento and the Baroque in general, as the point of departure for this modern urban remaking of Rome was an idea that resonated during the Fascist regime too, as Chapter 5 will show. In service of the glorification of the Baroque, the choice of the Capitoline Hill and Piazza Navona as the seats for Bernini’s celebrations was purposeful: although Bernini is renowned for religious commissions, the 1898 commemorations emphasised his contributions to secular, rather than Catholic, life. He was hailed ‘as the main maker of modern Rome’ and, as such, an embodiment of the values maintained by a ‘Romanity that dominates the world’, as the critic Ugo Ojetti put it.90 Despite the framing of Bernini as a post-unification hero, the initiative to honour him was not taken by the members of Parliament, the Academy of Fine Arts, or any of the many artistic associations that flourished in Italy; instead, a group of artists that included Ferrari and Charles Francis Summers, an Australian sculptor who worked in Rome, took up the task.91 However, thanks to Ferrari’s political appointments (a member of Parliament and a counsellor for the city of Rome) the Ministry of Education was involved in the festivities, and the city of Rome contributed to the expenses.92 The organising committee included Ferrari, the conservator of the Borghese collection Giovanni Piancastelli, Adolfo Venturi, and the painter Francesco Jacovacci, who in 1877 painted a powerful representation of Bernini working on his David, which will be discussed below.93 Ferrari’s involvement in Bernini’s celebrations is no wonder, given his interest in Bernini as a secular hero. In 1871, immediately after the annexation of Rome to unified Italy, Ferrari joined other Roman sculptors tasked to decorate the gardens of the Pincian Hill with thirty busts of illustrious Italians. The panoramic Pincio, inaugurated in 1824, was the first public park created in Rome. While it was still under Papal rule, busts of distinguished Italians had adorned the park, yet it was not possible to celebrate figures deemed controversial by the Popes until after 1871.94 Once afforded this freedom, Ferrari chaired a commission that petitioned the mayor of Rome to commemorate secular heroes: the Piedmontese politicians Camillo Benso di Cavour and Massimo d’Azeglio, decried by the Catholic establishment for their role in the annexation of Rome; the anti-Papacy critics Cola di Rienzo and Giordano Bruno; and the anti-clerical poets Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi. The inclusion of Bernini among such figures reveals his unique status in the secular pantheon of post-unification Italians.95 The Berninian celebrations did not conclude in 1889. A competition for the ‘best book that illustrates the life and works of he who with audacious and genial thought imagined the fountain of Piazza Navona and the colonnade of St Peter’s’ was also announced.96 Also, in April 1899 an ‘Esposizione Berniniana’ (Berninian Exhibition) opened in the Sala degli Orazi e dei Curiazi, a site still central for the secular celebration of Bernini despite its inclusion of one of his religious commissions, a massive monument to Urban VIII (1635–1640). The exhibition had a large collection of drawings, sketches, and busts from private and public collections.97 Facilitating the popularisation of Bernini’s work, the Berninian Exhibition also displayed multiple photographs of

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1.13  Giovanni Bertoli or Augusto Viola, Bust of Bernini on the Pincio (Rome), post 1871

his architecture and sculpture, the result of recent photographic campaigns by major studios. This show was crucial to introducing Bernini to the broad public, who, as a critic pointed out, knew Bernini ‘only by name’.98 The printing of postcards that represented a pastiche of Bernini’s most famous public works as well as the publication of multiple reviews of the exhibition in mass-circulation periodicals reveals the importance of the tercentenary celebrations in the popularisation of Bernini. Although some criticised the lack of chronological organisation in the exhibition, the choice of venue, and its inevitable lacunae, it proved quite successful among the public.99 This positive reception, in turn, yielded ambiguous reactions: a critic went so far as to describe Bernini as ‘the personification of bad taste’ and to describe his work – popular with the Papal Court and with late nineteenth-century audiences – as an example of what we would now call kitsch.100 However, others emphasised the importance of Bernini in Rome’s urban development. Such debate underscores once more that the interest in Bernini in 1898 was intimately linked to the urban changes in post-unification Rome. By bringing together works by Bernini that were dispersed among private and public collections, the Esposizione Berniniana encouraged developing studies on the work of the Baroque sculptor and architect. Yet most of the literature on Bernini published at the time espoused variations of a recurrent trope: the sculptor envisioned as a man of his age – a condition that bears most responsibility for his shortcomings – but also as an artist who attempted, unsuccessfully, to transcend the limits of vulgar

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1.14  Esposizione Berniniana, Il secolo illustrato della domenica (14 May 1899)

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1.15  Piancastelli, Postcard for Onoranze Centenarie al Bernini (1899)

Seicento culture. As I will show in the next section, this trope also appeared in academic publications on Bernini, which, despite using art-historical methodologies and reassessing the sculptor’s work, still took for granted that the Seicento was a decadent period.

1900: Stanislao Fraschetti and the photography of Baroque sculpture The commemoration of the tercentenary of Bernini’s birth inspired the publication of various studies on his work. Stanislao Fraschetti’s monograph Bernini, published in 1900, was the most substantial of these studies and inaugurated a period in which the reception of the seventeenth-century sculptor would be dramatically upturned.101 Fraschetti, a disciple of Venturi, was involved in the celebrations for Bernini’s tercentenary and advertised them in several articles.102 His Bernini used the same historical scheme implicit in Venturi’s article on the Carracci brothers. However, unlike Venturi, Fraschetti (who died prematurely at the age of twenty-seven in 1902) relied on two primary sources on Bernini’s life: the biographies by his son Domenico and by the seventeenth-century art historian Filippo Baldinucci.103 Fraschetti approached such primary sources critically, integrating them with archival research, the direct study of Bernini’s sculptures, and

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Decadent Seicento historical contextualisation. He also employed other scholarly protocols, such as asking permission to consult documents in Rome’s archive and photograph Bernini’s sculptures in city collections.104 Practices like these show him as a prototype of the contemporary art historian, engaged in reducing bureaucratic obstacles so as to access rare materials and study artworks as closely as possible. Though the two used different sources to study the Baroque artist, both Venturi and Fraschetti believed that the seventeenth century’s love for novelty was not paired with the capacity of ‘making visible the complex feelings of souls’; the art of the century was inevitably mendacious.105 In this bleak context, some geniuses arose who went against the grain of the age: the Carracci brothers and Bernini. To show how extraordinary Bernini’s work was in his time, Fraschetti presented it as initially guided by the twin principles of the ‘search for truth’ and ‘the ideal of beauty of ancient art’.106 Yet according to Fraschetti, Bernini soon abandoned these principles and his work became properly Baroque, producing sculptures that were ‘ostentatious and full of manneristic artifice’.107 Beyond its use of sources and exhaustive analysis of Bernini’s output, many reviewers pointed out that Fraschetti’s work was also novel for its lavish use of illustrations, which framed and expanded on the arguments of the text and reinforced its scholarly presentation.108 Fraschetti’s text included, too, a wide variety of high-quality photogravures of Bernini’s sculptures and buildings, both general views and details. These photographs, made by the commercial company Danesi of Rome, recorded all of Bernini’s sculptures known at the time.109 Through photography, Fraschetti’s book brought to the reader most of Bernini’s production, dispersed between Rome, Naples, Florence, Siena, and Paris. Works that had been presented in the Esposizione Berniniana in 1899 were reproduced in Fraschetti’s book, which then became a sort of permanent record of the important moment in the Baroque’s recuperation.110 In the photographs by Danesi, sculptures were isolated from their architectural setting, so the statue became the focal point of the picture. The strong lighting emphasises the glistening whiteness of the marble and the marked contrasts between illuminated and shadowed areas of the sculpture, underlining the subtle gradations of surface: for example, in the photograph of Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, the smoothness of the figures’ limbs, the sheerness of Apollo’s rippling robes, and the mesmerising transformation of soft flesh into tough leaves, bark, and branches. The use of saturated black and white helps to define the modelling of the statue and projects its mass from the backdrop, presenting it as an insistently tactile object and highlighting Bernini’s virtuoso technique. Fraschetti’s book constitutes a precious source for the visual historiography of nineteenth-century Italian photography of Baroque sculpture. It allows us to study not only how photographs influenced the understanding of seventeenth-century art but also how scholarly interpretations of this period shaped photographic conventions.111 The photographic firms Danesi, Brogi, Anderson, and Alinari specialised in the reproduction of Italian art. Their catalogues included a wide variety of photographs of buildings, paintings, engravings, landscapes, portraits, and sculptures, documenting which

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1.16  Gianlorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne

Italian artworks tourists, art historians, and photography collectors were interested in at the time.112 No Baroque works were included in their catalogues until the last decade of the nineteenth century.113 Only as late as 1891 did Anderson offer photographs of Bernini’s Saint Teresa and Vision of Constantine, as well as interior views of Maderno’s church of St Ignazio.114 None of these photographs of Baroque subject matter were

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Decadent Seicento available in the most prestigious ‘formato grandissimo’ (33 by 22 inches) – as Michelangelo’s Moses was, for instance – and they were printed only in the format ‘normale’ (8 by 10 inches).Yet their inclusion in the catalogue marks a change of course in the appreciation of Baroque sculpture. Around this time Anderson’s rival firms Brogi, Danesi, and Alinari also began photographing Baroque statuary, which made possible the prominent inclusion of photographs in Fraschetti’s study. It is not surprising that photographers started offering images of seventeenth-century sculpture and architecture only after a burgeoning scholarly interest in the period appeared. The diffusion of the collodion process, which allowed for an intensification of the tonal values of photography, also facilitated the photography of sculpture. Photographs by all these firms emphasised the firmly modelled surface of Baroque sculpture and its clearly defined shape. Nineteenth-century art history analyses also highlighted such set of traits in Baroque sculpture: its highly dramatic subject matter and theatrical gestures; its emphasis on mass rather than outline; and its skill for carving and moulding. Photographs of Baroque art by Brogi, Alinari, Anderson, and Danesi are difficult to tell apart. Perhaps due to this repetitive style, they could be said to embody (and define) the views of the Baroque that scholars defended in the first years of the twentieth century.115 Despite his youth and perhaps in part due to his novel use of photographic illustration, Fraschetti was the only Italian art historian to be cited in Riegl’s study on the Baroque, albeit not very admiringly, as I anticipated in the introduction. In Riegl’s view Fraschetti’s discussion was ‘amateurish, as he only sees in the Italian Baroque the decline of the Renaissance. He sees Bernini’s greatness exclusively in the fact that, notwithstanding periods out of favour, he was able to develop grandeur and originality.’ 116 Fraschetti’s text was the first monographic and scholarly study on a Baroque artist to be published in Italy, and it made use of all the research tools available at the time, including photography.117 Yet Riegl’s observation that the study of Fraschetti lacked a theoretical analysis of ‘the essence of the Italian Baroque style’ was true, and applicable to most Italian art-historical studies of the time. Italian art history centred on monographic studies of artists, and its focus was the Seicento – that is, a chronological marker – rather than the Baroque – a stylistic classification. Fraschetti’s book demonstrated that Venturi’s philosophy of history and methodology could not address seventeenth-century art without casting a select group of Baroque artists as Romantic geniuses fighting against their age, an age Fraschetti still considered decadent, albeit negatively. Venturi’s preface to Fraschetti’s Bernini argued that ‘[Bernini] walked by hysterics and visionaries like a victorious athlete with a brave heart […] Society was a dwarf, and Bernini a giant.’ 118 Venturi and Fraschetti’s studies were limited by the antinomies of their methods; despite their use of sophisticated analytical tools, their view of Bernini and the Seicento was as naive as that depicted in pseudo-historical paintings like Jacovacci’s Bernini in His Studio (1877). Broodily working alone on his David by staring at his reflection in a mirror, Bernini symbolised the lonely genius waging war against his century. Although they assessed it in different ways, Decadentist writers and positivist

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1.17  Francesco Jacovacci, Bernini nel suo studio, 1877

art historians shared a view of the Seicento as a decadent century, as a moment of crisis. Yet it was through the revision of its alleged decadence as positive rather than negative that the seventeenth century in general and the Baroque in particular began to be reimagined in Italian modern visual culture.

Notes 1 ‘Onoranze Centenarie al Bernini’ VI, I, 1891–1907, 59, b. 94, f. 3, Archivio Storico Capitolino (Rome), from now on ASC. 2 ‘Onoranze centenarie al Bernini’, La civiltà cattolica (28 December 1898): 102–103. 3 Paolo Orano, ‘Ettore Ferrari’, Emporium 11, no. 66 (June 1900): 407–423. 4 Simonato, Bernini scultore: il difficile dialogo con la modernità. 5 Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976); Alisa Luxenberg, ‘Regenerating Velázquez in Spain and France in the 1890s’, Boletín del Museo del Prado 17, no. 35 (1999): 125–149; Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum: Art Exhibitions and Their Significance (New Haven:Yale University

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8

9

10

11 12 13 14 15

16

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18 19

20 21 22

Press, 2000); Victor Claass, ‘Velázquez 1900: la fabrique d’un maître ancien’, in DiegoVelázquez: physionomie d’un génie, ed. Émile Michel (Paris: Pocket, 2015), 9–42. Elsa Sormani, Bizantini e decadenti nell’Italia umbertina (Bari: Laterza, 1975); Daniela Adorni, L’Italia crispina (Florence: Sansoni, 2002). Matei Călinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 162, italics in the original. See also David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); Jane Desmarais and David Weir, eds, Decadence and Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019). For the appropriation of French, German, and English Romantic themes in Italian Decadentism, see Mario Praz, La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica ([1930] Florence: Sansoni, 1966). Walter Binni, La poetica del Decadentismo (Florence: Sansoni, 1968); Carlo Salinari, Miti e coscienza del Decadentismo italiano (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960); Richard Drake, ‘Decadence, Decadentism and Decadent Romanticism in Italy: Toward a Theory of Decadence’, Journal of Contemporary History 17, no. 1 (January 1982): 69–92. On the critical tradition associating illness with decadentism see Barbara Spackman, Decadent Genealogies:The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects:The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Mario Moroni, ‘Sensuous Maladies: The Construction of Italian Decadentismo’, in Italian Modernism: Italian Culture Between Decadentism and Avant-Garde, ed. Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 65–80. Giulio Salvadori, ‘Rome’, Cronaca Bizantina (1 June 1882): 5; italics in the original. Renato Bertacchini, ‘“Cronaca Bizantina” e ”Il Convito”, riviste romane dell’estetismo decadente’, OttoNovecento 2, no. 5 (September–October 1978): 67–86, 69. ‘La direzione’, Cronaca Bizantina (15 November 1885): 2. Massimo Bernabò, Ossessioni bizantine e cultura artistica in Italia: tra D’Annunzio, Fascismo e dopoguerra (Naples: Liguori, 2003). For the intertwinement of ideas of the Baroque, luxury, and excess spending, see Rémy Gilbert Saisselin, The Enlightenment against the Baroque: Economics and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Huysmans’s novel was not translated into Italian until 1944 but was well known to D’Annunzio’s generation; it was reviewed in the Italian magazine Fanfulla della domenica the same month it appeared in France. Édouard Rod, ‘Corrispondenza di Parigi. Edmond de Goncourt’, Fanfulla della domenica (25 May 1884): 1–2. Bianca Tamassia Mazzarotto, Le arti figurative nell’arte di Gabriele D’Annunzio (Milan: Fratelli Bocca, 1949); Susanna Scotoni, D’Annunzio e l’arte contemporanea. (Florence: Spes, 1981); Rossana Bossaglia and Mario Quesada, eds, Gabriele D’Annunzio e la promozione delle arti (Milan: Mondadori, 1988). Gabriele D’Annunzio, Pleasure, trans. Lara Gochin Raffaelli ([1889] New York: Penguin Books, 2013), 36. Giuliana Pieri, The Influence of Pre-Raphaelitism on Fin de Siècle Italy: Art, Beauty and Culture (London: Maney Publishing, 2007). For D’Annunzio’s taste, see Pietro Gibellini, ‘La stagione Romana e il gusto figurativo di D’Annunzio’, in D’Annunzio a Roma (Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1990), 71–88. Il Duca Minimo (Gabriele D’Annunzio), ‘Nella Galleria Borghese’, La tribuna (22 July 1887). Gabriele D’Annunzio, ‘Il piacere (1889)’ in Prose di romanzi, ed. Ezio Raimondi and Annamaria Andreoli (Milan: Mondadori, 1988), 1–358, 74. Ibid., 308.

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Baroquemania 23 Luca Cottini, ‘D’Annunzio, Bernini, and the Baroque Prelude of Il Piacere’, Forum Italicum 51, no. 2 (August 2017): 9. 24 D’Annunzio, ‘Il piacere’, 95. 25 Angelo Conti, ‘Un’esposizione d’arte. Mario de Maria’, La tribuna (8 January 1887). 26 D’Annunzio, ‘Il piacere’, 156. 27 While D’Annunzio would later become a keen interpreter of Nietzsche, his knowledge of the German philosopher dates to 1892 at the earliest and was probably mediated through his French reception: Gabriele D’Annunzio, ‘La bestia elettiva’, Il mattino (25 September 1892). On the Italian reception of Nietzsche, see Gaia Michelini, Nietzsche nell’Italia di D’Annunzio (Palermo: Flaccovio, 1979); Francesco Piga, Il mito del superuomo in Nietzsche e D’Annunzio (Florence: Vallecchi, 1979), Domenico Fazio, Il caso Nietzsche: la cultura italiana di fronte a Nietzsche, 1872–1940 (Milan: Marzorati, 1988). 28 Richard Drake, Byzantium for Rome:The Politics of Nostalgia in Umbertian Italy, 1878–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1980), 221; Barbara Spackman, ‘D’Annunzio and the Antidemocratic Fantasy’, in Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 77–113. 29 Sormani, Bizantini e decadenti nell’Italia umbertina, 25–27. 30 Gabriele D’Annunzio, TheVirgins of the Rocks, trans. Agatha Hughes ([1895] London:W. Heinemann, 1899), 55–56. 31 Maria Elisa Tittoni, ‘La Roma sdegnata di Ernest Hébert’, Scritti in onore di Gianna Piantoni. Testimonianze e contributi, ed. Stefania Frezzotti and Patrizia Rosazza Ferraris (Rome: De Luca Editori, 2007), 103–108. 32 See Nicoletta Pireddu, Antropologi alla corte della bellezza: decadenza ed economia simbolica nell’Europa fin de siècle (Verona: Fiorini, 2002), 374–448. 33 Michael Löwy, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 34 Adolfo Venturi, ‘Giovan Battista Cavalcaselle (1819–1897)’, in Obituaries. 37 epitaffi di storici dell’arte nel Novecento, ed. Silvia Ginzburg (Milan: Electa, 2009), 3–12. 35 Arm Nivelle, ‘Winckelmann et le Baroque’, Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 36, no. 3 (1958): 854–860; Rosario Assunto, L’antichità come futuro: studio sull’estetica del neoclassicismo europeo (Milan: Mursia, 1973), 61. 36 Giovanni Morelli, Della pittura italiana: studii storico-critici: le gallerie Borghese e Doria-Pamphili in Roma, ed. Jaynie Anderson ([1890] Milan: Adelphi, 1991). 37 Laura Iamurri, ‘Art History in Italy: Connoisseurship, Academic Scholarship and the Protection of Cultural Heritage’, in Art History andVisual Studies in Europe:Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks, ed. Matthew Rampley, Thierry Lenain, and Hubert Locher (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 393–406, 395. 38 Adolfo Venturi, Vedere e rivedere. Pagine sulla storia dell’arte 1892–1927, ed. G. C. Sciolla and M. Frascione (Turin: Il Segnalibro, 1990), 75. Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) was translated into Italian in 1865 as Dell’origine e della specie per selezione naturale. 39 Adolfo Venturi, ‘Per la storia dell’arte’, Rivista Storica Italiana 4 (1887): 229–250, now in Stefano Valeri, Adolfo Venturi e gli studi sull’arte (Rome: Bagatto, 2006), 70. 40 There had been Italian art magazines since the mid-nineteenth century, such as Arte in Italia (1869–1873) and Arte e storia, but they were mostly addressed to artists and amateurs rather than to academics. Literary magazines, such as La nuova antologia, Arti e lettere, Il Marzocco, Rivista d’Italia, and Lettere e arti also devoted some space to artistic discussions, but without the textual rigour of specialised journals. 41 Gianni Carlo Sciolla, ‘Documento, opera d’arte e analisi dello stile’, in Franca Varallo and Gianni Carlo Sciolla, eds, L’Archivio storico dell’arte’ e le origini della ‘Kunstwissenschaft’ in Italia (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’orso, 1999), 27–71.

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Decadent Seicento 42 Gabriella DeMarco, ‘Adolfo Venturi critico d’arte per L’Ora’, inL’Ora: La cultura in Italia dalle pagine del quotidiano Palermitano (1918–1930), ed. Gabriella DeMarco (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2007), 55–66. 43 Shortly before his death in 1941, Venturi contemplated adding a twenty-sixth volume to his Storia. He was eager to learn from younger scholars (including his son Lionello) who had been thinking about the Seicento for more than thirty years. Lionello provided his father with bibliographical references, recommending Riegl’s The Origins of the Baroque in Rome (1908) and Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History (1915) – interestingly, not Renaissance and Baroque (1888). Lionello recommended avoiding the geographical approach that was adopted in the Storia’s previous volumes and suggested organising the book according to a chronological criterion. Lionello Venturi to Adolfo Venturi, 7 July 1940, VT V2 b02 65, Fondo Adolfo Venturi, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (Pisa). 44 Venturi, ‘Per la storia dell’arte’, 73. 45 Adolfo Venturi, Il Museo e la Galleria Borghese (Rome: Società laziale, 1893), 16–17. 46 Ibid., 25. 47 Adolfo Venturi, ‘Il Bernini’, Natura ed arte 2 (1893/1894): 1057–1068. 48 Ibid., 1057. 49 Ibid., 1066. 50 Ibid., 1068. 51 Adolfo Venturi, ‘I Carracci e la loro Scuola’, in La vita italiana nel Seicento: conferenze tenute a Florence nel 1894, ed. Guido Falorsi ([1895] Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1897), 247–268. 52 Ibid., 248. 53 Ibid., 268. 54 Ibid., 268. 55 Enrico Nencioni, ‘Barocchismo’, in La vita italiana nel Seicento, 297. 56 Fernando Mazzocca described Nencioni as ‘The first Italian voice to re-evaluate the art of the seventeenth century’. Fernando Mazzocca, ‘La mostra fiorentina el 1922 e la polemica sul Seicento’, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, classe di Lettere e Filosofia V, no. 2, III (1979): 837–901, 877. 57 Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, eds, Baroque NewWorlds: Representation,Transculturation, Counterconquest (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 41. 58 Giuliana Pieri, ‘Enrico Nencioni: An Italian Victorian’, in Biographies and Autobiographies in Modern Italy: A Festschrift for John Woodhouse, ed. Peter Hainsworth and M. L. McLaughlin (London: Legenda, 2007), 38. 59 Benedetto Croce, ‘E. Nencioni – E. Panzacchi’, La letteratura della nuova Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1943), 117; Enrico Nencioni, ‘Elenchi della propria biblioteca’, Carte di Enrico Nencioni, D.46.1 cc 1–29. Biblioteca Marucelliana (Florence). 60 Enrico Nencioni, Saggi critici di letteratura italiana (Florence: Le Monnier, 1911), 88. 61 Ibid., 235. 62 Ibid., 28–29. Italics in the original. 63 Ibid., 53. Italics in the original. 64 The term was not coined by Nencioni; it had already appeared in Pietro Selvatico, Sull’educazione del pittore storico odierno italiano. Pensieri di Pietro Selvatico (Padua: Seminario, 1842), 169: ‘il fatale miasma del barocchismo’ (the mortal miasma of baroquism). 65 Guido Biagi, ‘Le conferenze di Florence sugli albori della vita italiana’, in Gli albori della vita italiana (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1895), v–xii. 66 Nencioni, ‘Barocchismo’, 269. 67 In 1865 the Dizionario della lingua italiana (Dictionary of the Italian Language), compiled by Niccoló Tommaseo and Bernardo Bellini, defined the Baroque as ‘that ungainly and bizarre style that began to prevail at the end of the sixteenth century and lasted almost all of the

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eighteenth century […] The French called Baroque that genre of art that unites opulence and ungainliness, and is neither modern nor ancient.’ According to Tommaseo and Bellini, Baroque was not used often in Italy, perhaps because Italian, unlike French, already had an ‘abundance of these terms of scorn’, they observed. Niccoló Tommaseo and Bernardo Bellini, Dizionario della lingua italiana nuovamente compilato (Turin: Società L’Unione, 1865), 877. In 1842 the painter Antonio Bianchini considered ‘Baroque’ a ‘new term’ to refer to Carlo Maratti and Pietro da Cortona. Antonio Bianchini, ‘Risposta’ (1842), quoted in Paola Barocchi, Storia moderna dell’arte in Italia: manifesti polemiche documenti, v. 3, 1. Dai neoclassici ai puristi 1780–1861 (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1998), 500. Nencioni, ‘Barocchismo’, 269–270. Ibid., 270. Ibid., 279. Ibid., 272. Ibid., 280. Nencioni, ‘Barocchismo’, 270. Italics in the original. Ibid., 287. Italics in the original. Ibid., 297. Italics in the original. Ibid., 297. Italics in the original. Ettore Ferrari to Mayor of Rome, 4 December 1898, ‘Onoranze Centenarie al Bernini’ VI, I, 1891–1907, 59, Onorificenze Pubbliche, b. 94, f. 3, ASC; ‘Il centenario di Bernini’, Fanfulla della domenica (11 December 1898); ‘In onore di Gianlorenzo Bernini’, L’avanti (8 December 1898). ‘Minute di scritti’, b.1, f. 74: ‘Rome, inaugurazione lapide sulla casa di Bernini’, 1898. Archivio Ettore Ferrari, Archivio Centrale dello Stato (Rome), from now on ACS. Ibid. Fanfulla della domenica (7 December 1898), quoted in Simonato, Bernini scultore, 211. ‘In onore di Gianlorenzo Bernini’, L’avanti (8 December 1898); Ettore Ferrari to Mayor of Rome, 2 December 1898, ‘Onoranze Centenarie al Bernini’ VI, I, 1891–1907, 59, Onorificenze Pubbliche, b. 94, f. 3, ASC. Corrado Ricci, ‘Il Bernini’ (1898), in Roma (visioni e figure) (Milan: Treves, 1924), 83. Ibid., 87. Maria Giulia Barberini, ‘1887–1902: il passaggio allo Stato della Galleria Borghese’, in Villa Borghese: i principi, le arti, la città; dal Settecento all’Ottocento, ed. Alberta Campitelli (Milan: Skira, 2003), 159–166. ‘Promesse fatte fin dal 1891 alla Casa Borghese di sciogliere la questione della sua collezione artistica, e disegni di una convenzione in proposito’, Atti parlamentari, legislatura XX, 3° sessione 1899, Documenti-Disegni di legge, no. 129, 8. The announcement of the final schedule appeared in ‘Onoranze al Bernini’, Il messaggero (7 December 1898). Leoniero Cei, Monografia sulla illuminazione di Rome (Rome: Loescher, 1904). Diego Angeli, ‘Pel Bernini’, Il Marzocco (20 November 1898). Ibid. Jack, ‘Berniniana I’, Fanfulla della domenica (23 October 1898). Emphasis in orginal; Ugo Ojetti, ‘In gloria del Bernini’, Corriere della sera (8 December 1898). Angeli, ‘Pel Bernini’. Summers was mentioned in several foreign guides of Rome, such as Luigi Piale, Rome Seen in a Week: Being a Hand-Book to Rome and Its Environs (L. Piale, 1898), 16; and Italy: Handbook for Travellers (K. Baedeker, 1900), 133. He is described as ‘American’ or ‘English’, but I have reason to believe he was the Australian Charles Francis Summers (1858–1945), the son of the British sculptor Charles Summers, who had worked in Rome and was buried there

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Decadent Seicento after his death in 1878. Margaret Thomas, A Hero of theWorkshop and a SomersetshireWorthy, Charles Summers, Sculptor:The Story of His Struggles & Triumph (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1879). Charles Summers Jr specialised in casts and reproductions of Italian statues. 92 Ettore Ferrari to Luciani, 2 December 1898, ‘Onoranze Centenarie al Bernini’ VI, I, 1891–1907, 59, Onorificenze Pubbliche, b. 94, f. 3, ASC. 93 Simonato, Bernini scultore, 210. 94 Nadia Sorace, I busti in Il Pincio (Rome: Edizioni De Luca, 2000). 95 ‘Commissione degli Scultori e Ornatisti di Rome, progetto per il sindaco Pallavicini, per la continuazione dei busti degli italiani illusti sulla passeggiata del Pincio’ and ‘Nota degli scultori destinati d’eseguire i 30 busti allogati dal Municipio Romano, coi rispettivi nomi degli uomini italiani illustri’, b. 8, f. 395. Archivio Ettore Ferrari, ACS. 96 Stanislao Fraschetti, ‘Corriere Romano’, L’arte: rivista d’arte medievale e moderna 1, no. X–XII (December 1898): 467–468. 97 Stanislao Fraschetti, ‘L’esposizione berniniana in Roma’, L’arte 2, nos 4–7 (1899): 276–279; Ugo Fleres, ‘L’Esposizione Berniniana a Roma’, Emporium 9 (1899): 470–473; Stanislao Fraschetti, ‘L’esposizione Berniniana in Roma’, Rivista d’Italia (15 May 1899): 112. 98 Fleres, ‘L’Esposizione Berniniana a Roma’; Ugo Fleres, ‘Onoranze Centenarie a Gianlorenzo Bernini’, L’Illustrazione Italiana (8 December 1898): 399–402; Ugo Fleres, ‘Onoranze Centenarie a Gianlorenzo Bernini’, L’Illustrazione Italiana (15 December 1898), 429–432. 99 Fraschetti, ‘L’esposizione Berniniana in Roma’, 112. 1 00 Jack, ‘Berniniana I’, Fanfulla della domenica (23 October 1898). 101 Stanislao Fraschetti, Il Bernini, la sua vita, la sua opera, il suo tempo (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1900). 102 Fraschetti was trained as an artist in Rome. His first art history studies (on the sarcophagi of the Neapolitan Angevin dynasty) were conducted as a self-taught scholar. Impressed by the quality of his scholarship, Venturi published this study in L’arte and encouraged Fraschetti to attend his graduate classes at the University of Rome – he could not be a regular student because he did not have a university degree. Yet he continued to publish in the best Italian art history journals, and to collaborate with L’arte. Valentino Leonardi, ‘Stanislao Fraschetti: Ricordi’, L’arte 5, nos 3–4 (1902): 135–136. 103 Harold N. Fowler, ‘Archeological News, Notes on Recent Excavations and Discoveries; Other News’, American Journal of Archeology 7 (1903): 102; Leonardi, ‘Stanislao Fraschetti: Ricordi’, 135–136. See also Marteen Delbeke, Evonne Levy, and Steven F. Ostrow, eds, Bernini’s Biographies: Critical Essays (University Park: Pennsylania State University Press, 2006), 1. 104 See for example ‘Archivio Storico Comunale: ricerche documentarie su Gian Lorenzo Bernini da effettuarsi da Stanislao Fraschetti’, 6 October 1898; Stanislao Fraschetti to Emanuele Ruspoli, 14 October 1898; Stanislao Fraschetti to Emanuele Ruspoli, 20 October 1898, all in 54, I- 1891–1907, b. 88, f. 31, ASC. 1 05 Fraschetti, Il Bernini, 39. 1 06 Ibid., 23. 107 Ibid., 40. 108 Rodolfo Renier, ‘Stanislao Fraschetti, Il Bernini, la sua vita, la sua opera, il suo tempo (1900)’, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 36 (1900): 432. 109 Before the publication of his monograph, Fraschetti had curated an album of photogravures of Bernini’s work by Danesi. Bernini (Rome: Danesi, 1898). Although I have been unable to retrieve a copy of this volume, it is mentioned in Egidio Calzini, ‘Recensione. Stanislao Fraschetti, Bernini (Danesi)’, Rassegna bibliografica dell’arte italiana 2, nos 5–6 (June 1899): 130–131. 110 Fraschetti, ‘L’esposizione Berniniana in Roma’, Rivista d’Italia (15 May 1899): 112.

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Baroquemania 111 Mary Bergstein, ‘Lonely Aphrodites: On the Documentary Photography of Sculpture’, Art Bulletin 74, no. 3 (September 1992): 484. 112 Maison Giacomo Brogi, Catalogue général des photographies publiées par la Maison Giacomo Brogi de Florence (Florence: Établissement Civelli, 1878); Adolphe Braun et Cie, Catalogue général des photographies inaltérables au charbon et héliogravures faites d’après les originaux peintures, fresques, dessins et sculptures des principaux musées d’Europe, des galeries et collections particulières les plus remarquables (Paris: Braun, 1887). 113 I have consulted multiple Italian photographic archives, such as the Fondazione Giorgio Cini (Venice), Fondazione Federico Zeri (Bologna), and Fondazione Roberto Longhi (Florence), to no avail. 1 14 Casa Anderson, Catalogo delle fotografie di Roma e suoi contorni di D. Anderson (Rome: Spithöver, 1891). 115 These views became canonical and were consistently included in art history monographs of the period throughout the first half of the twentieth century: for example, the same images that illustrated Stanislao Fraschetti’s monograph were used in Antonio Muñoz’s Roma Barocca, published almost twenty years later. Antonio Muñoz, Roma barocca, con 438 illustrazioni. ([1919] Milan: Bestetti & Tumminelli, 1928). 1 16 Riegl, The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome, 99. 117 Odoardo Giglioli, ‘Un nuovo studio sul Bernini’, La rassegna nazionale 94, no. 22 (1900): 311. 118 Adolfo Venturi, ‘Prefazione’, in Fraschetti, Il Bernini, v–vi.

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2 The Baroque’s revenge: the 1911 jubilee exhibitions and the search for an Italian style

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n 27 March 1911 the King and Queen of Italy inaugurated the ‘Jubilee of the Fatherland’, a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy.1 Three cities were sites of the jubilee, each of which had been Italy’s capital at different moments of the new nation’s short history: Turin (1861–1864), Florence (1865–1870), and Rome (1871 onwards).2 An exhibition in the Palazzo Vecchio of Italian portraits created between 1575 and 1861 and a flower show were the only events that took place in Florence.3 Such sparse celebrations were to be expected given the Tuscan city’s original exclusion from jubilee festivities – an exclusion resultant of close collaboration between the administrations of Rome and Turin.4 Florence, indeed, was considered merely a provisional capital until Rome was finally annexed in 1870, with no symbolic importance for the Savoy family or for unified Italy.5 This chapter will, therefore, focus on Turin’s and Rome’s 1911 jubilee exhibitions, the first universal ones to take place in the peninsula. Secondo Frola and Ernesto Nathan, the mayors of Turin and Rome, respectively, proclaimed the symbolic role each city would take in their 1908 joint announcement of the fairs: ‘The metropolis of the strong and industrious Piedmont [is charged with] gathering the various expressions of economic activity in an international industrial exposition; Rome, beacon of Italian thought, [will] summarise the idea that inspired those economic activities in its historical, patriotic, and artistic exhibits.’ 6 The Turinese show included pavilions of countries from the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and a colonial exhibition, showcasing spaces into which Italian industries could expand. The Roman show, by contrast, was devoted to art and national identity; it featured an exhibit on Italian regional and ethnographic identities, and an international show of fine art and architecture. Although the exhibitions commemorated national unification, the cultural, political, and economic fragmentation of the Italian state came to the fore in the 1911 exhibitions. Celebrations of the Cinquantenario (fiftieth anniversary) were staged throughout the peninsula, as cities and towns erected monuments and organised public ceremonies independently and without direction from the central government. These festivities took 55

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Baroquemania place from 1909 to 1911, reflecting the reality that (despite the emphasis on unity and commonality) the process of Italian unification took place over an extended period of time, and often independently from the Savoy family’s intervention.7 To counter the regionalist impression implied by Rome’s and Turin’s distinct exhibitions, and to unite these two sections of the jubilee symbolically, on the day of the inauguration a group of cyclists left Rome in the direction of Turin, while another group travelled the reverse route. The illustrations covering the cyclists’ undertaking prominently depict some key buildings of the Roman exhibition: a grandiose arch that welcomed visitors to the fair and the richly decorated colonnade of one of the central pavilions. Architectural style was indeed another means of unifying the two shows. The flamboyant neo-Baroque was the preferred style of both the Roman and Turinese fairs, so much so that a journalist spoke of ‘the Baroque’s revenge’ in relation to them – as if, after being greatly maligned in previous centuries, the style were finally getting its due.8 The response to these neoBaroque pavilions was so positive that some urged using this style for all new public

2.1  E. Abbo, illustration for cover of La tribuna illustrata (21 May 1911)

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The Baroque’s revenge

2.2  E. Abbo, ‘The Palace of Festivities at the Turin Exhibition after the Inauguration’, La tribuna illustrata (7 May 1911)

buildings in Italy to give them a proper Italian feeling: that is, a national, as opposed to a regional, feeling.9 No longer a symbol of crisis, after the 1911 exhibitions the Baroque came to be framed as the starting point of a peculiarly Italian modernity, one that looked towards the future but still acclaimed and acknowledged the past in order to avoid the tabula rasa approach of the avant-garde. Choosing the Baroque as the style of jubilee fairs was partially justified by the extant architecture of Turin and Rome, cities that underwent profound change during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Another reason was the fact that this style represented, in the words of the same journalist quoted above, ‘the freedom of phantasy disciplined by the rules of good taste’ – the coexistence of innovation and order that were central to the image that the new Italy aspired to convey to the international community.10 After all, the Baroque was experiencing a revival in other European countries such as Britain, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and France, where it signified their imperial ambitions. Since

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Baroquemania Italy wanted to emulate such imperialist ethos, this re-evaluation of the Baroque was elemental to its fair planning. Yet for the organisers of the Rome and Turin fair, perhaps the most significant consideration was the argument that the Baroque style originated in Rome and spread throughout the Italian peninsula, and eventually to other countries in Europe and beyond. The style thus seemed an apt metaphor for the tensions between nationalism and regionalism in modern Italy, as well as for its expansionist ambitions. In addition to budding imperialist initiatives, the 1911 exhibitions also coincided with a period of economic growth and an influx of foreign capital into Italian industries. It was, too, a period of political uncertainty, as calls to implement universal male suffrage became ever-more pressing and Italy planned to expand its colonies in Africa as an outlet for its most impoverished population. Despite the intentions of the Italian political leaders who sponsored them, the 1911 exhibitions made it evident that Italy was still a cultural and social jigsaw fifty years after its proclamation as a nation. Just as the show celebrated the integration of the country, it revealed regional differences and the uneven industrial development of the peninsula. Yet, at a moment in which national and class identities were under debate, the 1911 jubilee was a crucial moment in the processes of memorialisation and reimagination that allowed Italy’s Baroque heritage to stand for the unified, modern nation.

Universal exhibitions: popular celebrations of capitalism and national culture11 Since the fabled 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition in London and throughout the nineteenth century, universal exhibitions served as the primary sites for nation-states to display and consume culture while vying for new markets and international influence. As Walter Benjamin famously claimed, world’s fairs were ‘the sites of pilgrimages to the commodity fetish’, boasting national pride and imperial ambitions under the guise of industrial products.12 A universal exhibition allowed a nation to reconfigure and reinterpret its history as the repository of essential features of national identity, asserting continuity between past and present. World’s fairs could, therefore, emerge only in the context of a triumphant capitalism and globalisation, and their aims transcended commercial transactions. The emphasis on vision, spectacle, and surveillance marks universal exhibitions as products of a particular intertwinement of capitalism and visuality that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century.13 The bird’s-eye views of the fairgrounds emphasised the centrality of this ‘view from nowhere’, implying the existence of a rational and omniscient subject who surveyed the entire fair.14 The organisation of universal exhibitions changed in the decades before Italy hosted the 1911 world’s fair. The Crystal Palace show took place in a single, industrially made pavilion.15 When Paris hosted the 1855 universal exhibition, however, two separate spaces were created: one for the display of industry, the other for the showcasing of fine arts, organised according to national origin. By stipulating that artists could participate in the show only as representatives of their own nations, the 1855 Exposition Universelle

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The Baroque’s revenge accelerated the process by which world’s fairs showcased both technological advances and national branding. Due to this emphasis, world’s fairs enforced what Natalia Majluf called an ‘essentialist discourse of authenticity’, by which ‘each territorial unit was required to have a distinct and unique culture, self-contained and coherent, to correspond to the national borders’.16 This notion was further underscored in the Paris 1867 universal exhibition, the first in which nations were asked to build individual pavilions in their ‘distinctive’ architectural styles. The organisation of a world’s fair was one of the most efficient ways to convey a distinctive national identity to the international community. For young nations such as Germany and Italy, fairs provided the opportunity to celebrate and flaunt their recent unification on the world arena. With the 1911 exhibition Italy sought to bind its stillheterogeneous country via external and internal pathways: international recognition and a sense of collective identity and political integration, respectively. There was, on the part of the industrial bourgeoisie who promoted the show, a desire to prove that Italy was not a great power ‘only by international courtesy’, in Eric Hobsbawm’s memorable phrasing, but rather a key player in the international sphere.17 The exhibition also provided the opportunity to introduce Italians to their own country. Most of them had never left their regions of origin, and, therefore, had little to no attachment to areas of the peninsula that they would probably never visit. By including an Italian regional and ethnographic exhibition, the 1911 show in Rome lent a sense of cohesion and belonging to a country still profoundly divided. This unitary aim was manifested by features that encouraged internal tourism, like a special card purchasable by visitors that offered heavily discounted visits to notable sights and monuments throughout the peninsula – from the lake of Como to Venice to the Capitoline Museums in Rome to Pompeii. Though the unifying focus of the 1911 jubilee may appear novel, national exhibitions had taken place in Italy since September 1861, only months after Victor Emanuel II was named King of Italy. Similar fairs would be repeated every ten years and in different cities until 1891. By introducing artisans and industrialists from different regions to one another, these shows contributed to Italy’s economic integration. They were, however, closed to all non-Italian participants and rapidly became obsolete, as Italian industry strove to merge itself into the global economic system. Thus Turin and Milan, the industrial capitals of Italy, were tasked with periodically organising trade exhibitions that included foreign participants. For example in 1898 Turin hosted the formidably named ‘General Italian Exhibition of Sacred Art and International Exhibition of Electricity’, organised to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Albertine Statute, the constitution that remained in force until Italy became a republic in 1948. Unlike other world’s fairs that espoused faith in progress and were, therefore, more or less explicitly anti-clerical, this show included a strong participation by the Catholic Church. Perhaps because of long associations between Catholic aesthetics and the Baroque, the style was heavily incorporated into the fair’s propaganda. Typifying this linkage, the fair’s poster depicted the Chapel of the Holy Shroud, a quintessentially Baroque space

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Baroquemania designed by Guarino Guarini for the religious relic that symbolised the Savoy dynasty’s importance. Clearly, the Baroque had robust ties to Italy’s exhibitions; as I will show in the next section, however, it would be by choosing a specific version of the Baroque – that of Filippo Juvarra, rather than Guarino Guarini – that the 1911 fair would present Baroque style as a secular, rather than religious, propaganda tool.18 A universal exhibition to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of unification was first suggested in 1895 by the then minister of education, Guido Baccelli. The proposal was presented to Rome’s city council in 1905 and approved in 1906, with the proviso that Turin would also be included, a key move to incorporate Turin’s elites in the celebration of unification.19 Finally, in January 1908, the mayors of Turin and Rome announced the organisation of the world’s fair: The fiftieth anniversary of the memorable [unification] day must be appropriately celebrated, so that today’s Italy pays homage to its forebears and affirms who she is in the presence of civilisation. And this solemn affirmation of Italianness should not and could not be achieved without uniting in thought and action the past and the present, the capital city then – Turin – and the capital city today – Rome – collaborating to commemorate the glories delivered to history and to ascertain what lies in the future […] In the name of Italy, of its resurrection in a third civilisation, certain of the national destiny, proud of our history, we invite the Italians to commemorate, in 1911, in Rome and Turin, the fiftieth anniversary of 27 March 1861!20 The inclusion of Turin’s élites was vital to the celebration as the 1911 jubilee actually expressed a class-based concept of national identity – bourgeois Italy, rather than Italy tout court – was showcased, indicative of the increased numbers and political influence of the Italian middle classes in the years immediately before 1911.21 As the socialist leader Claudio Treves wrote at the time, ‘at a certain point of its national life the Italian bourgeoisie felt the need to offer itself to the admiration of other national bourgeoisies and of itself’.22 Like other world exhibitions, the 1911 jubilee celebrations were ideal vehicles to propagate bourgeois values and ideas in a mass spectacle aimed at creating consensus for the Italian bourgeoisie’s national project.23 The idea that there were many Italys, rather than a single unified one, had long preoccupied Italian intellectuals.24 The unification process had concluded on a strongly anti-clerical basis after the Papal States were annexed to the Kingdom of Italy. Since Pius IX forbade Catholics to participate in post-unification elections, the new state excluded one of the few aggregating elements of the Italian population: its religious faith.25 Republicans, too, often abstained from elections as they did not feel represented by the monarchy instated after the Risorgimento wars.26 This divisive discourse was only exacerbated by a consistent primitivist rhetoric: Observers described the North of Italy as ‘European’ (‘rich, healthy, well-educated, cultured, advanced, civilised’) and the South as ‘African’ (‘poor, segregated, malaria-ridden, illiterate, backward, barbaric’).27 Others emphasised that differences

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The Baroque’s revenge remained between the industrialised and the agricultural areas, and between the urban and rural populations. With such intense fragmentation, the celebrations for the Cinquantenario attempted to project a unity that did not exist. The Baroque would be tasked with representing, on an aesthetic level, Italian identity as a cohesive totality. Just as the Crystal Palace exhibition organised in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions was, in the words of Paul Greenhalgh, ‘an immense show of strength designed to intimidate potential insurrectionists’, the 1911 Italian fairs responded to a divisive moment in Italy’s domestic politics through a show of unity.28 That year, massive strikes by industrial and agricultural workers erupted throughout the peninsula, and the resultant class politics of the exhibition were revealed in newspapers such as Il giornale d’Italia, which on 30 April 1911 titled its front page ‘In Turin Triumphal Celebration of Those Who Work’.29 During 1911 there were also important discussions on universal male suffrage, which would be approved in 1912. This question of who constituted the Italian ‘people’ was at the core of the exhibition, forefronting the minds of those, especially, who saw the Italian Ethnographic show in Rome. The ‘Other’, meaning the rural and urban working class who demanded to be granted the right to political self-expression, appeared pacified and harmless – not the violent crowds that conservatives feared – but also woefully unprepared to make informed political decisions. The democratisation of the Italian state, which would clear the path to mass politics and eventually to Fascism, meant that the construction of consensus became a political necessity. The Baroque’s associations with both Catholic and secular practices, and its regional and national connotations, suggested that the style could create a sense of commonality among a fundamentally diverse population. At the same time, the style’s pomp and its past role in fomenting empathetic allegiance, such as Counter-Reformation propaganda, meant that the Baroque already had an important history as a tool for mass politics and crowd control that could be easily mobilised in the jubilee fairs.

The Turinese (neo-)Baroque and industrial Italy Countries from the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia participated in the Turin section of the fair, bringing more than seven million visitors, most of whom were French, to a city with 450,000 inhabitants.30 The exhibition started in the Parco del Valentino, a public park located along the left bank of the Po and integrated within Turin’s urban fabric. The park, created in the seventeenth century and opened to the public in 1856, had hosted many fairs and was thus already associated with exhibitions. The organisers of Turin 1911 incorporated the idiosyncrasies of the Parco del Valentino in their design. Pavilions were spread throughout the grounds so as to maintain any trees and pre-existing structures, such as the Castello del Valentino (1640–1660) and the neo-Medieval Village (1884). This strategy evoked – in accordance with the overall Baroque flair of the fair – the aesthetics of marvel and surprise. Along a convoluted array of paths, visitors could see pavilions devoted to cities such as Turin and Paris, to industries such as tobacco, agriculture, or fashion, as well as restaurants and exhibition spaces.

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2.3  Plan of the exhibition, Torino esposizione 1911

The fair continued on the other side of the river, where the pavilions were distributed in a more orderly fashion. After crossing a two-tiered bridge, the visitor could visit the ‘Castle of Waters’, an extravagantly decorated fountain. To the left of the fountain were the pavilions of France, Belgium, Brazil, Argentina, and one for the other Latin American nations. To the right were those of Serbia, Siam, the United States, and Germany. On this side of the river were also three colonial exhibitions: one organised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, named ‘Kermesse Orientale’, one pavilion devoted to Somalia, and another to Eritrea – Italian colonies since 1889 and 1890 respectively. In 1910, when the organisation for the jubilee fairs began, a group of Italian entrepreneurs based in Somalia proposed an exhibition on this colony in either the Rome or the Turin section. The anticipated onerous expenses led members of the government to suggest dispensing with this display altogether, ‘as it presents less importance in relation to the historical and patriotic character of the commemoration’, they wrote. By 1911 the strategic importance of Somalia in Italy’s expansionistic plans had changed, and the Ministry of Colonies was given charge of these displays.31 In September 1911, Italy’s military occupation of Libya (then a territory of the Ottoman Empire) caused the early closure of the Turkish pavilion.32 The Turin 1911 exhibition thus rehearsed the role that the country aspired to play internationally, affirming Italy as a key colonial player and leaving behind the shameful defeat of Dogali – which Andrea Sperelli had mocked, describing the fallen as ‘four hundred brutes, who had died brutally’.33 Three engineer-architects, Pietro Fenoglio, Giacomo Salvadori, and Stefano Molli, were in charge of the visual programme of the ‘International Exhibition of the Industries and Labour’, the official title of the Turin fair. They designed most of its structures, including the pavilions of France, Germany, and England. Unlike the Rome section, Turin 1911 utilised a common style to link the overall design of the fairgrounds. Because the fair was integrated within the city, the architects faced the important challenge of ‘giving to the constructions of the Exhibition a style that reflected the architectural art typical of our city’, as the guide read. To achieve this, Fenoglio, Salvadori, and Molli ‘thought of Juvar[r]a, to whom Turin owes the majority of its most notable buildings, and from

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The Baroque’s revenge him, from his style, they derived the initial inspiration, the coordinating concept of the various construction’, the guide continued.34 The Baroque architect and stage designer Filippo Juvarra was commissioned by Victor Amadeus II of Savoy to design churches and palaces in a grandiose style that conveyed the political ambitions of the Piedmontese dynasty. The imposing aesthetics Juvarra developed was, therefore, a suitable model to convey the imperial desires of a newly united Italy, and to celebrate the Savoy dynasty and its contribution to the Risorgimento.35 The dialogue between the neo-Baroque of the fair and the historical Baroque of Savoy Turin was visualised by a series of postcards in which ‘Turin and its exhibition’ were depicted. The postcards paired Baroque buildings of the city centre designed by Juvarra with neo-Baroque pavilions in the fair, such as the Palazzo Madama with the Pavilion of Fashion, or the Royal Palace with the French Pavilion.The prominent use of the Piedmontese Baroque in a fair celebrating Italian unification emphasised the role of Turin in constructing the idea of Italy; it presented the values of the Piedmontese as coinciding with those of the entire Italian nation. The connection with the Baroque emphasised, too, Turin’s artistic identity and highlighted its central role in Italy’s unification. Indeed, Palazzo Madama had been one of the seats of the Subalpine Senate, the direct precedent of the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy, while the Royal Palace was the seat of the Savoy monarchy. There were many striking examples in the fair of buildings directly inspired by Juvarra’s architecture. The Pavilion of the city of Turin, for instance, resembled the nearby Basilica of Superga, which also had a portico, a central plan crowned by a dome, and

2.4  Commemorative postcard featuring the Pavilion of Fashion at the International Exhibition and Turin’s Palazzo Madama, 1911

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2.5  Watercolour by Carlo Cussetti, Padiglione Arte applicata all’Industria, postcard, 1911

two lateral bodies. Like the Castello del Valentino, the Pavilion’s domes were covered in slate roofs inspired by Mansart-style architecture. The intricate décor of the façade was designed to attract attention to the historical importance of the city that hosted the fair, as inside the pavilion were displayed documents and artworks that showcased Turin’s role during the Risorgimento and its aftermath. Next to it, the Pavilion of Art Applied to Industry likewise evoked Superga’s central plan and large dome, and it was decorated with Baroque scrolls inspired by those on two other Turin buildings – the façade of Juvarra’s church of Santa Cristina and the sanctuary of the Consolata. Even pavilions devoted to new technologies and industries, such as the Palace of Newspapers and the Pavilion of Manufacturing Industries, employed a Baroque-inspired decorative repertoire and architectural elements associated with seventeenth-century religious buildings: domes, spiral bell towers, and concave entrances decorated with conches and volutes. The neo-Baroque was also prominent in the architecture of foreign pavilions; for example, the Brazilian Pavilion, designed by the Brazilian engineers Moraes Rego and Jayme Figueira, had a grand entrance elaborately decorated with shells, draperies, and festoons.36 The Pavilion of Italians Abroad – admired by the press for depicting the successes of Italian emigrants, rather than presenting them as impoverished workers forced to leave their country – also included Baroque features such as a colossal dome and turrets decorated with scrolls.37 This global application of the neo-Baroque is not surprising given the style’s function in the imbrication of capitalism and the emergence of an advertising culture within the modern nation-state. As Albert Narath has pointed out, the language of persuasion and

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The Baroque’s revenge

2.6  Pavilion of Italians Abroad, postcard, 1911

attention-grabbing overlapped in the German advertisement discourse and in that of Baroque architecture.38 This happened, too, in the 1911 Turin fair, as pavilions sponsored by businesses such as the Liquore Strega referenced the flamboyant rhetoric of the Baroque with the festoons and curlicues of its façade as well as with the rich decoration of its interior. The Baroque’s decorative exuberance attracted the public’s attention and inspired awe for Italian industrial progress. Indeed it is clear from many guides of the Turin exhibition that the use of Juvarrian decorative repertoire was seen by contemporary observers as neither nostalgic nor backward-looking. Authors even stressed, in the same sentence, the Baroqueness and the modernity of the fair’s architecture. The Pavilion of Latin America, for example, attracted visitors for Baroque grandeur and ornamental excess but was described as being in a ‘modern style’.39 Baroque forms were seen to embody modern values such as novelty, originality, and optimism in the future.

Baroque and Liberty style: freedom, experimentation, and the renewal of tradition The author of the article ‘The Baroque’s Revenge’ interpreted the fair’s style as a ‘paraphrase –that is, a liberal translation [of the Baroque] with modern criteria […] Lucifer rebelling against the Olympian serenity of the Quattrocento’.40 By 1911 the Baroque was considered a quintessentially modern style because it defied the apparently eternal rules of classicism. The style thus seemed to express the permanent desire for innovation that animated the

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capitalist expansion on view in Turin 1911, and visually connected with the Art Nouveau, at the time the epitome of modern architecture in Italy. The stylistic success of the Turin fair resulted in a rehabilitation of seventeenth-century architecture. Visitors admired how the choice of the Baroque had given a consistent style to the fair.41 The poet Guido Gozzano, for example, claimed that the neo-Baroque was a vast improvement on the Art Nouveau of previous fairs organised in Turin: Solemn without being clerical, immune to the baroquism [‘barocchismo’] of the time, this [Juvarrian] style provides buildings with an unrivalled nobility and it makes me think, with renewed antipathy, of the multicoloured messes, the sorbets, the tapeworms, the tulips of the abhorrent Liberty style, that cloying liquor of good taste that disappeared with no traces, but that has still infected the Parco del Valentino in previous exhibitions.42 This review deserves some careful consideration because of the concepts Gozzano uses. Firstly, he employs the term ‘barocchismo’ along the lines established by Nencioni, who encouraged differentiation between those artists and architects who justly defied obsolete aesthetic rules (Baroques) and those who hubristically pursued innovation for its own sake (Baroquists). Thus it is possible, as Gozzano observed in relation to the pavilions in Turin, to be ‘solemn without being clerical’, that is, to achieve magnificence and gravity without falling into the rhetorical excesses associated with religious propaganda. Secondly, it is interesting to note that, as Gozzano observed, Molli, Salvadori, and Fenoglio chose a specific approach to the Turinese Baroque: Juvarra is to Bernini as Guarino Guarini would be to Borromini, to use Nencioni’s examples. Guarini’s whimsical and creative approach to architecture was not considered appropriate for the fair, despite his close connections with the Savoy monarchy.43 His style was too idiosyncratic and personal, and too tied to the Counter-Reformation, whilst Juvarra’s repertoire (associated with the Savoys’ secular project) could be readily adapted to 1911 architectural and political interests. Finally, Gozzano’s rhetoric contrasts the overall harmony of Baroque style with the jarring plurality of the Liberty style, the name applied to Art Nouveau in Italy after the famous London shop that exported modern British decorative arts to Italy.44 Liberty entwined the notion of the Baroque with ideas of newness and contemporaneity. The style, indeed, was also labelled ‘Arte Nuova’ or ‘Nova’ [New Art], the literal translation of Art Nouveau. Exhibitions such as the 1902 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art in Turin (which Gozzano referred to in his review), the 1903 Venice Biennale, and the 1906 Milan International Fair introduced the Italian public to the Liberty style and sparked discussions about its relation to both the Baroque and notions of originality.45 Both the Baroque and Liberty style were considered (negatively or positively) anti-historicist and anti-traditional, as they proposed new decorative solutions. For some, Liberty was (like the Baroque) excessively committed to innovation. The architect Carlo Calzecchi Onesti,

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The Baroque’s revenge for example, remarked that ‘there is a singular connection between Baroque degeneration and this modern Italian Art’: the presence of ‘unbridled licence’.46 Others, however, deployed the Baroque in favour of Liberty style. As the engineer Daniele Donghi argued, ‘We believe that, as Arte nova is now for us what the Baroque was in past centuries, it is good that it came to be, because it will bring good fruits, just as the old Baroque did’. 47 Thanks to critics sympathetic to Liberty, the historical Baroque was reassessed. Many perceived significant similarities between the Baroque and Liberty’s attitudes towards decoration and art as ‘the uprising of forms’, in Luca Quatrocchi’s accurate formulation. 48 This stylistic kinship is evident in one of the iconic examples of Turinese Liberty style: the Fenoglio-Lafleur House (1902), designed by one of the architects of the Turin 1911 fairgrounds, Pietro Fenoglio, for his family. Fenoglio conceived his home as a coherent whole and designed the architecture as well as the decoration of the house, including the window frames, the front gate, and even the radiators. His stylistic direction reflects his attunement to both Liberty and the Baroque. Firstly, both Liberty and the Baroque were enthralled by the aesthetic possibilities of curved lines and the growth patterns of organic matter, as evidenced by one of the most striking features of the Fenoglio-Lafleur House: winding plant-like decorations in paint, stained glass, and wrought iron that coil throughout the façade and the interior of the multi-level residence. Both styles, too, were interested in creating a total work of art and in designing all-encompassing environments, harmonic wholes that link architecture and decoration, precisely what Fenoglio did for his home. Finally, the Baroque and Liberty (the latter in its very name) were associated with spontaneous creativity and inventiveness, dissatisfaction with the models bequeathed by tradition, and an interest in exploring new ways of producing art. Regardless of this significant overlap, many still associated Liberty with kitsch and the neo-Baroque, as Gozzano pointed out, with the ‘rehabilitat[ion of] good taste’.49 Another visitor to the fair was also relieved by the choice of Juvarra’s architecture as the overall inspiration of the exposition: ‘This means that the good decorative taste will rule the general architecture of the exhibition’, as Juvarra, ‘avoiding the too contrived baroque style of Father Guarini […] introduced a new elegance, with lines both simple and grandiose.’ 50 By 1911 the Baroque’s innovative thrust mirrored Italy’s desire to present itself as a modern power. At the same time, by using the style (considered then the last major one to originate in Italy) as an overarching narrative applied to the presentation of all nations in the 1911 fair (from Italians abroad to rival colonial powers like England and France), the Baroque reiterated Italy’s cultural (if not yet economic and political) primacy in global affairs. Yet Cristina Della Colletta, one of the few scholars of the 1911 Turin fair to attend to its use of the Baroque, deems the use of this style its ‘single most dramatic failure’.51 She has argued that the neo-Juvarrian style failed to reactivate its original function, that of giving visible form to the spectacle of political hegemony. Unable to be collectively decoded, the revival of the Turin baroque did not give form to the collective idea of the nation, but remained

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2.7  Pietro Fenoglio, Fenoglio-Lafleur House, Turin, 1902

marooned in an opaque and archaic regionalism, thus contradicting the very idea of national cohesion and historically sanctioned leadership that Turin 1911 otherwise aggressively proclaimed.52 Yet the use of the Baroque in the Rome fair too compels us to reconsider her harsh assessment. I would rather argue that the neo-Baroque was a unifying element in the 1911 jubilee fairs with different yet complementary meanings: in Turin, the style conveyed a sense of transformation and novelty, as was appropriate to the section of the exposition

The Baroque’s revenge tasked with displaying industrial progress; in Rome, by contrast, the neo-Baroque stood for Romanity as a centralising core that deterred the disaggregation of different Italian regions. Both elements – that of capitalist capacity for innovation and that of national identity – were key for Italy’s self-image on the eve of its imperialistic expansion.

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Rome 1911: regional identities as eclectic pastiche As in Turin, a team of architects and engineers was also in charge of the design of the fairgrounds of Rome 1911, but with separate tasks. Ernesto Basile co-ordinated the pavilions in the Regional exhibition, Augusto Giustini and Angelo Guazzaroni concentrated on the Ethnographic exhibition, and Cesare Bazzani oversaw the area of Villa Giulia where international pavilions were located. Bazzani also designed the building where the International Fine Art exhibition took place, which has since become the National Gallery of Modern Art.53 Finally, the architect Marcello Piacentini served as the artistic director and the designer of the central buildings of the exhibition. As was typical of most world fairs, the Rome fairground was laid out in a systematic way, which allowed guests to survey, map, and organise the knowledge they gleaned from their visit. In service of this organisational principle, the Tiber was used to separate two sections in the fair physically: the International Exhibition devoted to the modern fine arts lay on the grounds of Vigna Cartoni, and the Regional and Ethnographic Exhibitions 2.8  Map of Rome and of the Exhibition

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Baroquemania were located in an undeveloped area of the city – what now houses the Quartiere Mazzini-Prati. After crossing the Ponte Flaminio (now Ponte del Risorgimento), visitors entered the fairgrounds through a profusely decorated triumphal arch designed by Ghino Venturi and Arnaldo Foschini. The first building that they would see was the Forum of the Regions, designed by Piacentini, visible in the illustrations mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Behind the Forum was an artifical lake, and on the opposite shore stood the Palace of Festivities, which was also designed by Piacentini, as were the Pavilion of Schools and that of Ethnography. The overall impression of this sprawling layout was that of splendour and monumentality, as the massive, white-plastered buildings, embellished by sculptures and high-reliefs, were reflected on to the water. Piacentini’s buildings did not evoke a specific region but rather aspired to bring together all the Italians; they were designed in an eclectic style that celebrated seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Roman architecture.54 Unlike Turin 1911, in which the Baroque gave a distinctively Turinese look to the fair, in Rome 1911 it countered the regionalist tendencies that were on display in the other pavilions. Indeed difference and otherness were prominently displayed in Rome 1911, despite the fair’s ambitions towards unity and cohesion. The Regional Exhibition, for example, highlighted the distinctive historical and artistic character of Italy’s different regions.55 The Sicilian Pavilion had cubical shapes, pointed arches, crenelations, jalousies, and domed turrets inspired by the Arab-Norman architecture of the island. The result was a typically ‘Sicilian’ construction that celebrated the remarkable architectural history of the island, providing visitors who had never been there with a taste of the island’s heritage. Only one pavilion in the Regional Exhibition was inspired by a style other than the medieval or the Renaissance. The Pavilion of Campania, Lucania, and Calabria looked back at late Baroque architecture. The interior of the pavilion celebrated seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury intellectuals from the South of Italy, such as Torquato Tasso, Giambattista Marino, Luigi Vanvitelli, and Mattia Preti. As one of the organisers observed, the unusual choice of the late Baroque was justified by the historical conditions of the Italian South during the Seicento; whilst this could be seen as a moment of decadence for the Centre and North of the country, it coincided with artistic and intellectual flourishing in the southern regions.56 At the same time as it symbolised Italian unity, the Baroque could also embody the peninsula’s uneven development. After assessing Italy’s architectural diversity on display, one commentator noted that the Regional Exhibition offered ‘a general idea what the various regions of Italy, so different from one another, have in common in terms of beauty’.57 Thus, while emphasising regional diversity, the Regional Exhibition aimed to showcase the ‘Italianness’ of all of them: a heightened artistic sensibility that was believed to distinguish Italy from other countries. The notion of ‘small homelands’, developed by Stefano Cavazza, provides a useful framework here.58 Cavazza has argued that, in recently formed nations such as Italy and Germany, notions of cultural regionalism coexisted with and reinforced strong patriotic allegiances to the nation. This was the sentiment that the organisers of the Regional Exhibition aspired to elicit in the audiences of Rome’s 1911 fair: they could be strongly attached

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The Baroque’s revenge

2.9  Sicilian Pavilion from publicity for Estratto Liebing, 1911

to their region of origin without sacrificing their commitment to the national unification project. Yet this was harder to achieve when displaying class difference instead of regional difference. Another section of Rome 1911 included an Ethnographic Exhibition, showcasing different ethnic groups from the Italian peninsula.59 The aim here was different from that of Piacentini’s Baroque pavilions and of the eclectic buildings of the Regional Exhibition. The Ethnographic Exhibition meant to visualise the rural poor, and to urge a colonial solution to the rampant poverty that was forcing millions of Italian peasants to emigrate. Populist arguments were indeed a key element in Italian colonialist propaganda. The poet Giovanni Pascoli celebrated Italy’s 1911 conquest of Libya because he argued that it was

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2.10  Pavilion of Campania, Lucania, and Calabria, La tribuna illustrata (21-24 September 1911)

the best response to the plight of the poor, who would now be provided with fertile lands to cultivate. He even described Italy as ‘the Great Proletarian’ nation, opposing it to France, Germany, and Great Britain, the bourgeois ones.60 The 1911 fairs, especially the Rome section and its emphasis on the poverty of the rural population, encouraged colonialism as the only solution to the inequality in the peninsula. The Ethnographic exhibition highlighted the abyss that separated the educated urban bourgeoisie (who, despite regional differences, shared high culture references and values) and the rural poor (who were reduced to folkloric stereotypes). Lamberto Loria, the curator of Florence’s Museum of Italian Ethnography (1906), was in charge of the Ethnographic Exhibition. In a typical primitivist move, rural and highlander Italians were put on passive display for the benefit of the jubilee audiences, treated as if they lived in a different temporal and geographic dimension than those who visited fairgrounds.61 As one of Loria’s collaborators wrote while gathering objects for the Ethnographic Exhibition in the southern province of Molise, ‘we should not think about civilising Africa, we should instead civilise Italy!’ 62 The estrangement between the two socio-economic groups – an industrialised and urbanised Italy looking abroad for models, and an agrarian Italy, apparently unchanged and tied to tradition – was starkly emphasised. However, despite the class difference between the Italians on view in the Ethnographic exhibition and those who visited it, an emphasis on creativity was intended to forge

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The Baroque’s revenge

2.11  Poster for Ethnographic Exhibition in Rome, 1911

a sense of cohesion, too. As the then governor of Eritrea, Ferdinando Martini, stated in his speech at the inauguration of the Museum of Italian Ethnography, ethnographic objects provided precious insights as ‘in one [object] we find a prejudice that needs to be eradicated, a bad habit to correct; in another an ignored activity that needs to be encouraged and advertised’. But, Martini argued, these objects also bear witness to the ‘genius’ and ‘indestructible artistic sense’ of the Italian people.63 The idea that the core of Italianness was an ‘artistic sense’ was a leitmotiv of Rome 1911; it was embodied in the emphasis on architectural variety in the Mostra Regionale, in the display of craftsmanship and ingenuity in the Mostra Etnografica, as well as in the awe-inspiring Baroque of Piacentini’s pavilions. Whilst stylistic variety accounted for regional and ethnographic difference, in Rome’s 1911 jubilee fair the Baroque stood for both Italianness, as I will show in the next section,

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Baroquemania and a certain notion of the bourgeoisie. The neo-Baroque was indeed prominently represented in the Architectural Exhibition, displaying the submissions to a competition for upper-middle-class urban housing.64 These were villini (‘little villas’), which despite their diminutive name, refer to a single-family villa of significant dimensions. Through their references to multiple architectural styles (Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo), an eclectic medley described with the term barocchetto, villini gave cultural capital to Rome’s emerging upper-middle classes. The economic and political interests of these politicians, financiers, and public officials were linked to those of the Roman aristocracy. Perhaps because of this ideological identification and class aspirations, the Roman upper bourgeoisie often patronised styles linked to the Italian architectural tradition rather than more modern aesthetics.65 Among the villini in the Architectural Exhibition, Armando Brasini’s manifests a growing interest in the neo-Baroque, exemplified by his use of rounded pediments, shell-like ornamentation, and extravagant sculptures. Brasini – whose work I will examine at length in Chapter 5 – was one among the many architects of villini who drew inspiration from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century decorative repertoires. For these architects, such as Carlo Pincherle and Augusto Cavazzoni, the Baroque was, like the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, a mere repository of decorative motifs that could be interchangeably cited to give cultural capital to the buildings of the new urban bourgeoisie. Their villini may have had modern heating systems, but their decorative features marked them as being traditional and distinctly Italian.

2.12  Armando Brasini, Villa Laetitia, Lungotevere delle Armi 22/23, Rome, 1911

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The Baroque’s revenge The Baroque, therefore, was treated as part of a historical heritage that could be selectively mined to give prestige to post-unification bourgeoisie. This retrospective focus explains why, in the wake of the 1911 Rome fair, a new genre of books on the Baroque became extremely popular: photographic portfolios of seventeenth-century decorative and architectural repertoires. All followed a similar scheme: a brief introduction tracing the history and theory of seventeenth-century architecture and decorative arts, followed by an extensive photographic collection of façades, architectural details, fountains, and furniture.66 These books were used by architects as a visual archive of architectural references. They testify to a widespread interest in this style as a source of inspiration for architects and designers, and to the inclusion of the Baroque as an integral part of the Italian early twentieth-century architectural canon. Though many believed that Italy was the birthplace of the Baroque, the style’s broad, international use gave new imperative for Italy to lay its claim on the style. Many such examples of international neo-Baroque were on view in the section of the Rome jubilee fair dedicated to the Fine Arts. A columnated building designed by Cesare Bazzani hosted Italian and international contemporary painting and sculpture.67 Around Bazzani’s building, the pavilions of the United States and many European nations showcased their architecture as well as their art. True, the pavilion of Austria was designed by Joseph Hoffmann in streamlined modernist lines, and those of Japan, Serbia, Hungary, and the United States engaged with vernacular traditions; however, those of France, Britain, and Belgium made blatant use of their Baroque and Rococo heritage. For example, the French and Belgian pavilions had curved tympana and richly decorated façades, whilst the English pavilion (Britain and England were not clearly differentiated in Italy at thes time), designed by Edwin Lutyens, was inspired by St Paul’s Cathedral in London. During the Edwardian era, architects throughout the British empire drew from Baroque models to design public buildings. Lutyens was a major exponent of this approach, which simultaneously conveyed the pomp of imperial power and its rootedness in the English tradition.68 A similar inspiration would guide Piacentini’s use of the neo-Baroque in the official buildings for the 1911 fair. Although the fairgrounds were physically separated from the rest of Rome, the jubilee exhibition spread into the city. Around and inside the recently restored Castel Sant’Angelo, a series of ‘retrospective exhibitions’ showed an eclectic array of cultural references. Many small shows there displayed the Seicento past of Rome: a reconstruction of the cell of an alchemist, a pharmacy with an actor in period costume, and the workshop of a sculptor. A small exhibition was even devoted to the work of Bernini and his school. In 1911, unlike 1898, he was modestly commemorated, but Michelangelo was also celebrated along the same lines. Plaster casts, as well as drawings and paintings by the artists and their students, composed the entire retrospective exhibition.69 Bernini and other Baroque sculptors were included because, as the guide to the exhibition pointed out, scholarship had disproved the idea that ‘from the Cinquecento to neoclassicism’ art was solely ‘decadent’.70 Rather, Baroque sculptors showed a ‘marvellous ability in working with marble, which they used as if it were malleable as

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Baroquemania wax’, as well as the search for the pictorial effects of chiaroscuro and the expression of pathos.71 Michelangelo and Bernini were not the focus of the jubilee shows, but both were considered important enough to deserve inclusion in the celebration, and equally relevant. In dialogue with these displays of Seicento culture, Rome 1911 also included a reenactment of the parade with which the Roman people had welcomed Queen Christine of Sweden in 1655.72 Male actors in seventeenth-century costumes played the Queen, Cardinals, members of the noble Roman families, and their entourage of valets and squires. The splendour of the Pope’s court was summoned to enhance the dignity of both post-unification Rome and the jubilee secular festivities, thereby transposing the Baroque from an ecclesiastical style to one that served the celebrations for anti-clerical Italy. References to the neo-Baroque throughout the fair demonstrate the versatility of the Baroque repertoire, which could adopt imperial, national, public, private, ancient, and modern connotations. The aforementioned examples, all teeming with references to the Baroque, show the style’s changed public reception following the 1911 world exhibition; after the charged debates on Liberty less than ten years earlier, the Baroque had become an acceptable reference to a not-altogether shameful past, and effectively allowed the

2.13  Parade for Queen Christine of Sweden, ‘Roma- Il Corteo Storico che si svolse nella Piazza d’Armi (22 ottobre). Una parte del corteo. Un’attesa (Costumi italiani del secolo XVII),’ Album dell’illustrazione popolare, no. 45 (2 November 1911)

The Baroque’s revenge celebration of Rome as the embodiment of an Italian national identity centred on creative talent and artistry.

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The neo-Baroque as the style of consensus Because of its celebration of regional and ethnic difference, Rome 1911 – unlike the Turin section – presented a wide array of styles. By contrast, the neo-Baroque buildings designed by Piacentini operated as a unifying frame, containing regional differences through the use of ornamental excess and the majestic dimensions of the buildings. Yet in Rome, unlike in Turin, references to the Baroque were not historically precise.To our contemporary eyes, these buildings look more like eclectic Beaux-Arts style than neo-Baroque, but contemporary commentators (and Piacentini himself) considered them to be directly inspired by seventeenth-century Roman architecture. As can be seen in the Figures 2.1 and 2.2, visitors entered the Forum of the Regions through a portico inspired by late Renaissance and early Baroque models; the pastiche, a strategy prominent in the Regional and Ethnographic exhibitions, was also at work here. On its façade, crowned by a curved broken pediment typical of late sixteenth-century Roman architecture, are verses by the iconic poet of post-unification Italy, Giosuè Carducci. In keeping with the jubilee fair’s aims towards unity, Carducci’s verses summarised the desire to bond the plurality of Italian regional identities around the symbolic idea of Rome: ‘A new Italy, one of arms, laws, and language’, they proclaimed, despite most of the exhibition revealing precisely the opposite. Two free-standing columns in front of the Forum held the animal symbols of Turin and Rome, the bull and the Capitoline she-wolf, whilst the four corners of the towers and the arched entrance were crowned by numerous sculptures. In a final show of Italian Baroque spirit the colonnade’s flat arches and balustraded parapet show direct inspiration from Bernini’s in St Peter’s. The Palace of Festivities stood on the opposite side of the ornamental lake and echoed some aspects of the Forum: this building, too, has two lateral porticoed colonnades with square towers at the ends. Of gigantic proportions – appropriate for a building that hosted numerous ceremonies – its façade had an elliptical triple entrance articulated by enormous pilasters. The squared lines of the porticos’ ends were countered by the multiple protruding and receding volumes of the façade and by its profuse decorations. A sculpture representing ‘Rome being Honoured by Italian Cities’ dominated the façade. It was here that more verses by Carducci, this time from his 1887 Odi Barbare, were inscribed: ‘And all that in the world is civilised, grand, celebrated is still Roman.’ Decorative cornices added to the overall extravagance of the building. A similarly eclectic style, although slightly more sober, inspired Piacentini’s design for two other twin buildings overlooking the ornamental lake. Piacentini revealed the sources for his evocatively Baroque design of the jubilee buildings: ‘having lived for several days, with a vigilant mind in the life of the fertile period in which emerged those exquisite monuments, the Museum of Villa Borghese […] the Casino of Villa Medici, the one of Villa Doria Pamphili, etc., I eagerly started working’.73

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2.14  Palace of Festivities, postcard, 1911

Yet despite these references, whilst one can find explicit references to specific buildings designed by Juvarra in the Baroque-inspired buildings of the Turinese section, the same is not possible for Piacentini’s structures. Rather, it is the overall effect that is charged with ‘Baroqueness’: the profusion of allegorical sculptures, the decorative exuberance, and the majestic dimensions, rather than any pointed references to precise Baroque structures. Rome 1911 was by no means the first time in which the neo-Baroque was used in world’s fairs. The style, associated with theatricality, spectacle, and the display of political power, was particularly appropriate to world exhibitions. In the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, for example, the central pavilion also embodied features associated with the Baroque, such as the rich decoration of the façade and the inclusion of a massive dome; the style was easily adapted to modern construction techniques and materials such as cast iron. Piacentini, therefore, in addition to wanting to convey the ‘Romanness’ of the exhibition, was also inspired by a long-standing tradition of using the Baroque as the vehicle for the imperial ambitions of universal exhibitions. In Piacentini’s design, stylistic features enhanced the dignity of the fair buildings, serving Italy’s self-presentation as a crucial player in international politics.74 What are the cultural and political implications, however, of choosing Roman Baroque references – even relatively vague ones – as the inspiration for the key common buildings of the jubilee fair? The four buildings that Piacentini designed were expected to overcome regional differences and bring together multiple centrifugal identities. The Baroque style mirrored the symbolic role of Rome itself, which was similarly tasked with representing unity within difference – the only identity available to Italy fifty years after its unification.

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The Baroque’s revenge In this emblematic, unifying sense, then, Baroque equalled Rome. By 1911, it was a given in the history of art that the Baroque was a style that had emerged in that city and, from there, spread throughout the peninsula. Key texts by Gurlitt, Wölfflin, and Riegl made this process of dissemination clear, as they focused almost exclusively on the achievements of Roman architects and painters when describing the key features of the Baroque. In truth, however, the style’s journey throughout the peninsula was anything but linear. Instead, the Baroque acquired manifold features and yielded diverse iterations as it progressed through Italy, as evidenced by 1911 buildings as different as the Juvarrainspired pavilions in Turin, or the Southern Baroque of the pavilion of Campania in the Regional exhibition in Rome. Simply put, the style adapted well to regional varieties. The concept of the ‘Italian Baroque’, then, managed to create cohesiveness but also to respect regional differences, thereby encompassing the overall aim of the jubilee celebrations of 1911. This is not to say that the style held no unifying qualities; in fact the Baroque demonstrated key common features throughout Italy – intricate decor, flamboyant rhetoric, the goal of inspiring awe – without compromising the peculiarities of regional identities. In this respect Piacentini’s choice of the neo-Baroque for these major buildings in Rome 1911 was very attentive to the political and cultural implications of the Cinquantenario. His neo-Baroque designs implicitly argued that Rome was the core of Italian identity that kept together regional differences and prevented a lapse back into the fragmentation of pre-unification Italy. At the same time his stylistic choice showed that Rome’s influence did not obliterate differences, but rather allowed every region to simultaneously have its own identity and be part of a larger Italian nation. Italy as a whole was absent in the manifestations of the Cinquantenario; the nation was presented as the sum of complementary regional identities, united by the symbolic role of Rome and expressed by the notion of the Baroque. A style that countered regionalism through its ubiquity on the peninsula, yet countered homogeneity through its regional variety, the Baroque was ideally positioned to express both the centrifugal and the centripetal pulls manifested in the jubilee celebrations. It would be easy to read the differences between the Rome and Turin sections in the 1911 celebrations as proof of the failure of the Italian unification process. This has been the general assessment of the many critics of the exhibitions, both in 1911 and in recent literature. For example in 1911 the Italian intellectual Giuseppe Prezzolini condemned the exorbitant costs of the exhibition and defined it as ‘vain, useless, without celebrating our progress or our future, but which as usual attracted even more the attention of Italians to their “glorious past,” a “glorious past” that it is a miracle has not rendered us all stupid for staring at it’.75 However, it should also be pointed out that what both the Turin and Rome sections attempted to show was an Italian national identity arrived at via multiple and diverse means rather than centred on a single core – but without shattering into particularism. Catherine Brice has observed that, for an audience as non-homogeneous as Italians were in 1911, the choice of a single seat, instead of three, might have even been counterproductive; she correctly points out that viewing this as an intrinsic failure of the Italian

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Baroquemania celebrations assumes that the only valid national model is the strongly centralised French one.76 Other possibilities, as Brice writes, were ‘polycentrism and variability of the unitary message, according to local interests’, expressing the importance of the relatively autonomous local administrations in the post-unification Italian state.77 Whilst purportedly commemorating unification, the 1911 universal exhibitions, in reality, ended up celebrating difference, presenting a common Italian identity that expressed itself through regional variety. Against Della Colletta and other critics of the stylistic variety of the jubilee fairs, I would argue then that the neo-Baroque operated as a fil rouge that connected its Rome and Turin sections. In this respect the style perfectly embodied the ‘polycentrism and variability’ identified by Brice as a key feature of Italian identity in 1911, as well as the desire for unity that the Cinquantenario celebrated. Whilst it is true that the Baroque was ambiguous – associated with opposing values such as extravagance and discipline, spectacle and devotion, church and state – many 1911 visitors praised the choice of this style rather than deeming it a failure. Indeed the coincidence of stylistic choices in both Turin and Rome led powerful critics such as Ugo Ojetti to propose that the neo-Baroque, which fitted so well with both the local and the international ambitions of both Turin and Rome 1911, could become a model for Italian national architecture. The jubilee shows were an opportunity to shape ongoing debates about Italy’s cultural identity as expressed through the built environment: a high-stakes discussion, to say the least. After all, privileging one style over another inflected architecture’s duty to represent the ostensibly organic development that linked the new nation-state to its cultural roots. In Italy one of the most systematic attempts to propose a unitary style for national architecture was Camillo Boito’s ‘On the Future Style of Italian Architecture’ (1880).78 Along the lines of the Gothic revival taking place in Britain, Germany, and France, Boito proposed the fourteenth-century Lombard style as a paramount example of an architecture that could be ‘varied, adaptable to many ends, many climates, and the nature of the different provinces’, as well as ‘worthy of the refined culture, the progressive science of our nineteenth century or even of the twentieth’.79 By contrast, in 1911 Ojetti proposed the Baroque as the Italian national style. In his article ‘Rome and Turin – For an Italian Architecture’, published in the Milanese newspaper Il corriere della sera in August 1911, Ojetti observed that it was quite revealing that, independently from each other, the architects of both the Rome and the Turin exhibitions had chosen the Baroque as the main style of the fairs.80 For Ojetti, architecture is tasked with representing the cultural patrimony of the nation, as ‘it defines a people better than painting, literature, or music.’ 81 Ojetti argued that ‘all new factories, barracks, schools, embassies, prefectures, stations, bridges, museums, banks, courthouses, prisons should be in a single style, to affirm and remind that Italy has become one’.82 The issue, however, was to find a style ‘singularly Italian, accepted in all the ancient States [of the peninsula] and in the many regions, unanimously’.83 This eliminated Boito’s suggestion, which extended to the entire peninsula a local, Northern, style. For Ojetti the Seicento (which he defined as including both the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries) was the first time a new style ‘spread from

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The Baroque’s revenge Rome, precisely from Rome, to the rest of Italy, and not only Italy’.84 The Seicento was ideally suited to becoming the national style because it not only unified Italian art and architecture but also provided a model for French modern artists like Édouard Manet, reinforcing Italy’s artistic primacy. For Ojetti, as I will show in Chapter 4, the paintings of Caravaggio and Tiepolo, and the architecture of Bernini and Juvarra, were not anti-classical, but rather an expression of a quintessentially Italian classicism. Through the conceptual linkage between the Baroque and notions of the classic, during the interwar period Ojetti would argue that the Seicento was an integral part of the Italian tradition. But in 1911 he mentioned only briefly the classicism of the Baroque. Rather, he emphasised its role as the stylistic equivalent of Rome’s political influence over the rest of the peninsula: an influence that created cohesiveness but also allowed for the expression of regional individualism and provided a model for art abroad. Ojetti’s prediction of the style’s global prominence was true. As shown by the Architecture Exhibition in Rome 1911, at the turn of the century a host of international countries appropriated Baroque motifs for consensus-building. In the Austro-Hungarian empire, for example, the Baroque symbolised Austrian national identity, in opposition to the classical and Gothic traditions reclaimed by Prussia (which had displaced Austria-Hungary as the political leader of German-speaking nations).85 The neo-Baroque was deployed as Austrian because of its tendency towards universality – both in the sense of integrating multiple media and in the sense of embracing multiple ethnic identities – which the Habsburg monarchy aimed to emulate.86 This was also the role that Rome was asked to play in the Cinquantenario celebrations: integrating differences and unifying them while preserving their distinctive characters. The Baroque style served as a visual expression of such task. In conclusion, the Rome and Turin fairs used the Baroque to emphasise commonalities over regional distinctions, but also to evoke the specificity of the Italian tradition. At the same time the 1911 jubilee delivered the Baroque from its religious connotations. Italy’s unification, which had entailed the annexation of Rome and the end of the temporal power of the Papacy, was considered by Catholics a usurpation. The Pope had exhorted Catholics to boycott the 1911 jubilee exhibitions, and he refused to do any celebrations in relation to them.87 Catholics found that even the use of the term ‘jubilee’ to describe the resolutely secular festivities was an affront to religion.88 By designing a fairground on the same side of the river as the Vatican that included a central domed structure and a colonnade, just like St Peter’s, Piacentini rendered the jubilee ‘a secular equivalent to ecclesiastical celebrations’, as Terry Kirk has observed.89 In 1911 a style that had been inextricably associated with Counter-Reformation propaganda was mobilised for a truly secular celebration such as the Cinquantenario. Despite the secular motivations behind the re-emergence of the Baroque, its durability was not guaranteed. After all, the danger of obsolescence is implicit in any aesthetic driven by the desire to innovate, as the Baroque was described around 1911. A style whose only rationale is originality is destined to be supplanted by another one, animated by the same disruptive spirit. Indeed, notions of the ephemeral shaped discussions of the

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Baroquemania Baroque and of the 1911 fairs, especially when considering the looming destruction of all those grandiose pavilions.90 The triumphal rhetoric around the exhibitions, therefore, would not prevent a melancholic reflection on their transitory character, and of the brief concord it had created among Italians. The resonance of the Baroque for Italian unity was not only fleeting due to the nature of artistic expression. The year 1911 marked the end of a fifteen-year period in which Italy did not engage in aggressive expansionism, but rather built a system of diplomatic alliances. A month before the 1911 jubilee fairs closed, this politic ended: on 29 September 1911, Italy declared war on the Ottoman Empire, eventually conquering Tripolitana and Cyrenaica. This war, and the First World War even more so, gave new vitality to Italy’s sense of national solidarity. Now wars unified the Italians around the myth of a nation tasked with the reconquest of the territories that had once belonged to the Roman Empire, in the European and African shores of the Mediterranean.91 In light of this historical backdrop, one of Gozzano’s evocative reviews of the Turin fair concluded with an air of melancholy, the Baroque feeling par excellence. Italy’s declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire over Libya gave a material concreteness to the imperial aspirations only suggested by the jubilee fairs’ neo-Baroque. Viewed in light of this historical trajectory, Gozzano’s imagined dialogue with his companion, a lovely cocotte named Jeannette, at the end of their visit to the Turin fair, becomes particularly poignant: – What a melancholy! – Jeannette, who has been silent for a long time, murmurs leaning on the balusters, and looks away. – Melancholy? Why? –I ask, curious about the workings of that brain. – I do not know why. [This fair] is really beautiful, bigger and more amazing than I would have thought; and all this makes me melancholy. I think that one gets older … that one dies. I am a fool. I am like this!92 The fictional character of the Italian unity put on display in Turin and Rome created a fleeting consensus, and tested the imperialist dreams of the young nation. After 1911 the brief symbolic and aesthetic unity created by the Baroque in the jubilee fairs was replaced, through and by wars, with a sense of national allegiance based on territorial ambitions and nationalist rhetoric.

Notes 1 ‘Nel giubileo della patria. Torino Esposizione Internazionale delle Industrie. Il Corteo Reale si avvia per inaugurarla (29 aprile)’, Album dell’Illustrazione Popolare, no. 20 (11–17 May 1911), 153. 2 On the exhibitions see Gianna Piantoni, ed., Roma 1911 (Rome: De Luca Editore, 1980), in particular Enzo Forcella, ‘Roma 1911: Quadri di un’esposizione’, 27–38; Mariantonietta Picone Petrusa, Le grandi esposizioni in Italia, 1861–191: la competizione culturale con l’Europa e

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4 5

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7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15

16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23

la ricerca dello stile nazionale (Naples: Liguori, 1990); Massimo Misiti, ‘L’Italia in mostra. Le Esposizioni e la costruzione dello Stato nazionale’, Passato e presente 37 (1996): 33–54; Paolo Colombo, Le Esposizioni Universali: i mestieri d’arte sulla scena del mondo (1851–2010) (Venice: Marsilio, 2012); Albina Malerba and Gustavo Mola de Nomaglio, eds, Torino internazionale: le grandi expo tra Otto e Novecento (Turin: Consiglio regionale del Piemonte, 2015). Giulio Caprin, ‘Il ritratto italiano alla mostra del ritratto a Firenze’, Emporium XXXIV, no. 202 (1911): 243–270; Mostra del ritratto italiano: dalla fine del sec. XVI all’anno 1861 (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano di Arti Grafiche, 1911). Annarita Gori, Tra patria e campanile. Ritualità civili e culture politiche a Firenze in età giolittiana (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2014). Enrico di San Martino to Luigi Luzzatti, 5 June 1910, Festeggiamenti per il 1911 in occasione del 50° anniversario della proclamazione del Regno d’Italia, Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, 1910, f. 16, b. 401, ACS. Ernesto Nathan e Secondo Frola, ‘Proclama’, Le Esposizioni del 1911: Roma – Torino – Firenze: rassegna illustrata delle Mostre indette nelle tre Capitali per solennizzare il Cinquantenario del Regno d’Italia (Milan: Treves, 1911), 4. Translated in Cristina Della Coletta, World’s Fairs Italian Style: The Great Exhibitions in Turin and Their Narratives, 1860–1915 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 86. Catherine Brice, ‘Il 1911 in Italia. Convergenza di poteri, frazionamento di rappresentazioni’, Memoria e storia, no. 34 (August 2010): 47–62, 50. ‘In giro per le mostre torinesi. Fra le architetture – La rivincita del “barocco”?’, Le esposizioni di Roma e di Torino nel 1911 descritte ed illustrate, no. 2 (December 1910): 14–15. Ugo Ojetti, ‘A Roma e a Torino. Per un’architettura italiana’, Corriere della sera (8 August 1911). ‘In giro per le mostre torinesi’, 14. The title of this section is drawn from Pier Luigi Bassignana, Le feste popolari del capitalismo: esposizioni d’industria e coscienza nazionale in Europa: 1798–1911 (Turin: Allemandi, 1997). Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 1978), 146–162, 151. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: OnVision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Timothy Mitchell, ‘Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order’, in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 2002), 495–505. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Jeffrey Auerbach and Peter Hoffenberg, Britain, the Empire, and theWorld at the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); Paul Young, Globalisation and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Natalia Majluf, ‘“Ce n’est pas le Pérou,” or, the Failure of Authenticity: Marginal Cosmopolitans at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855’, Critical Inquiry 23, no. 4 (1997): 868–893, 872. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 314. Evonne Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Stefania Massari and Stefania Baldinotti, Il fatale Millenovecentoundici: le esposizioni di Roma,Torino, Firenze (Rome: Palombi, 2012), 7. Ernesto Nathan and Secondo Frola, 15 January 1908, in Festeggiamenti per il 1911 in occasione del 50° anniversario della proclamazione del Regno d’Italia, Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, 1910, f. 16, b. 401, ACS. Giovanni Schininà, Stato e società in età giolittiana l’Italia tra il 1901 e il 1914 (Rome: Bonanno, 2008), 217. Claudio Treves, ‘I due cinquantenari’, L’avanti (27 March 1911). Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vista: The ‘Expositions Universelles’, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 27; Tony Bennett, ‘The

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26 27

28 29 30

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32 33 34

35

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37 38

Exhibitionary Complex’, in Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Bruce Ferguson, Reesa Greenberg, and Sandy Nairne (New York: Routledge, 1996), 81–112. Claudia Petraccone, Le Due Italie: la questione meridionale tra realtà e rappresentazione (Bari: Laterza, 2005). Federico Chabod, ‘L’idea di Roma’, in Storia della politica estera italiana dal 1870 al 1896 (Bari: Laterza, 1951), 179–323; Guido Formigoni, L’Italia dei cattolici: fede e nazione dal Risorgimento alla Repubblica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998); Saretta Marotta, ‘La questione romana’, in Cristiani d’Italia, Chiese, società, stato, 1861–2011, ed. Alberto Melloni (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani, 2011), 641–654; Camillo Brezzi, Laici, cattolici, Chiesa e Stato dall’unità d’Italia alla Grande Guerra (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011); Giuseppe Battelli, Società, Stato e Chiesa in Italia: dal tardo Settecento a oggi (Rome: Carocci, 2013). Giovanni Spadolini, I Repubblicani dopo l’Unità (Florence: Le Monnier, 1960). Eduardo Cimbali, Esiste l’idea di patria e di patriottismo?: saggi di politica internazionale democratica (Rome: Lux, 1912), 21–22. See Aliza Wong, Race and the Nation in Liberal Italy, 1861–1911: Meridionalism, Empire, and Diaspora (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, 29–30. ‘Trionfale festa a Torino del mondo che lavora’, Il giornale d’Italia (30 April 1911). These numbers are put into a different light when compared with the more than fifty million visitors who attended the 1900 Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Paris, or the eighteen million who visited the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Seven million was nevertheless an impressive number for the nascent Italian mass culture: the Venice Biennale, for example, hardly reached 400,000 visitors, despite its sixteen-year history and international prestige. Regno d’Italia, Ministero delle Colonie, Le mostre coloniali all’Esposizione internazionale di Torino del 1911 (Rome: Bertero, 1913). The ‘Kermesse Orientale’ reproduced, in the words of a guide to the exhibition, ‘Oriental civilisation in the costumes, methods of life, work, industries, and pleasures’, recreating sections of cities and towns from India, Lahore, Persia, China, Japan, Indochina, Siam, Senegal, Dahomey, Niger, Congo, Madagascar, Algeria, Egypt, and Tunisia. La guida tricolore rimborsabile di Torino e della Esposizione del 1911 (Milan: Edizioni del Rio, 1911), 150–155. Communication to the Ministry of Treasury, 7 February 1910, Festeggiamenti per il 1911 in occasione del 50° anniversario della proclamazione del Regno d’Italia, Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, 1910, f. 16, b. 401, ACS. ‘Torino. La chiusura del Padiglione Turco’, Le Esposizioni del 1911 a Torino, Roma, e Firenze 26 (November 1911): 404. D’Annunzio, Pleasure, 244. Torino Esposizione 1911. Monografia illustrata edita dalla Direzione Generale del Touring Club Italiano col concorso della Commissione Esecutiva dell’Esposizione di Torino 1911 (Milan: Touring club italiano, 1911), 7–8. Costanza Roggero Bardelli, ‘Tradizionalismo barocco e neobarocco. Tendenze dell’eclettismo nella capitale sabauda dell’Ottocento’, in Tradizioni e regionalismi: aspetti dell’eclettismo in Italia, ed. Loretta Mozzoni and Stefano Santini (Naples: Liguori, 2000), 429–484. The Brazilian pavilion resembled the Palácio Monroe, the neo-Baroque Brazilian Pavilion for the 1904 Saint Louis world fair, which had been dismantled and rebuilt in Rio de Janeiro. On Brazil’s participation in the fair, see Ruth Sprung Tarasantchi and Ivo Mesquita, Turim 1911: vestígios de uma exposição universal (São Paulo: Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 2014). ‘Il Padiglione degli Italiani all’Estero’, Le esposizioni di Roma e di Torino nel 1911 descritte ed illustrate, no.11 (March 1911): 88. Albert Narath, ‘Grossstadt as Barockstadt: Art History, Advertising and the Surface of the Neo-Baroque’, in The Baroque in Architectural Culture, 1880–1980, ed. Maarten Delbeke, Andrew Leach, and John Macarthur (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 29–41, 29.

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The Baroque’s revenge 39 Torino Esposizione 1911, 35. 40 ‘In giro per le mostre torinesi’, 14–15. 41 ‘In giro per le mostre torinesi’, 14; Giulio de Prenzi, ‘L’Industria trionfa a Torino e l’arte trionfa a Roma, Napoli e Firenze’, Il giornale d’Italia (3 April 1911). 42 Guido Gozzano, ‘Un vergiliato sotto la neve’, in Il paese fuori del mondo: prose per l’Esposizione di Torino del 1911, ed. Eliana Pollone (Savigliano: Nino Aragno, 2011), 3–27, 21; ‘Rosolie di stagione’, in ibid., 29–40, 29. 43 John Beldon Scott, Architecture for the Shroud: Relic and Ritual in Turin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 44 On Liberty see Rossana Bossaglia, Il liberty: storia e fortuna del liberty italiano (Florence: Sansoni, 1974); Fernando Mazzocca, Liberty: uno stile per l’Italia moderna (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana, 2013). 45 Quinta esposizione internazionale d’arte della città di Venezia, 1903: catalogo illustrato. (Venice: Ferrari, 1903). On the 1902 Turin show see Rossana Bossaglia, Ezio Godoli, and Marco Rosci, Torino 1902: le arti decorative internazionali del nuovo secolo (Milan: Fabbri, 1994); on the 1906 Milan exhibition see Inaugurazione del nuovo valico del Sempione. Esposizione di Milano 1906. Guida ufficiale (Milan: M. Frank & Co., 1906); Pietro Redondi and Paola Zocchi, eds, Milano 1906: l’Esposizione internazionale del Sempione: la scienza, la città, la vita (Milan: Guerini e associati, 2006). 46 Carlo Calzecchi Onesti, ‘Arte nuova ed arte barocca’, in Ars una (Milan: Scuola Tipografica Figli della Provvidenza, 1915), 9–19, 11. 47 Daniele Donghi, ‘La Prima Esposizione di Arte Decorativa in Torino, 1902’, in Torino 1902. Polemiche in Italia sull’Arte Nuova, ed. Francesca Romana Fratini (Turin: Martano, 1971), 114. 48 Luca Quattrocchi, ‘La sommossa delle forme’, in Paolo Portoghesi, Luca Quattrocchi, and Folco Quilici, Barocco e Liberty: lo specchio della metamorfosi (Trento: Reverdito, 1986), 33–129. 49 Ibid., 30. 50 Le Esposizioni del 1911: Roma – Torino – Firenze, 27–29. 51 Cristina Della Coletta, World’s Fairs Italian Style:The Great Exhibitions in Turin and Their Narratives, 1860–1915 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 10. 52 Ibid. Della Coletta has also published a very useful website on Turin 1911, with additional visual materials: ‘A World’s Fair in Italy: Turin 1911’, http://italyworldsfairs.org/, accessed 23 January 2017. 53 Mariantonietta Picone Petrusa, Le grandi esposizioni in Italia, 1861–1911: la competizione culturale con l’Europa e la ricerca dello stile nazionale (Naples: Liguori, 1990), 123. 54 On eclecticism, the dominant architectural style of post-unification Rome until the advent of Fascism, see Paolo Portoghesi, L’eclettismo a Roma, 1870–1922 (Rome: De Luca, 1968); Luciano Patetta, L’architettura dell’eclettismo: fonti, teorie, modelli, 1750–1900 (Milan: G. Mazzotta, 1975); Loretta Mozzoni and Stefano Santini, eds, Tradizioni e regionalismi: aspetti dell’eclettismo in Italia (Naples: Liguori, 2000). 55 On this section of the show see Thomas Renard, ‘Patrimoine et commémorations dans l’Italie libérale: généalogie de l’exposition régionale de 1911 à Rome’, Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome – Italie et Méditerranée Modernes et Contemporaines, no. 125–2 (15 January 2013), http:// journals.openedition.org/mefrim/1478. 56 Giovanni Tesorone, Il padiglione della Campania, Basilicata e Calabria all’Esposizione di Roma del 1911 nella mostra regionale di Piazza d’Armi (Milan: Editori Alfieri, 1913), 23. 57 Rina Larice, ‘L’esposizione di etnografia italiana’, Giornale di Udine (25 August 1909). 58 Stefano Cavazza, Piccole patrie: feste popolari tra regione e nazione durante il Fascismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003). See also Ilaria Porciani, ‘Identità locale – identità nazionale: la costruzione di una doppia appartenenza’, in Centralismo e federalismo tra Otto e Novecento, Italia e Germania a confronto, ed. Oliver Janz, Pierangelo Schiera, and Hannes Siegrist (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998),

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Baroquemania 141–182, as well as the issue ‘Identità e culture regionali. Germania e Italia a confronto’, ed. Stefano Cavazza and Reinhard Johler, Memoria e ricerca, no. 6 (1995): 7–113. 59 Sandra Puccini, L’ itala gente dalle molte vite: Lamberto Loria e la Mostra di Etnografia italiana del 1911 (Rome: Meltemi, 2005); Leandro Polverini, ‘Moderno e antico nel cinquantenario dell’Unità d’Italia’, Studi romani LXI, no. 14 (December 2013): 262–275. Ethnography was an emerging discipline in Italy, and the first national conference took place precisely in 1911, concomitantly with the jubilee celebrations. Società di etnografia italiana, Atti del primo Congresso di etnografia italiana. Roma, 19–24 ottobre 1911 (Perugia: Unione tipografica cooperativa, 1912). 60 Emilio Gentile, L’Italia giolittiana, 1899–1914 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997), 187. 61 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Patricia Leighten and Mark Antliff, ‘Primitivism’, in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 217–233. 62 Puccini, L’itala gente dalle molte vite, 103. 63 Arturo Lancellotti, Le mostre romane del cinquantenario (Roma: Fratelli Palombi, 1931), 57. 64 Comitato Esecutivo per le Feste Commemorative del 1911 in Roma, ‘Programma’, 6 July 1909, Festeggiamenti per il 1911 in occasione del 50° anniversario della proclamazione del Regno d’Italia, Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, 1910, f. 16, b. 401, ACS. On this section of the show see Enrico Valeriani, ‘Il Concorso Nazionale di Architettura’, in Gianna Piantoni, ed., Roma 1911 (Rome: De Luca Editore, 1980), 305–325; Federica Angelucci, ‘Il Concorso nazionale di architettura per l’Expo del 1911: sistemazioni urbane e testimonianze edilizie nella zona d’espansione oltre il Tevere e nei Prati di Castello’, Storia dell’urbanistica XXXIII, III (June 2015): 103–118. 65 Irene De Guttry and Cecilia Flori, Il villino a Roma: Boncompagni, Sebastiani, Parioli (Rome: Italia Nostra, 1993). 66 Rocco Lentini, Ernesto Basile, and Corrado Ricci, Le scolture e gli stucchi di Giacomo Serpotta (Turin: Crudo, 1911); Giulio Magni, Il barocco a Roma nell’architettura e nella scultura decorativa (Turin: Crudo, 1911); Corrado Ricci, Baroque Architecture and Sculpture in Italy (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1912), published in Italian, English, German, and French. 67 Curated by Ettore Ferrari, rooms were devoted to painting and sculpture from the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Greece, Ecuador, China, Norway, Sweden, and Japan. There were individual exhibitions of Ignacio Zuloaga and Hermen Anglada y Camarasa. Five rooms exhibited architectural models and designs of Italian and international buildings: Catalogo della Mostra di Belle Arti (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano d’Arti Grafiche, 1911). 68 Paul Greenhalgh, ‘Art, Politics and Society at the Franco-British Exhibition of 1908’, Art History 8, no. 4 (December 1985): 434–452. 69 Guida Generale delle Mostre Retrospettive in Castel Sant’Angelo (Bergamo: I.stituto Italiano d’Arti Grafiche, 1911), 167–173. 70 Ibid., 229. 71 Ibid. 72 ‘Una parte del corteo. Un’attesa (Costumi italiani del secolo XVII)’, Album dell’illustrazione popolare, no. 45 (2 November 1911): 360. 73 Cited in Paolo Marconi, ‘Roma 1911. L’architettura romana tra italianismo carducciano e tentazione “etnografica”’, in Roma 1911, ed. Gianna Piantoni (Rome: De Luca Editore, 1980), 225–228, 227. 74 A similar strategic use of the neo-Baroque was implemented in 1915 at the Panama-California Exposition held in San Diego, where the Churrigueresque (Spanish Baroque) style emphasised the area’s links to Europe while downplaying those with Mexico. Phoebe S. K. Young, ‘The

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The Baroque’s revenge Spanish Colonial Solution: The Politics of Style in Southern California, 1890–1930’, in Design in California and Mexico, 1915–1985: Found in Translation, ed. by Wendy Kaplan (Prestel: DelMonico Books, 2017), 47–83. 75 Giuseppe Prezzolini, ‘L’annata triste’, La voce III, no. 34 (24 August 1911): 1. 76 Brice, ‘Il 1911 in Italia’, 48. 77 Ibid., 50. 78 Camillo Boito, ‘Sullo stile futuro dell’architettura italiana’, Architettura del Medio Evo in Italia (Milan: Hoepli, 1880), v–xlvi. 79 Ibid., xxiii. 80 Ugo Ojetti, ‘A Roma e a Torino. Per un’architettura italiana’, Corriere della sera (8 August 1911). 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 85 Albert Ilg, Die Zukunft des Barockstils: eine Kunstepistel (Vienna: Manz, 1880). 86 Francesca Torello, ‘Engaging the Past: Albert Ilg’s Die Zukunft Des Barockstils’, in The Baroque in Architectural Culture, 1880–1980, ed. Maarten Delbeke, Andrew Leach, and John Macarthur (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 13–27. 87 Enzo Forcella, ‘Roma 1911: Quadri di un’esposizione’, in Roma 1911, ed. Gianna Piantoni (Roma: De Luca Editore, 1980), 27–38, 37. 88 ‘Le commemorazioni patriottiche del 1911’, La civiltà cattolica 2 (1911). 89 Terry Kirk, ‘Framing St. Peter’s: Urban Planning in Fascist Rome’, The Art Bulletin 88, no. 4 (December 2006): 756–776. 90 Torino Esposizione 1911, 19. 91 Emilio Gentile, L’Italia giolittiana, 1899–1914, 184. 92 Gozzano, ‘Un vergiliato sotto la neve’, 26.

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Baroque Futurism: Roberto Longhi, seventeenth-century art, and the Italian avant-garde

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n 1913, while reviewing the First Exhibition of Futurist Painting in Rome, a young Italian art historian described the relationship between the two leading avant-gardes of the time by evoking the Seicento: ‘The problem of Futurism with respect to Cubism’, Roberto Longhi declared, ‘is that of the Baroque in relation to the Renaissance.’ 1 The Futurists are, of course, well known for their violent rejection of the history of art; they famously claimed, ‘We will destroy museums, libraries, academies of every kind’. Although a careful study of Futurism reveals a rather tortured relationship to artistic predecessors, the more familiar Futurist proclamations never made any connection between their own practice and the art of the seventeenth century.2 What, then, is the meaning of Longhi’s declaration? The Futurists’ antics unsurprisingly alienated most of the Italian art establishment. Yet one of the few critics to immediately recognise the group’s artistic significance was, in fact, Longhi, a doctoral student who would later become one of the most important Italian connoisseurs of the twentieth century. Foreshadowing his field-changing contributions to artistic scholarship, Longhi wrote his doctoral dissertation on Caravaggio and his followers, one of the first scholarly studies on this then nearly forgotten Baroque painter. Before contributions like Longhi’s, the artist’s celebrated Bacchus had been relegated to storage in the Uffizi, re-emerging only in 1916, when the contents of the gallery’s storerooms were re-examined in light of new scholarly developments. Longhi’s fascination with Caravaggio, however, hinted at only part of his diverse intellectual interests: early modern and avant-garde art. While writing his dissertation on Baroque topics, Longhi also published texts on the Futurists. For him, these apparently divergent interests were closely related, and he collapsed the perceived distance between seventeenth- and twentieth-century art in writings such as ‘I pittori futuristi’ (‘The Futurist Painters’) (1913) and Scultura Futurista Boccioni (Futurist Sculpture Boccioni) (1914).3 Because of this interest in seventeenth-century art, Longhi was familiar with Wölfflin’s Renaissance and Baroque (1888).4 Here Wölfflin argued that the passage from the Renaissance to the Baroque was marked by the replacement of closed forms with open, dynamic ones. Renaissance concepts of rest and repose were displaced by Baroque ideals of tension, 88

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Baroque Futurism

3.1  Amerigo Bartoli Natinguerra, Roberto Longhi, 1924

change, and restlessness. As Wölfflin observed, ‘in contrast to Renaissance art, which sought permanence and repose in everything, the [B]aroque […] never offers us perfection and fulfilment, or the static calm of “being,” only the unrest of change and the tension of transience’.5 This difference was summed up by the opposing figures of the circle and the oval. The first, a ‘static and unchangeable form’, was common in Renaissance architecture, whilst the Baroque preferred elliptical ground plans, domes, and decorations.6 Although Longhi’s copy of Wölfflin’s book, now in the Fondazione Roberto Longhi in Florence, is heavily annotated,7 the author’s influence can also be gleaned from another source: Longhi’s review of the 1913 exhibition of Futurist painting, in which he compared the Futurist paintings on display with Cubist artworks. Avoiding any reference to the publicity machinery of the Futurists or to their scandalous performances and soirées, Longhi’s strictly formalist approach to their works in their relationship to Cubism strongly echoes Wölfflin’s ideas: The problem of Futurism with respect to Cubism is that of the Baroque in relation to the Renaissance.The Baroque merely puts in motion the mass of the Renaissance:

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Baroquemania the smooth church façade, a thick slab of robust stone curves under the pressure of a gigantic force. The circle is replaced by the ellipse. The circle is immobility, abandon, rest. The ellipse is a compressed circle, energy at work, movement […] Now, coming after the Cubists, by which I mean being initially animated by the same lyricism, the new painters aim to keep the Cubist crystallisation of form, but to give it motion. The result is clear: it is the complete dislocation of the limbs of reality that in Cubism were contracted, stiff, stratified; the projection of the crystals in the essential directions required by matter and movement […] this establishes the profound legitimacy of the new tendency, and its superiority over Cubism.8 Longhi was not the first to focus on movement as the key element of Futurist art. He was, however, the first to historicise Futurist dynamism, connecting it to seventeenthcentury art. Longhi’s approach to the Baroque was similarly novel in Italian art history. Until then, Italian scholars (not architects, as I showed in Chapter 2) had either cast the Baroque as an ancestor of Decadentism or as a period worthy of philological study only for the sake of historical completeness. For Longhi, by contrast, the Baroque was the source of a specifically Italian modern aesthetics – a view borne from the intensely nationalistic climate of 1913 and 1914. At the time, he was reflecting on the tropes of ‘Latinity’ versus ‘Germanity’, and his analysis of the relationship of the Baroque to Futurism needs to be considered in light of this metanarrative. For other young Italian art historians, modernity was a cosmopolitan tendency and the Baroque the cultural vehicle through which Italian art was disseminated throughout Europe; at this moment in his career, however, Longhi believed it was the way Italy manifested its artistic primacy. On the eve of the First World War, the discussion of the Baroque and the avant-garde – more specifically, Futurism – as embodying a distinctly Italian or international aesthetics was particularly timely. As mentioned in the introduction, pre-First World War German and Austrian analyses of the Baroque were deeply enmeshed in nationalistic discourses, yet it is rarely acknowledged that Italian examinations of the Baroque also engaged questions regarding the Italian nation and its place in European culture. Longhi avoided openly racist proclamations, but I will show that his analysis of Futurism as heir to the Baroque unavoidably engaged in conversations about national identity, Italy’s place in the history of the avant-garde, and its geopolitical aspirations at the turn of the twentieth century. This chapter sheds light on an often-overlooked episode of the earliest reception of Futurist art: in formalist terms and as the expression of a nationalist agenda, prior to the Futurists’ well-known zeal for intervening in the First World War. This reimagination of the Baroque as the source of a specifically Italian modernity is a key piece in the overall narrative of this book. In the case of the 1911 exhibitions explored in the last chapter, and the interwar painting, architecture, and sculpture that will be analysed in the second part of the book, such neo-Baroque Italian modernity was conceptualised as anti-avantgarde and committed to the recuperation of tradition. In the

Baroque Futurism case of Longhi’s dialogue with the Futurists, by contrast, the Baroque was considered the starting point of an Italian avant-garde. Not a foreign import, then, the latter was seen as the expression of an Italian artistic essence that since the Seicento challenged the status quo by pursuing permanent innovation.

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Roberto Longhi: ‘a young critic with a brilliant future’ With his almost infallible connoisseur’s eye and literary style, Roberto Longhi cast a far-reaching shadow on Italian art history.9 His writing was dazzling and rich in rhetorical tropes, enrapturing readers with its poignancy and wit.10 Considering this vivid style, David Tabbat has observed that Longhi shows us ‘the extent to which heightened, sharpedged visual perceptions can constitute, in and of themselves, a real form of intimate historical knowledge’.11 This ‘logic of the eyes’, as Longhi called it, was the method with which he emphasised the similarities between Futurism and the Baroque.12 In a 1913 letter to Giuseppe Prezzolini, Longhi declared that his early career was divided between ‘ancient scholasticism’ and ‘modern art and journalism’.13 Indeed, between 1912 and 1917, Longhi published academic articles in the art history journal L’arte and militant texts in Prezzolini’s La voce. Despite the seeming incongruity between these venues, the variation supported Longhi’s overarching objective: to unite the interests of the art historian with those of the intellectuel engagé, rendering art history an active participant in the cultural debates of the time. Rather than a split between two personae, then, Longhi’s parallel historical studies and critical interventions inform one another. He brought an assured scholarly method to contemporary art criticism and a polemical style to the study of the art of the past that was rare in academic journals.14 Longhi ‘belong[ed] to the ranks of the idealists (spiritualists) who have entrusted their thinking and their activities to the deeply renewing schemes of […] Benedetto Croce’, as he wrote to Bernard Berenson in his youth.15 Like other collaborators of La voce, Longhi agreed with Croce that art must be studied in its ‘pure’ features, instead of focusing on its subject matter, its historical context, or the artist’s biography.16 However, Longhi believed that art criticism should be based on an examination of the single artwork in relation to its particular medium, rather than on a general theory of art, as Croce advocated.17 Recognising that Croce’s interest in literature outweighed his interest in the visual arts, Longhi looked elsewhere for concrete guidance in art writing. Berenson’s books provided him with a much-needed methodological orientation for the analysis of painting because the American connoisseur had, in Longhi’s words, ‘prepared the ground for pictorial criticism’.18 Young Italian intellectuals admired Berenson’s intense attention to the formal aspects of artworks, an alternative to the then-dominant practices of art criticism that focused instead on contextual and historical aspects.19 A new generation of Italian art critics and historians – Longhi, Lionello Venturi, Ardengo Soffici, Emilio Cecchi – were unsatisfied with the lack of rigorous analyses of contemporary art in the Italian milieu and looked to Berenson for guidance.20 His essays provided a methodology and a vocabulary that did justice to the compositional innovations of modern artists.

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Baroquemania Unlike those of other art historians, Berenson’s analyses focused on the specific vocabulary of painting and its formal characteristics; his methodology facilitated anachronistic pairings such as the ones Longhi’s would mobilise. Berenson, however, was only one among the pantheon of Longhi’s influences. Theories of ‘pure visibility’ greatly impacted Longhi’s approach, especially Adolf von Hildebrand’s Das Problem der Form (1893), which assessed art as a strictly formal problem responding to its own internal laws.21 Wölfflin’s methodology likewise shaped Longhi’s work in important ways. For Longhi Classical Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance (1898) was ‘the only truly serious German book on Italian art’, although he deemed Wölfflin’s analyses excessively schematic.22 True to the formalist lesson, Longhi’s studies focused on the relationship between the artwork and the artist, and between the artwork and its immediate artistic context. Longhi agreed that, as Croce insists, art should be judged according to its intrinsic values, thereby urging focus on elements such as line, colour, and composition. However, Longhi also rejected the crucial aspects of Croce’s aesthetic theory that focus on the intuitive content of the work of art and ignores its formal, material, and technical aspects. As Longhi argued in a handbook that he wrote for his high school students in 1913–1914, art history must ‘establish the relationship between two works […] that is, nothing but the history of the development of figurative styles. The fate of line, of colour, of form, in the hands of artists with genius.’ 23 This methodology allowed Longhi to decontextualise the Baroque from its Symbolist and Decadentist connotations, and to focus solely on its formal features, uncovering its similarities with avant-garde practices.

Rediscovering Baroque painting As shown in Chapter 1, despite its novelty, Stanislao Fraschetti’s richly illustrated monograph Bernini (1900) presented the Baroque sculptor as a maverick genius who went against the tide of Baroque decadence. It was not until a new generation of scholars like Longhi conceptualised their own art historical approach that justice could be done to the Baroque’s formal innovations. In the English-speaking world Roger Fry initiated a rediscovery of the Baroque in his 1905 edition of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, where he remarked that Caravaggio represented the most important contribution of the seventeenth century to the development of modern art.24 In Italy, by contrast, Caravaggio was studied as an exemplar of the romantic criminal artist. Mariano Luigi Patrizi, who worked in the Museum of Criminal Anthropology at the University of Turin, published between 1913 and 1921 a series of studies of Caravaggio through the criminology paradigms of Cesare Lombroso.25 In 1913 Longhi received a letter from Patrizi, who asked for a copy of Longhi’s thesis and explained that his own work (based on primary sources on the life of Caravaggio, as well as on recent German-language bibliography) was an ‘application of psycho-anthropology to the analysis of emotion and artistic creation’.26 Longhi’s approach could not have been more different.

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Baroque Futurism A new interpretation of Caravaggio, and of the Baroque in general, was introduced by Lionello Venturi, Longhi’s colleague at the University of Rome. In 1909, only ten months after the publication of the ‘Manifesto of Futurism’, Venturi argued that the seventeenth century was not a dead letter, but rather the beginning of the modern era.27 Venturi declared that although 1909 marked the death anniversary of three great Baroque painters – Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, and Federico Zuccari – the prevailing vogue for Renaissance painting prevented them from being commemorated appropriately.28 Initially Venturi construed Caravaggio as a bad-tempered rebel, ‘an anarchist in life as in art’, whose painting ‘foreshadowed the art of the future’. Such Patrizi-like criminological analyses of Caravaggio were brief, however, and Venturi soon addressed his artistic practice, in which he took ‘life as his only model’. Venturi also noted that Caravaggio was ‘too Italian to not give his characters some idealisation’, although ‘like all realists […] he claimed to have not created anything and to have allowed nature to create for him’. The definition of ‘realism’ (as a purely mimetic and passive reproduction of reality or as its creative and more truthful translation) was a key node in the Italian reinterpretation of the Baroque, as I will show in the chapters that follow. For Venturi chiaroscuro is one of the ways in which Caravaggio interpreted, rather than copied, reality, in order to express his spiritual preoccupations. His simplification of natural illumination into strong contrasts of dark and light, for example, ‘reveal[s] souls independently from the bodies that robe them’.29 Venturi read formal features as expressions of cultural concepts. By contrast Longhi analysed artworks in terms of what he considered to be ‘specifically artistic ideas, that is, a creator’s modes of seeing the materiality of the visible world’.30 His interpretation of Caravaggio focused neither on his naturalistic subject matter nor on his spiritual interests but rather on the formal elements of his painting: his approach to colour, volume, and composition. According to Longhi these are the point of departure for understanding an artwork’s distinctive characteristics.31 In his analysis Caravaggio is indifferent to psychological representation and is instead only interested in using a severe economy of means to represent the pure surface ‘of individuals, of things, of settings’.32 Part and parcel of his fascination with Caravaggio, Longhi was also intrigued by the painter’s influence on other artists, as his correspondence with the art collector, dealer, and writer Angelo Cecconi proves.33 Cecconi, who had published in 1906 one of the first monographs on Rembrandt to appear in Italian, assiduously collected Italian Baroque art. He also published passionate defences of Baroque architecture, denouncing the tendency of over-zealous restorers to eliminate seventeenth-century additions in service of the buildings’ presumed original purity.34 Cecconi was one of the first interlocutors to whom Longhi exposed his increasingly sophisticated understanding of the importance of Italian Baroque painting in the development of European art – a reflection that he developed simultaneously with his analysis of Futurism. Longhi’s influential article ‘Mattia Preti (critica figurativa pura)’ (Mattia Preti (Pure Figurative Criticism)) was published in La voce in October 1913.35 As that year was the anniversary of Preti’s birth, some critics took the opportunity to disparage,

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Baroquemania once more, the art of the seventeenth century. For example, the art critic Angelo Conti, a sympathiser with the aestheticist theories of D’Annunzio and Pater, dismissed the Seicento as being a century in which ‘men were born already old’; for Conti, Preti was the best Italian artist of the seventeenth century but ‘much inferior’ to Rubens and Rembrandt.36 Longhi, conversely, argued that Preti and other Italian Baroque painters were superior to northern European artists, and Cecconi agreed with him. ‘Rembrandt is a great artist, maybe the only one that those Northerners (whom you have justly criticised) can claim to have,’ Cecconi wrote to Longhi, ‘but he does not have the beautiful confidence and the noble sincerity of our great painters.’ Cecconi concluded, ‘Flemish and Dutch [artists] always have something contrived and artificial, like the sophistry of the alchemist and the magician’.37 As I will show in the last section of this chapter, Longhi further developed this controversial thesis in his unpublished article ‘Keine Malerei. Arte Boreale? [‘No Painting, Northern Art?’]’, written in November 1914 in the midst of First World War chauvinistic propaganda.38 Having read the published version of ‘Mattia Preti’, Cecconi wrote again to congratulate Longhi for proving that Seicento Italian art was in no way inferior to ‘Rembrandt and Rubens and Velázquez’.39 For Cecconi, Longhi’s analyses would ‘eradicate the last remains of the stupidity of [John] Ruskin and [Domenico] Morelli, [Wilhelm von] Bode and [Adolfo] Venturi, of [Corrado] Ricci and similar obnoxiousness’ – that is, of the critics whose studies of the Italian Baroque rendered it inferior to Renaissance art or to foreign seventeenth-century painting.40 Patriotism was not the only concern of Longhi’s article on Preti. For him Preti was fundamental in the development of modern art because he had taken up one of the most crucial lessons of Caravaggio’s work: the building of mass through colour rather than line. This lesson led to a simplification in composition, which, for Longhi, was key to the development of modernism.41 Thus ‘Caravaggio is the founder of European seventeenthcentury art, which is to say, of modern art’; by proving this Baroque ancestry of Futurism, Longhi aimed to show that the most advanced example of avant-garde art could only originate in Italy.42

The Baroque and the avant-garde Longhi was one of the few Italian art critics who had supported the Futurists since the beginning, as Boccioni’s dedication of his book Pittura e scultura futuriste: dinamismo plastico (Futurist Painting and Sculpture: Plastic Dynamism) reveals: ‘To the first Italian critic who has loved and defended Futurist plasticism, with loving admiration’.43 In his 1913 and 1914 texts Longhi identified in Baroque architecture (not sculpture or painting!) the origin of key features of Futurist art. The comparison of Futurism and the Baroque was a common trope by 1918, when Croce defined the former movement as a ‘plague’ and argued that its historical precedent was the ‘secentismo’ (‘seventeenth-century style’), which ‘exhausted itself after seventy years of fever’.44 Condemnatory as Croce’s assessment was, the similarities between

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Baroque Futurism Futurism and the Baroque he hinted at were remarkable: they were both artistic movements that originated in Italy but spread beyond its borders; they both engaged with persuasion through rhetorical techniques; and they both deployed a variety of stylistic devices to create an affective connection between the public, the artist, and the artwork. The connection drawn by critics between Futurism and the Baroque highlighted the relations of the Futurists to the Symbolist poets. Many interpreted Symbolism as a revival of Seicento rhetoric because of its emphasis on allegory, unconventionality, and convoluted metaphors.45 Furthermore, F. T. Marinetti published his ‘Manifesto of Futurism’ in Le Figaro, the same newspaper in which Jean Moréas had issued his ‘Manifesto of Symbolism’ in 1886. In his magazine Poesia (1905–1909), Marinetti published the work of Gustave Kahn and Émile Verhaeren, among other Symbolist poets.46 Further entwining the two movements, the few artists the Futurists admired were Gaetano Previati, Giovanni Segantini, and Medardo Rosso – foremost representatives of Symbolism in Italy.47 However, the relationship with Symbolism was one the Futurists also took great pains to deny, even if it had been crucial to the development of their own poetics.48 The association with the Baroque could thus be said to constitute a key way in which the Futurists negotiated their relationship to Symbolism. A case in point is the Futurist poet and writer Emilio Settimelli, who, in September 1910, authored a caustic article titled ‘Let Us Admire the Seicento!’.49 Settimelli acknowledged that he had often used the term ‘Seicento’ to refer to ‘the opprobrium and gangrene of exhausted Italian letters’, but he admitted the blind spots of this appraisal: the seventeenth century was also ‘a powerful innovator, an original and liberating movement’, as it was ‘the first century that went beyond aesthetic laws, and attempted to [break] all the limits imposed on poetry’. 50 For this reason Settimelli considered Baudelaire (one of the precursors of fin de siècle Symbolism) a true heir of the Baroque – a connection that Théophile Gautier already posited, as I noted in the introduction.51 Settimelli observed that Baudelaire and the Symbolists expanded poetry to address themes until then considered unworthy of literary treatment, just like Baroque poets. Settimelli vowed that, from then on, he would bestow positive value on the Seicento as ‘[it] overcame stupid barriers to thrust art into open and unexplored fields’ – much like the Futurists.52 As Settimelli’s re-estimation implies, the Baroque’s legacy is rife with contention regarding the relationship between the Futurists and the previous generation of intellectuals. Years before Croce described the Futurists as ‘Baroque’, he and other Italian critics had already used this term to describe the poetics of D’Annunzio and other fin de siècle writers.53 I would argue that the ambiguity that Marinetti and the other Futurists felt with respect to D’Annunzio coloured their relationship with the Baroque and rendered it difficult for them to acknowledge even the most evident similarities. Indeed, in his 1912 ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’ Marinetti contended that the juxtaposition of dissimilar things is the best means of provoking amazement in the reader.54 This argument evokes the Baroque poetic of the marvellous, attained through the polyphony of unexpected images connecting disparate things.55 Just as the Baroque subsists on amazement and marvel, these elements are also fundamental to Futurism’s poetics because

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Baroquemania the expressive value of a Futurist work resides in its power to shock; as the Futurists claimed, ‘It is imperative […] to abolish whatever in language has become a stereotyped image, a faded metaphor’.56 Settimelli’s aforementioned text made explicit the Baroque and Symbolist genealogy of this approach, with its emphasis on originality and wonder. Dismissing the host of evidence to the contrary, the Futurists explicitly denied the analogy between the aesthetics of the Seicento and their artistic practice. In their Manifesto of February 1910 the Futurist painters expressed their negative view of the seventeenth century by pointing out that they were ‘nauseated by the vile laziness which, from the sixteenth century on, has made our artists live by means of an incessant exploitation of ancient glories’.57 This rejection of all art after the Seicento seems even more direct in ‘Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto’ (published in April 1910) where Futurists reject ‘the easy accusation of “baroquism”’, because, ‘while baroquism means artifice, maniacal and spineless virtuosity, the Art that we predict is spontaneous and powerful’.58 In the English translation of this passage for the 1912 Futurist exhibition at the Sackville Gallery, ‘barocchismo’ was reworded as ‘tormented and decadent cerebralism’.59 More recent anthologies either repeat this translation or replace it with ‘Baroque’.60 Yet the Futurists were careful to use the deprecatory term ‘baroquism’ instead of the historically specific ‘Baroque’, suggesting their rejection of a style’s empty display of virtuosity, rather than the Baroque as an artistic movement. The distinction between these two terms explains why this second manifesto of the Futurist painters also mentions aspects of their aesthetic that immediately resonate with the Baroque, such as the representation of dynamism and the interpenetration of space and objects. As early as 1910, the literary and art critic Ardengo Soffici noticed that the Futurist manifestos were ‘reminiscent of the seventeenth century’.61 In contrast to art forms that purportedly register a frozen movement, the Futurists claimed to depict the actual sensation of movement itself.62 This claim echoed contemporaneous conceptions of the Baroque, as evidenced by Wölfflin’s and Longhi’s thesis that the Baroque introduced movement into Renaissance art. However, the Futurists considered that these seemingly Baroque elements resulted from their study of the work of painters such as Previati and Segantini, and of Rosso, whose sculptures were being rediscovered in Italy at the time precisely through Soffici’s efforts.63 As I will show in the next section, it was in and through Longhi’s writings that the tie between the Baroque and Futurism was made explicit, and given weight beyond mere superficial similarities.

The circle and the ellipsis: Roberto Longhi and the Futurist painters Longhi’s article on the Futurist painters appeared in April 1913, one month after the closing of their group show in the Teatro Costanzi in which works by Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, and Soffici were exhibited.64 After their 1912 exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris, one of the central preoccupations of the Futurists was to clarify the differences between their movement and

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Baroque Futurism Cubism.65 This theme was also at the core of Longhi’s text, and he corresponded with the Futurists while preparing his article. In March 1913 Soffici sent a detailed letter to Longhi explaining the conceptual distinctions between Cubist and Futurist aesthetics – distinctions gleaned from the critic’s direct experiences. Soffici had spent extended periods in Paris, where he met Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and other members of the international avant-garde. Soffici then settled in Florence and in 1908 began collaborating with La voce. Despite his initial scepticism about Futurism, he soon saw it as the most ground-breaking Italian artistic movement. Soffici and Longhi met in 1912, and he was the one to suggest that Longhi write an article on the Futurists.66 Owing to his knowledge of the Parisian avant-garde, Soffici was also one of the first critics to introduce Italian audiences to the work of the Cubists.67 His articles on this topic were anthologised in 1913 in Cubism and Beyond, thereby making Soffici the ideal interlocutor to introduce Longhi to Cubism.68 Longhi, indeed, had not yet seen any Cubist works in person and, therefore, had to rely on published reproductions. Not surprisingly, given Longhi’s barren Cubist exposure, Soffici began his letter to Longhi by anticipating that he would send some books and magazines about Cubism to the young critic, who had requested to see ‘as many reproductions from Picasso and the Cubists as possible’.69 Soffici lamented that, although he had urged Prezzolini to forward to Longhi a recent issue of the American photographic quarterly Camera Work, it was already sold out. It was a pity, Soffici wrote, because there Longhi would have seen ‘the true Picasso’ and been able to ‘understand the differences between the tendencies of that school and ours, which for the sake of brevity we will call Futurists’.70 Among the few images of Cubist artworks that Longhi had seen were two reproductions of Picasso’s and one of Braque’s work that La voce had published in December 1911.71 To illustrate the formal differences between Cubist and Futurist art Soffici refers to the artworks that were on view in the Teatro Costanzi, so his letter reads like a guided tour of the Futurist exhibition. To explain the complex difference between the Cubist representation of objects ‘from the outside’ and the Futurists’ desire to ‘represent the object lyrically, from the inside’, Soffici advises Longhi to ‘look at my sugar bowl and [at] Carrà’s objects (4)’, a reference to Decomposition of the Planes of a Sugar Bowl and a Bottle (1913) and Rhythm of Objects (1911).72 Soffici points out other crucial dissimilarities between Futurism and Cubism by referencing specific artworks in the Costanzi show and recent works by Robert Delaunay, like Eiffel Tower (1910), and Pablo Picasso, like Souvenir of Le Havre (1912). These differences include the monochromatic palette of Cubist painting, as opposed to the importance of colour in Futurist painting; the Cubist unfolding of planes, rather than the Futurist compenetration of planes and lines; and the Cubist reference to ‘archaic […] Egyptian or African’ forms, instead of the Futurists’ depiction of modernity.73 However influential Soffici’s letter was to Longhi’s critical education, a comparison between the note and Longhi’s ‘I pittori futuristi’ indicates the young critic’s independence of judgement. Although Longhi generally agreed with Soffici’s assessment, his article made

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3.2  Ardengo Soffici, Decomposition of the Planes of a Sugar Bowl and a Bottle, 1913

use of Wölfflin’s architectural categories to historicise the difference between Futurism and Cubism. Comparing Futurist painting to Baroque architecture was justified because, as he argued, ‘modern painting is essentially architectural, […] when architecture is understood for what it is – a harmonic composition of interior space, and outside, a pure creation of planes and volumes, of lines and also chiaroscuro, of weight-bearing and supporting

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Baroque Futurism

3.3  Carlo Carrà, Rhythms of Objects, 1911

structures’.74 Following Wölfflin’s model of the development of art, predicated upon the cyclical alternation between form and movement, Longhi interpreted Greek, Gothic, Baroque, and Futurist art as stylistic modes concerned with motion, in opposition to Egyptian, Roman, Renaissance, and Cubist art, which represent stillness. To exemplify this thesis, Longhi compares Boccioni’s Elasticity (1912) and Jean Metzinger’s Woman on a Horse (1911–1912), an artwork Longhi was probably familiar with through the illustrations of Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger’s 1912 Du ‘Cubisme’, which he had read in preparation for his article.75 Though Metzinger’s work was purportedly haunted by rigidity and stasis, Longhi views the ability to convey movement in the curves of Boccioni’s ‘masterpiece’: ‘every curve is extremely compressed, but does not fracture; every circle is reduced to the longest ellipse’; as this passage demonstrates, Longhi again makes use of Wölfflin’s opposition between the Renaissance static circle and the Baroque dynamic ellipse.76 Attentive to formal details, Longhi’s evaluation of Futurist art went well beyond the interpretation that the artists themselves provided. Rather than engaging with the Futurists’ claims in relation to modern culture, Longhi focused on the purely formal aspect of their art, condemning critics who addressed ‘extra pictorial’ aspects of painting, such as ‘literature, psychological interiority – and sensual beauty’.77 To Longhi the properly modern contribution of the Futurists is their concern with the pictorial medium itself, not their representation of contemporary subject matter.

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3.4  Robert Delaunay, Eiffel Tower, 1910

3.5  Umberto Boccioni, Elasticity, 1912

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Baroque Futurism

3.6  Jean Metzinger, Woman on a Horse, 1911–1912

Longhi also pointed out that the Futurists, contrary to their ambitions, had not been able to overturn completely the tendency toward stasis exemplified by Cubism. In his letter to Longhi, Soffici singled out his Decomposition of the Planes of a Sugar Bowl as an example of the Futurist centrifugal extension of an object into its surrounding space. Longhi differed. He observed that the painting represents a ‘sturdy sugar bowl’, and thus is much more Cubist than Soffici intends it to be.78 Its curves and circles need to be undone through the Baroque evolution towards the ellipse, Longhi observed, in order to be properly Futurist.79 Longhi also considered Carrà’s Gallery of Milan (1912) to be ‘Cubistic’, whilst his Rhythm of Objects conveys movement and is thus truly Futurist. This perceived misapplication of elements – in short, the presence of Cubist elements in paintings described by their creators as Futurist – is central to Longhi’s art-historical view of the relationship between the two movements. Instead of considering one movement as a reversal or overcoming of the other, Longhi analysed their relationship through the same nuanced historicised lens that Wölfflin used to decipher the passage from the Renaissance to the Baroque. The change is gradual and progressive, and, as these movements embody artistic constants, they coexist, often in the same artist. Whilst Boccioni and the

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3.7  Carlo Carrá, The Gallery in Milan, 1912

Futurists interpreted Cubism and Futurism as two opposed forms of representation – with Futurism being superior to Cubism – for Longhi, they are in a dialectical relationship; the two movements, therefore, represent the most recent instances, rather than the only instance, of a law that has ruled the history of art since its origins. Despite his esteem for the transhistorical art tendency Futurism embodied, Longhi’s defence of the Futurists was limited. He refused to consider them as a multidisciplinary group and, instead, analysed Futurist art as the product of individual personalities. In

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Baroque Futurism fact Longhi examined only the works of Soffici, Carrà, Severini, and Boccioni. He ignored the work of Balla and Luigi Russolo, artists who also contributed to the Costanzi show, because he did not consider them authentic painters.80 Longhi also avoided any reference to the performative aspect of the Futurist movement, or to its ambition to be the only correct response to the changes brought about by modernity. His dedicated copy of Boccioni’s Futurist Painting Sculpture: Plastic Dynamism (1914) even has some undated marginalia in which Longhi sarcastically comments on aspects of Futurist poetics. Next to Boccioni’s assessment that the Futurists have ‘for the first time given the example of an enthusiastic human adherence to the civilisation that is being shaped under our eyes’, Longhi deadpans, ‘enthusiastic conformists’. When Boccioni argued that Futurist art would lead to ‘a new sublime more abstract than the Greek or the Christian one’, Longhi adds, ‘ha! ha!’ 81 In Longhi’s eyes ‘Futurism is an extremely interesting phenomenon, in which there are intelligent, maybe even genial, men’, although they constitute a minority ‘nestled in a gelatine of imbecility’, as he wrote to Prezzolini.82 Yet the Futurists were enthusiastic about the promising art historian. In his letter Soffici exhorted Longhi to become ‘the critic of truly modern art’, because Italian critics like Ojetti ‘do not know what else to say, and they will soon have to be quiet or they will become a joke’.83 After it was published, Marinetti pronounced Longhi’s article ‘excellent’, whilst the futurist poet Luciano Folgore found it ‘extremely profound’.84 Carrà considered Longhi as ‘the first critic’ (excluding Soffici) ‘to have a precise vision of what we want’, and to ‘understand the modern direction of European, what is more, world painting’.85 By November 1913, however, some Futurists including Carrà were uneasy with Longhi’s interest in the Baroque: ‘I am sorry that you do not see in yourselves the faults that you criticise in us,’ wrote Prezzolini to Carrà, ‘the same measure for all: if Longhi should not occupy himself with [Mattia] Preti, neither should [Giovanni] Papini publish on the work of Leon Battista Alberti!’ 86 Nevertheless, in the last days of 1913, Enrico Cajumi – a friend of Longhi since they attended university in Turin – reported Marinetti and Boccioni’s irritation with young artists who wanted to profit from the succès de scandale of the Futurist exhibitions and show their work with the group. Marinetti responded by denouncing their opportunism: ‘If you want Ojetti to write about you, then you must exhibit in the Society of Connoisseurs and Art Lovers and get the hell out of here; if you are interested in Longhi’s criticism, then work for another ten years, and let us talk again then.’ 87 This declaration shows that the Futurists considered Longhi, despite his young age, to be the only critic who truly understood their project, regardless of his reservations about it. The Futurists’ appreciation for Longhi reflects the critic’s singular ability to convey the visual experience of Futurist painting, adapting formalist method and terminology to contemporary criticism. In addition to his nuanced understanding of Futurist art, Longhi was also admired because his approach was a blow to critics such as Ojetti, Vittorio Pica, and Corrado Ricci who had lambasted the Futurist movement. In a letter to Soffici, Carlo Carrà remarked that Longhi’s article was the ‘least superficial’ to be published about the Futurist exhibit at the Costanzi and praised the young art historian

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Baroquemania because ‘talking about pure painting’ in Italy ‘is really gruelling’.88 Boccioni also wrote to Longhi congratulating him: ‘Your article, my dear friend, will mark an era in Italian criticism. […] I have been particularly struck by how you have used – in a completely novel way – such a plastic terminology.You have enriched the pictorial verbal expression, that is, you have solved the problem of how to understand each other talking pictorially.’ 89 Heeding such adulation, it is obvious that Longhi’s formalist methodology was warmly welcomed within Futurist circles. This esteem from the Futurists was well-warranted. After all, as a militant critic who applied academic rigour, historical knowledge, and a sophisticated formalist vocabulary, Longhi was in an ideal position to further the cause of the Italian avant-garde. In the aftermath of the publication of ‘I pittori futuristi’, Longhi considered becoming a sort of compagnon de route of the Futurists. A letter from Giuseppe Sprovieri, whose Neapolitan and Roman galleries were instrumental in establishing a market for Futurist art, provides precious information about their plans.90 Longhi and Sprovieri intended to start a magazine, ‘which should […] contribute not only in spreading avant-garde movements but also in forming a truly artistic environment’ in Rome.91 Sprovieri wanted to call the magazine Dinamica, and it was to be modelled after polemical literary magazines like La voce.92 Italian avant-garde magazines focused more on literature than on visual culture, whilst art history academic journals like L’arte did not pay much attention to the controversies of contemporary art. Filling in the two models’ gaps, Sprovieri planned to devote the first issue of the magazine to Boccioni’s sculpture and he obtained Longhi’s commitment to write about it.93 In his correspondence with Longhi, Sprovieri comments on some aspects of ‘I pittori futuristi’ that had particularly impressed him. ‘You have magnificently exposed the analogy between Futurism and the Baroque and the position of these schools with respect to Cubism and the Renaissance,’ he wrote to Longhi. ‘I will make use of this suggestion, looking for affinities – let us call them exterior, and with a polemical character – between Futurism and the Baroque.’ 94 Sprovieri seems to have been the only member of the group interested in this comparison, as I have not found explicit mention of it in the correspondence or texts of the other Futurists. Yet, as I will show in the next section, echoes of Longhi’s analyses do appear in the work of Boccioni and Soffici after the publication of ‘I pittori futuristi’. Moreover, it is reasonable to assume that the Futurists did not disagree with Longhi’s assessment of their work in art-historical terms, or they would not have insisted on continuing his collaboration with them.

Umberto Boccioni’s sculptural experiments as Baroque architecture The Futurists’ appreciation of Longhi’s criticism played a central role in the genesis of Longhi’s Scultura futurista Boccioni, published in 1914 at the partial request of Boccioni himself.95 After publishing his manifesto for Futurist sculpture (April 1912) and exhibiting his sculptures in Paris (April 1913) and at Sprovieri’s gallery (December 1913), Boccioni

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Baroque Futurism wanted to further his theoretical analysis of Futurism.96 In early 1914 he published his own book but wanted to complement his voice with that of an independent critic sympathetic to the Futurist project. For his part Longhi was particularly enthusiastic about Boccioni, arguing that ‘with him […] Italian art is suddenly in the avant-garde of international art, even if only with one great artist because for the moment the other Futurists […] cannot compete with him’.97 This enthusiasm translated into a renewed verve in Longhi’s own literary explorations, and, instead of the planned article, he ended up writing a full-length book. Longhi wanted to title his text ‘The Plastic Dynamism of Boccioni’ or ‘Boccioni the Sculptor’, arguing that the word ‘Futurism’ ‘does not mean anything in art’ and that his analysis of the sculptor (like his text on the Futurist painters) focused on the formal notion of dynamism rather than on the Futurist movement at large.98 Boccioni, conversely, insisted that the term ‘Futurism’ appear on the cover of the book as a gesture of loyalty to the other members of the group. He was adamant that the use of the term ‘dynamism,, with no reference to Futurism, would prove incomprehensible to the general public, while the group’s name would at least attract people who were curious about their shenanigans.99 In the end Longhi’s book was entitled Futurist Sculpture Boccioni and, at Marinetti’s suggestion, included Boccioni’s manifesto and photographs of his eight most recent sculptures.100 Longhi commenced his book by acknowledging that, whilst modern sculpture began with Michelangelo, a ‘tiresome Baroque breeze’ had lasted from Bernini to Medardo Rosso.101 Although the characteristics of Boccioni’s sculpture that he admired are the same as those that he purported were Baroque in ‘I pittori futuristi’ – such as the ability to animate matter and to render form as a dynamic element – Longhi’s Scultura Futurista Boccioni included a harsh critique of the foremost Baroque sculptor who had achieved these results. Longhi held that Bernini might have greatly influenced sculptors of later generations if he had not fallen to the decorative aesthetics of artists like Correggio and Federico Barocci. Longhi’s disdain for Bernini is supplemented by an animosity towards modern sculpture in general, which led him to critique the work of Auguste Rodin, George Minne, Aristide Maillol, and even Rosso, whom the Futurists worshipped. Thus Boccioni’s sculpture emerges, in Longhi’s words, ‘in the middle of the desert of modern sculpture […] and of its most brutish expanse, Italy’.102 In Longhi’s view Boccioni transformed the history of modern sculpture by restoring it to its most essential qualities: dynamism and the fusing of figure and atmosphere.103 Yet Boccioni’s research is still incomplete, for he has achieved ‘the solidification of light. There is nothing more attractive. And on the other hand this is not new: how many wooden or marble rays were cast by the Baroque on to its quivering statuary groups’, and yet they are still static?104 Thus Longhi took issue with some of Boccioni’s recent sculptures: Head+House+Light, for example, is still motionless rather than dynamic. By contrast, Synthesis of Human Dynamism animates plaster by breaking the continuous surface of the sculpture with cracks and fissures. And what is the model for this innovative approach to sculptural form? Here is Longhi’s answer:

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3.8  Umberto Boccioni, Testa+Casa+Luce (Head+House+Light), 1912

It is, naturally, a magnificent Baroque architecture. I mean that Boccioni […] in no way seeks to diminish the sense of gravitation of the masses, but rather [than] set them in the icy stylisation of Cubism, [he] twists them sinuously in subcutaneous spindles that bring the liminal arabesque to express itself not through angular combinations but insinuated curves […] in the slowness – obstructed by the setting – of the trajectory, the matter multiplies instead of reducing itself; and it is in this very multiplication of the matter, confined as it is to the limbs where the grasp of its surroundings is greater, above and below, that lies the [B]aroque architectural construction which only seeks outlines rather than the intervals between them, and can only therefore express on its own the matter of plastic intervals.105 Here, as in ‘The Futurist Poets’, Longhi evokes Wölfflin’s schemata to make sense of the difference between Cubism and Futurism. The key element indicative of Boccioni’s

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Baroque Futurism

3.9  Umberto Boccioni, Sintesi del dinamismo umano (Synthesis of Human Dynamism), 1912

Baroque ancestry – of his ancestry in Baroque architecture, not sculpture – is the curve, which imparts movement to mass. As he had done in his other articles of the period, in this book Longhi posited a relationship between the Italian avant-garde and the Baroque on the basis of formal scrutiny. Scultura futurista Boccioni was an ambitious attempt to transcribe into words the material qualities of sculpture, paying attention to its surface, line, and setting, and allowing readers ‘to experience B.[occioni]’s organic creation, through my suggested literary symbols’, as Longhi wrote.106 It is formal analysis, then, that enables the study of Boccioni’s art not in relation to his immediate predecessors or contemporaries (Longhi does not mention the name of a single avant-garde sculptor contemporary to Boccioni) but as the heir to the Baroque architectural tradition. Though struck by Longhi’s accolades, Boccioni waited until the book was published to communicate his gratitude. In a long letter sent from Paris he opened his heart to Longhi. He perceived that the new sculpture being presented at the Salon des Indépendents

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was directly inspired by his work, but no one acknowledged his seminal role: ‘as Italians, we do not exist, and our name is whispered with diffidence’. In this moment of despair Longhi’s book offered much-needed encouragement. As in his earlier letters, Boccioni praised Longhi for his usage of ‘miraculously transparent plastic language’ and his ability to write art criticism ‘without a single literary-sentimental crutch’. Above all, Boccioni shared Longhi’s view on dynamism’s vital role: Few people feel, like us, that the solution of all modern art is in dynamism. Even Soffici and Carrà hesitate between Cubism and a popular art that at the end is reduced to a schematic reference to [Henri] Rousseau. They are still reproducing a traditional and static reality […] They do not go beyond the surface. Even if one sticks cardboard or something else on the canvas, the plastic view of the world is still the same. We have to get rid of Picasso with his ordinary objects […] Instead, everyone is influenced by [his] pipes, bottles, guitars, glasses. Enough!107 It is obvious from Boccioni’s fervour that he agreed with Longhi’s critical assessment that movement is foundational to avant-garde art. Despite this accord, however, none of his writings features an explicit reference to Baroque architecture as Futurism’s ancestry. Rather, he considered Baroque (but not Italian!) painting to be crucial to the development of modern art. Boccioni frequently made use of genealogical charts in his writings to demonstrate that Futurism was not born out of a vacuum but was the ‘result of investigations previously ignored in Italy […] that tie the modern sensibility to those that have appeared in the past’.108 In these genealogical trees Rembrandt, Rubens, and Spanish seventeenth-century painters assumed a prominent role, having transformed art from ‘Christian Plastic Abstraction – passage from the external to the internal’, to ‘Naturalistic Plastic Abstraction – exteriorisation of the internal’, the categories that Boccioni devised. Boccioni overtly concurred with Longhi’s assessment that Baroque painting was seminal for modern investigation, but we can only speculate the degree to which Longhi’s research inspired Boccioni’s views. Nevertheless, it must be noted that the historical sensibility apparent in Boccioni’s 1913–1914 writings differs greatly from the quite myopic perspective of the early Futurist manifestos, in which only contemporary artists such as Previati, Segantini, and Rosso are recognised as ancestors. Soffici, furthermore, ended up accepting Longhi’s interpretation of the Baroque as the starting point of the avant-garde. In his 1916 articles ‘Primi principi di una estetica futurista’ (‘First Principles of a Futurist Aesthetic’) Soffici exalted Baroque creativity and inventiveness, celebrating the seventeenth-century poet Giambattista Marino as a pioneer of modernity.109 Alessandro del Puppo has described ‘Primi principi’ as a ‘strategic antiMarinetti (and anti-Boccioni) positioning’ that represents, despite its title, a move away from Futurism.110 Given the rejection of ‘baroquism’ in the Futurist manifestos, it does not seem accidental that such revision of Soffici’s relationship to Futurism explicitly endorses Baroque aesthetics.111 After all, the artistic principles that Soffici promulgated are as follows: art does not have to be edifying; art and artists do not have to be venerated;

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Baroque Futurism

3.10  Carlo Carrà, The Carriage, 1916

art does not have to be comprehensible to the public. Soffici’s model of the artist is no longer the ‘apostle, the educator’, but ‘the acrobat, the funambulist, and the juggler’.112 Here Soffici evokes a tradition inaugurated by Baudelaire and, at the time, expressed by the work of Apollinaire in France, the work of the Futurist poet Aldo Palazzeschi in Italy, and recent enigmatic experiments such as Carrà’s The Carriage (1916).113 In Soffici’s estimation art should be ‘nothing more than an extended surprise in front of a reality that reveals itself as always new and unpredictable’, and amazement is central to this new aesthetic. Thus it is not surprising that Baroque poets like Marino – who famously wrote, ‘the aim of a poet is to astonish’ – became his new heroes. True, Soffici understood the negative connotations the Baroque had acquired, but he also observed, echoing Settimelli’s assessment of 1910, that ‘only incompetents see in the Baroque a form of decadence rather than a courageous and fertile renewal’ and ‘a creator of new forms, a pioneer of modernity’. For Soffici the contribution of Baroque culture to modernity was its arousal of the public’s sense of surprise for the world, a sense that repetition and routine had obfuscated.114 Soffici celebrated the Baroque; however, he was careful to specify that this new ‘Futurist aesthetic’ of the marvellous was not to be confused with ‘the bizarre, the strange, the fantastic, the fabulous, as in Ariosto, Holbein, Dürer, Eops, Poe, Barbey d’Aurevilly, and Wells’. In brief he aimed to distance his Baroque from the heroes of the Decadentists. Rather, the new aesthetic ‘abhors imaginative, grotesque, prophetic forms, and only complies with the evisceration, the exaltation, and illumination of the sensible concrete, more portentous and fascinating than any idealistic fiction’.115 In making explicit the difference between the historical Baroque and its associations with the fin de siècle, Soffici - like Longhi two years earlier – allows the Baroque to be interpreted in the terms of the militant and polemical avant-garde.

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Cosmopolitanism versus nationalism: the Baroque on the eve of the First World War In contrast to Longhi, at the time Lionello Venturi was sceptical about Futurism.116 In August 1913, a few months after the publication of Longhi’s article on the Futurists, Venturi wrote to Longhi, expressing a diffidence toward the movement unmoved by his arguments. ‘Futurist art is based on an ignorant absurdity’, Venturi claims, repeating a criticism often made against Boccioni and his friends, because ‘a succession of planes does not imply movement […] For a Futurist sculpture or painting to attain movement, it is necessary to put behind the painted or sculpted artwork a mechanism that would rotate it continuously. All figurative Futurism is based on the confusion of movement and succession of planes.’ 117 The Futurists themselves had already responded at length to these quite naive critiques, but such responses fell flat in the face of Venturi’s critique.118 Unlike Longhi, Venturi did not engage on a purely formal terrain. He rejected Futurism, instead, because of what he perceived as its futility for the future development of art. As he wrote in another letter to Longhi: I do not believe that treating [matter, weight, articulate substance, movement] with orgiastic ability can lead to art […] I can agree with you that [Boccioni] has gone beyond Cubism, but unfortunately he has not gone beyond kabbala, because a deformation […] that is not illuminated by a spiritual emotion, never connected to humanity as a whole […] remains at most a geometric game and it is not art.119 The crux of Venturi’s rejection of Futurism is what many critics posited in writings on the avant-garde after the First World War: Futurism’s failure to communicate with the public or to advance art. Venturi, who already then defended the primacy of French art in the history of modernism – a position that would cause him trouble with nationalist Italian critics in the interwar period – claimed that the French Impressionists were the true heirs of the Baroque as they fulfilled the promise represented by Caravaggio’s work. In his 1909 article on Baroque painting Venturi described the work of Zuccari, the Carracci brothers, and Caravaggio as prototypes for recurring approaches to art. For Venturi these three examples reappear in three distinct figures: J.-A.-D. Ingres, for his technical ability; Eugène Delacroix, for his expression of national characteristics in art; and Édouard Manet, for his role in paving the way for future artistic developments. Just like Manet, Caravaggio can be said to have foreshadowed the advent of a future movement, modernism, even as he was fully immersed in his time.120 As Venturi argued, ‘the culture of pictorial tone [initiated by Caravaggio]’ informed European painting, and ‘through it, Rubens and Velázquez, Rembrandt and the French Impressionists were able to create their masterpieces’.121 Other differences between Venturi’s and Longhi’s conceptualisations of the Baroque inflected their analysis, as well. Whilst Venturi considered the Baroque as a cosmopolitan tendency, at the time Longhi held that the Baroque was intrinsically Italian. In the period

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Baroque Futurism immediately before the First World War, many of his writings proclaim the superiority of the Italian Baroque over its foreign manifestations, and of Italian art in general over what he terms ‘Northern’ art. For example, in Futurist Sculpture Boccioni, Longhi regards ‘Northern art’ as absolutely antithetical to Futurism; for him, the most genuine expression of Futurist painting and sculpture is dynamism, whilst he argued that Northern artists – which, in this book, he does not qualify in terms of period, country, or names - did nothing more than produce ‘a polite euphemism for photography’.122 Whilst the Futurists engaged in what Croce described as a ‘lyrical intuition’, Longhi found this trait woefully absent in Northern art, as for these artists ‘it is a matter of pride not to allow themselves to be moved by anything, on grounds of objectivity’.123 Since the publication in 1908 of Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy), stylisation was seen by many critics as equal if not superior to mimetic art.124 The crux of Longhi’s criticism of Northern art was what he found to be a passive acceptance of reality as it is, rather than its creative reinterpretation. The latter, however, was for him, as for Croce and Soffici, a necessary condition of authentic art. In his article on Mattia Preti, Longhi claimed that, ‘in the most essential feature of art, Style, the Italian Seicento is superior to contemporaneous foreign art’.125 Italian painters like Preti or Caravaggio did not reproduce reality as-is, but instead ‘stylised’ and, therefore, reinterpreted it. This stylisation of reality proved that the Italian Baroque artists had transformed reality as opposed to submissively recording it. By contrast, ‘Northern painters’ like Hugo van der Goes or Rubens (but also Jusepe Ribera) ‘are not properly artists. They are the usual Flemish, who descend upon us, self-important and haughty, with their microscopic and necrophiliac realism.’ Longhi concluded with a disparaging description of these Northern artists’ influence on Italian art: ‘[They] are merciless plagues and could be only compared to the syphilitic slaughters caused by certain famous courtesans.’ 126 Longhi thus overturned the by then clichéd association of the Baroque with degeneration and illness by projecting it on to the foreign art of the seventeenth century rather than on to Italian Seicento painting. Longhi expanded on this idea in an unpublished article written in November 1914, titled ‘Keine Malerei. Arte Boreale?’ (‘No Painting. Northern Art?’). The article was meant to be published in La voce, a journal that espoused strong anti-Germanic sentiment through its rejection of intrinsically ‘German’ elements, like philology, positivism, and philosophical idealism.127 Longhi did not ultimately send ‘Keine Malerei’ to La voce, but it aptly summarises his analysis of the relationship between ‘Latin’ and ‘Northern’ – between Latinity and Germanity – at the time.128 To avoid any facile accusations of chauvinism on the eve of Italy’s participation in what would become the First World War, Longhi wrote, ‘I already profoundly despised Northern painting before 1914’.129 He insisted, ‘I am not writing an article about current events; there is no politics between the lines’, as he equally criticised art of both Italy’s wartime allies and its enemies – Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium.130 He considered them all ‘Northern’. This North–South opposition, as Éric Michaud and Michela Passini have shown, is structural to the historiography of modern art history. Throughout the nineteenth century

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Baroquemania art historians argued that the artefacts produced by a people manifest its unchanged and unadulterated essence.131 When Longhi wrote ‘Keine Malerei’ there was already an established historiographical tradition of reading the artistic differences between Northern and Southern art as two irreconcilable modes of seeing and understanding the world. Yet while discourses on Northern and Southern art quickly degenerated into racist assessments, Longhi – true to the formalist lesson that other formalist art historians of his time failed to follow – described only the stylistic features of art rather than the people who produced it. In ‘Keine Malerei,’ despite its triumphalist tone, Longhi stops before affirming the superiority of the Italian people over all others, and instead argues that only Italian art was truly art. For Longhi the opposition between Northern and Southern art is not so much a conflict between two regional cultures but rather between art and mere technique. He goes so far as to claim that ‘it was only a coincidence! a mere contingency!’ if the most positive developments of art had taken place in Italy rather than elsewhere: ‘one must not allow the spirit to be too carried away by geography or topography’.132 Yet Longhi held that it is impossible to admire Masaccio and Jan van Eyck, Lorenzo Lotto and Albrecht Altdorfer equally: one has to choose one or the other, art or non-art, style or technique. Italian art presented an interpretation of reality from a specific, personal, point of view. Northern art reproduced life as it was, with no selective intervention of the artist.133 The former is art, the second pedestrian mimesis. In Pittura scultura futuriste: dinamismo plastico (1914), Boccioni used similar language and a comparable theoretical framework when describing Italian art. According to Boccioni, Northern art, which emerged during the seventeenth century and at a time of Italian decadence, focused on ‘fragmentary, naturalistic, and artistic investigations’.134 This study lacked the character of ‘universality’, which, for Boccioni, could be developed only by the Italians. The Northern artists reproduced reality because they were unable to synthesise their experiences: they could never rise ‘above realistic imitation’ and only produced ‘analytical […] reproductions of the real’.135 Like Longhi, for Boccioni, too, ‘Northern art’ is an oxymoron: Futurist painting demonstrated that ‘the Italian genius is regaining in the field of art its fated predominance over the world’, whilst non-Italians ‘lack the true and profound sense of plasticity’.136 In Boccioni’s view, only with Impressionism could Nordic art become universal, for the Impressionists identified sensation with creation. Although this identification led them to represent fragments of reality rather than its totality, they at least initiated ‘the effort toward the new plastic unity’ that would seek to unite the object with its surrounding environment.137 For Boccioni the Futurists resolved Impressionist investigations by representing the compenetration and simultaneity of forms. By these means the Futurists captured the ‘reality in its essential manifestation’, thereby ‘universalise[ing] the accidental’ that had been the main interest of Impressionist artists.138 The Futurists, then, not the Cubists, are the true heirs of Impressionism, according to Boccioni. Metzinger, Gleizes, and Léger removed life from the object by analysing its formal complexity, whilst the Futurists explored the relationship between the object and its setting in order to represent life as it was intuited. In ‘I pittori futuristi’ Longhi arrived at the same conclusion.

Baroque Futurism

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Whilst this opposition between Latin and Northern tendencies split French art throughout its history – between Nicolas Poussin and the Le Nain brothers, JacquesLouis David and Jean-Antoine Watteau, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Jean-Honoré Fragonard – for Boccioni, Italian art was typified by a continuous and logical development: In Italy, from Cimabue to Michelangelo to the Venetians to Caravaggio to Bernini and Tiepolo, we can retrace instead a strict, inevitable, and serene line of development in which artists […] always follow one another from investigation to investigation […] The triumphal entrance that the newest Italian painting has made into European sensibility with the Futurist painters gives us the greatest hopes for the future. From the death of Michelangelo until today, European painting has sought and accumulated the elements for a new typical form that only we Italians can express.139 It is noteworthy that Longhi and Boccioni deployed the Baroque to promote the cultural primacy of Italy precisely when Italians were debating whether or not to intervene in the First World War, as questions of alliance-building pervaded political discourse. Considering Italy’s expansionist ambitions, the country had to decide between joining Germany and Austria-Hungary, which had a stronger military and seemed to have better chances of winning, or joining France, Britain, and Russia, whose victory would provide Italy with the possibility of annexing Italian enclaves in Austria. In dialogue with the aforementioned political climate and as already discussed, for many German-speaking scholars the Baroque was a model of national culture alternative to the Renaissance, the starting point of a modernity centred in northern rather than in southern Europe. Longhi and Boccioni challenged this narrative, arguing that the Baroque was essentially Latin, not German. Regarding the Baroque as the origin of a distinctly Latin (and more specifically Italian) modernity had important geopolitical implications. ‘Germanity’ solely referred to Austria and Germany, and German-speaking enclaves in eastern and northern Europe. As a cultural construct ‘Latinity’ included an expansive body of countries: Italy, France, Spain, North Africa (Libya had become an Italian colony in 1912), the territories of Istria and Dalmatia that Italy sought to annex from Austria, and Latin America, where the Italian emigrant communities were numerous and (at least according to Italian nationalists) strongly committed to the homeland.140 Even if they argued that the Italian artistic primacy had cultural rather than racial origins, in Longhi and Boccioni’s texts of 1913 and 1914 the Baroque performed a similar ideological function as it did for their German counterparts, yet this time in support of another recently formed and territorially ambitious nation: Italy. Longhi’s engagement with the Futurists was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War. The magazine that he envisioned with Sprovieri never materialised, and in the summer of 1915 Longhi was drafted.141 After the First World War Longhi travelled throughout Europe, expanding his expertise of Italian early modern art. These travels were sponsored by the dealer and collector of Baroque art Alessandro Contini Bonacossi,

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Baroquemania for whom Longhi worked as an adviser. By the end of the decade Longhi was one of the foremost European connoisseurs of Italian art from the late Middle Ages to the Seicento. He maintained an interest in contemporary practice, although his preference was now for the neo-Baroque painting of Gregorio Sciltian and Carlo Socrate, which I will address in the next chapter, as well as the primitivist landscapes of Carrà and Giorgio Morandi.142 However in his later career Longhi continued to create productive anachronistic pairings between the art of the past and that of the present. ‘Having entangled myself in the past with a contemporary spirit,’ Longhi wrote in 1914, ‘I became aware of this extraordinary notion, that criticism is essentially history.’ 143 Longhi’s articles on Futurism show that the opposite was also true. They are also one of the earliest moments in which the interests of the Italian avant-garde and of academic art history aligned.

Notes 1 Roberto Longhi, ‘I pittori futuristi’, LaVoce 5, no. 15 (10 April 1913): 1051–1053. Republished in Roberto Longhi, Scritti giovanili, 1912–1922 (Florence: Sansoni, 1980), 48. Translated by Rosalind McKever and Lucinda Byatt, in Roberto Longhi, ‘The Futurist Painters’, Art in Translation 6, no. 3 (September 2014): 287–298, 289. 2 Enrico Crispolti, Il mito della macchina e altri temi del futurismo (Trapani: Celebes, 1971); Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism:The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Rosalind McKever, ‘Futurism and the Past: Temporalities, Avant-Gardism and Tradition in Italian Art and Its Histories 1909–1919’ (PhD diss., Kingston University, 2012); Rosalind McKever, ‘On the Uses of Origins for Futurism’, Art History 39, no. 3 (June 2016): 512–539. 3 Translated as Roberto Longhi, ‘Futurist Sculpture Boccioni’, trans. Rosalind McKever and Lucinda Byatt, Art in Translation 7, no. 3 (2015): 311–342. 4 Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock. 5 Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Simon, 58. 6 Ibid., 63. 7 Biblioteca D.Estet.e Fil.Wölfflin.1, Fondazione Roberto Longhi (Florence). Wölfflin was well known among Italian art historians, although this book was translated into Italian in 1928. 8 Longhi, ‘The Futurist Painters’, 289–290. 9 Giacomo Agosti, ‘Altri materiali sulla giovinezza di Roberto Longhi. Qualche esempio e alcune prospettive di lavoro’, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa IV, nos 1–2 (1996): 478–484; Loredana lorizzo, ‘Roberto longhi ‘romano’ (1912–1914): gli anni alla scuola di perfezionamento di Adolfo Venturi e un’inedita relazione di viaggio’, Storia dell’arte, no. 125/126 (August 2010): 182–208; Antonio Del Guercio, ‘Roberto Longhi 1913–1919. L’orizzonte critico del suo rapporto con l’arte del Novecento’, in Da Renoir a De Staël: Roberto Longhi e il moderno, ed. Claudio Spadoni (Milan: Mazzotta, 2003), 55–65. 10 Gianfranco Contini, ‘Sul metodo di Roberto Longhi’, Belfagor 4 (March 1949): 205–210; Ezio Raimondi, Barocco moderno: Roberto Longhi e Carlo Emilio Gadda (Milan: Mondadori, 2003); Manuela Marchesini, Scrittori in funzione d’altro: Longhi, Contini, Gadda (Modena: Mucchi, 2005); Andrea Mirabile, Scrivere la pittura: La ‘funzione Longhi’ nella letteratura italiana (Ravenna: Longo, 2009). Studies of Longhi in English include Jonas Nordhagen, ‘Roberto Longhi (1890–1970) and His Method’, Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 68, no. 2 (1999): 99–116; Matthew Rampley, ‘The Poetics of the Image. Art History and the Rhetoric of Interpretation’, Marburger Jahrbuch der Kunstgeschichte 35, no. 35 (2008): 7–30.

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Baroque Futurism 11 David Tabbat, ‘Translator’s Preface: Roberto Longhi and the Historical Criticism of Art’, in Longhi, Three Studies, xxii–xxiii. 12 Giacomo Agosti, ‘Questioni di “logica degli occhi”: 5 lettere di Lionello Venturi a Roberto Longhi (1913–1915)’ Autografo 9, no. 26 (1992): 73–84. 13 Roberto Longhi to Giuseppe Prezzolini, n.d. [1913], in Roberto Longhi, Giuseppe Prezzolini: Lettere, 1909–1927, ed. Maria Cristina Bandera and Elisabetta Fadda (Parma: Monte università Parma, 2011), 49. 14 Giuliana Tomasella, ‘Una convivenza difficile: Longhi e l’arte novecentesca’, Artibus et Historiae 6, no. 32 (1995): 204. 15 Longhi to Berenson, 4 September 1912, in Bernard Berenson and Roberto Longhi, Lettere e scartafacci: 1912–1957, ed. Cesare Garboli, Cristina Montagnani, and Giacomo Agosti (Milan: Adelphi, 1993), 82. See Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Profilo della critica d’arte in Italia (Florence: Edizioni U, 1948); Roberto Longhi, ‘Omaggio a Benedetto Croce’, Paragone 35 (1952): 3; Flora Bellini, ‘Una passione giovanile di Roberto Longhi: Bernard Berenson’, in l’arte di scrivere sull’arte: Roberto Longhi nella cultura del nostro tempo, ed. Giovanni Previtali (Rome: Editori riuniti, 1982), 9–26. 16 Giuseppe Prezzolini and Emilio Gentile, La Voce: 1908–1913; cronaca, antologia e fortuna di una rivista (Milan: Rusconi, 1974), 93; Cesare Garboli, ‘Breve storia del giovane Longhi (1988)’, in Scritti servili (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), 165–282; Giacomo Agosti, ‘Una lettera di Longhi a Prezzolini nel gennaio del 1914’, in Ad Alessandro Conti (1946–1994), ed. Francesco Cagliotti, Miriam Fileti Mazza, and Umberto Parrini (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 1996), 285–294. 17 Paolo D’Angelo, L’estetica di Benedetto Croce (Rome: Laterza, 1982); Vittorio Stella, Il giudizio dell’arte: la critica storico-estetica in Croce e nei crociani (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2005); Mario Perniola, 20th Century Aesthetics:Towards a Theory of Feeling, trans. Massimo Verdicchio (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012). 18 Roberto Longhi to Giuseppe Prezzolini, 4 October 1912, in Viani and Fadda, Roberto Longhi, Giuseppe Prezzolini, 35. 19 Sydney Freedberg, ‘Some Thoughts on Berenson, Connoisseurship, and the History of Art’, I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance 3 (1989): 11–26; Hayden B. J. Maginnis, ‘The Role of Perceptual Learning in Connoisseurship: Morelli, Berenson, and Beyond’, Art History 13, no. 1 (March 1990): 104–117; Mary Ann Calo, Bernard Berenson and the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). 20 Laura Iamurri, ‘Berenson, la pittura moderna e la nuova critica italiana’, Prospettiva, no. 87/88 (1998): 69–90. 21 Alfredo Puerari, ‘Le origini della critica d’arte contemporanea e gli Scritti giovanili di Roberto Longhi’, Arte antica e moderna 18 (April–June 1962): 208–215; Giuliana Tomasella, ‘La “militanza futurista” di Roberto Longhi’, Op. Cit. 70 (1987): 37–48; Evangelisti, ‘Longhi e il futurismo’, in Da Renoir a De Staël, 77–82. 22 Longhi to Prezzolini, 17 April 1913, in Viani and Fadda, Roberto Longhi, Giuseppe Prezzolini, 45. 23 Roberto Longhi, Breve ma veridica storia della pittura italiana (Florence: Sansoni, 1980), 25. 24 Joshua Reynolds, Discourses Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy, ed. Roger Fry (London: Seeley, 1905). 25 Mariano Luigi Patrizi, Un pittore criminale: Michelangelo da Caravaggio (1569–1609); Critica e biografia psicologica (Recanati: Rinaldo Simboli, 1913); Mariano Luigi Patrizi, La ‘Madonna dell’insalata’ di Michelangelo da Caravaggio: Un dipinto satirico dell’artefice criminale (Recanati: Rinaldo Simboli, 1917); Mariano Luigi Patrizi, Per l’indirizzo antropologico (psico-fisologico) nella storia dell’arte: Critica e biografia psico-fisiologica del pittore criminale Michelangelo da Caravaggio (1569–1609)

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(Modena: Società Tipografica Modenese, 1918); Mariano Luigi Patrizi, Un pittore criminale: Il Caravaggio e la nova critica d’arte; Ricostruzione psicologica (Recanati: Edizioni dello Stabilimento Cromo-Tipografico Rinaldo Simboli, 1921). Mariano Luigi Patrizi to Roberto Longhi, 18 March 1913, Fondo Roberto Longhi, Centro di ricerca sulla tradizione manoscritta – Università degli Studi di Pavia (from now on FRL, USP), 473. Lionello Venturi, ‘Il 1609 e la pittura italiana’, La nuova antologia 44, no. 912 (December 1909): 613–619. Venturi made a dating mistake: Caravaggio died in 1610 rather than 1609. Ibid., 618. Roberto Longhi, ‘Rinascimento fantastico’, La voce 4, no. 52 (26 December 1912): 976–977. Republished in Longhi, Scritti giovanili, 1912–1922, 3–13. Raimondi, Barocco moderno, 77. Roberto Longhi, ‘Due opere di Caravaggio’, l’Arte 16 (1913): 161–164. Republished in Longhi, Scritti giovanili, 1912–1922, 23–24. Angelo Cecconi published most of his writings under the pseudonym Thomas Neal. On his collection of Baroque painting see Matteo Marangoni, ‘La raccolta Cecconi di pittura Seicentesca’, Dedalo 2, no. 6 (June 1921): 362–380. Thomas Neal, Rembrandt e l’arte del suo tempo (Florence: Seeber, 1906); Thomas Neal, ‘Novità e anticaglie’, La voce (20 December 1908): 2–3. Roberto Longhi, ‘Mattia Preti (critica figurativa pura)’, La voce 5, no. 41 (9 October 1913): 1171–1175. Republished in Longhi, Scritti giovanili, 1912–1922, 29–45. Angelo Conti, ‘Dopo il terzo centenario di Mattia Preti’, Il Marzocco (19 October 1913): 3. Conti had also published ‘Due Conviti di Mattia Preti’, Bollettino d’arte 2, no. 1 (January 1908): 19–24. Angelo Cecconi to Roberto Longhi, 29 September 1913, FRL, USP, 176. Roberto Longhi, ‘Keine Malerei. Arte Boreale? (1914)’, ed. Cristina Montagnani, Autografo, no. 26 (1992): 55–72. Angelo Cecconi to Roberto Longhi, 11 October 1913, FRL, USP, 178. Ibid. Longhi, ‘Mattia Preti (critica figurativa pura)’, in Scritti giovanili, 1912–1922, 36. Roberto Longhi, ‘Gentileschi padre e figlia’, L’Arte (1916): 245–314. Republished in Longhi, Scritti giovanili, 1912–1922, 219. Umberto Boccioni, Pittura scultura futuriste: dinamismo plastico (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di ‘Poesia’, 1914), D.Mon.Mod. Boccioni 1.1, Fondazione Roberto Longhi, Biblioteca (Florence). Boccioni mentioned Longhi in Pittura e scultura futuriste: ‘Had it not been for one young critic with a great future, Roberto Longhi our first exhibition in Rome would not have been reviewed.’ Translated as Umberto Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism), ed. Maria Elena Versari, trans. Shane Agin and Maria Elena Versari (Los Angeles: Getty Research institute, 2016), 106. This was an exaggeration: other reviewers were Emilio Cecchi, André Warnod, Enrico Cajumi, and of course Ardengo Soffici. Benedetto Croce, ‘Aspettazione di peggiori tempi per l’arte – Il Futurismo come cosa estranea all’arte – L’atteggiamento da adottare nei tempi antiartistici’, La critica: rivista di letteratura, storia e filosofia 16 (1918): 384. Alberto Asor Rosa, ‘Il Futurismo nel dibattito intellettuale italiano dalle origini al 1920’, in Futurismo, cultura e politica, ed. Renzo de Felice (Turin: Ed. della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1988), 52–53. For Marinetti’s early symbolist allegiances see Günter Berghaus, The Genesis of Futurism: Marinetti’s Early Career and Writings, 1899–1909 (Leeds: Society for Italian Studies, 1995).

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Baroque Futurism 47 Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Aroldo Bonzagni, and Romolo Romani, Manifesto dei pittori futuristi (Milan: Edizioni di Poesia, 1910). 48 For example, in Marinetti’s manifestos ‘Let us kill the moonlight’ (1909) and ‘We repudiate our symbolist masters last lovers of the moon’ (1911). 49 Emilio Settimelli, ‘Ammiriamo il Seicento’, La difesa dell’arte 2, no 34–35 (18 September 1910): 1–2. 50 Ibid. 51 Théophile Gautier, ‘1868 introduction to Charles Baudelaire Les fleurs du mal’ (Paris: Aubry, [1868] 1942), 18–19. 52 Settimelli, ‘Ammiriamo il Seicento’, 2. 53 Arturo Graf, ‘Preraffaeliti, simbolisti ed esteti’, in Foscolo, Manzoni, Leopardi (Turin: Ermanno Loecher, 1898), 303–345; Giovanni Alfredo Cesareo, ‘La rinascita del Secentismo: La canzone di Garibaldi, di G. D’Annunzio’, Nuova antologia di lettere, scienze ed arti 177, no. 93 (June 1901): 420–435; Arturo Graf, ‘Il fenomeno del Seicentismo’, Nuova antologia di lettere, scienze e arti 203 (1905): 350–382; Benedetto Croce, ‘Prefazione’, Saggi sulla letteratura italiana del seicento (Bari: Laterza, 1911), vii–xxiii. 54 F. T. Marinetti, Manifesto tecnico della letteratura Futurista (Milan: Direzione del movimento Futurista, 1912). English translation: ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’, in Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence S. Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 120. 55 Luciano De Maria, introduction to F. T. Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista (Milan: Mondadori, 1983), 70. 56 Marinetti, ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’, 120. 57 Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Aroldo Bonzagni, and Romolo Romani, Manifesto dei pittori futuristi. English translation in Rainey, Futurism, 62–64. 58 ‘La pittura Futurista: Manifesto tecnico (Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini; Poesia [Milan], 11 Aprile 1910)’, in Futurismo, ed. Umbro Apollonio (Milan: G. Mazzotta, 1970), 56–57. 59 Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini, ‘Manifesto of the Futurist Painters’, in Exhibition ofWorks by the Italian Futurist Painters (London: The Sackville Gallery, 1912), 33. 60 Umbro Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 29; Rainey, Futurism, 66. 61 Ardengo Soffici, ‘Risposta ai futuristi’, La Voce 2, no. 23 (19 May 1910), 324. 62 Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini, ‘Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto’, in Rainey, Futurism, 64. 63 Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini, ‘Manifesto of the Futurist Painters’, in Rainey, Futurism, 63; See also Ardengo Soffici, Il caso Medardo Rosso: Preceduto da l’Impressionismo e la pittura italiana (Florence: B. Seeber, 1909); Jean-François Rodriguez, La réception de l’impressionnisme à Florence en 1910 (Venice: Istituto veneto di scienze lettere ed arti, 1994); Sharon Hecker, A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). 64 Prima Esposizione Pittura Futurista (Rome: Galleria Giosi, 1913). 65 Emily Braun, ‘Vulgarians at the Gate’, in Boccioni’s Materia: A Futurist Masterpiece and the Avant-Garde in Milan and Paris, ed. Laura Mattioli Rossi (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2004), 1–21. 66 Giuseppe Prezzolini to Ardengo Soffici, 11 November 1912, in Giuseppe Prezzolini and Ardengo Soffici, Carteggio, ed. Mario Richter (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1977), 238. 67 Ardengo Soffici, ‘Picasso e Braque’, La voce III, no. 34 (24 August 1911): 635–637. 68 Ardengo Soffici, Cubismo e oltre (Florence: Libreria della Voce, 1913).

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Baroquemania 69 Roberto Longhi to Ardengo Soffici, 24 February 1913, Fondo Ardengo Soffici – 12 Corrispondenza Lettere K-L, 12/26. Archivio di Stato di Firenze (Florence) (from now on FAS, ASF). Published in Fabio Vittucci, ‘Umberto Boccioni ad Ardengo Soffici: 13 lettere + 2 cartoline’, L’uomo nero III, nos 4–5 (December 2006): 527. 70 Ardengo Soffici to Roberto Longhi, 5 March 1913, FRL, USP, 549. The article Soffici referred to is Gertrude Stein, ‘Picasso’, Camera Work 39 (August 1912): 29–30. 71 Jean-François Rodriguez, ‘Dall’Impressionismo al Cubismo: Ardengo Soffici e Henri des Pruraux banditori di modernità artistica ne “La Voce” prezzoliniana’, in La voce 1908–2008, ed. Sandro Gentili (Perugia: Morlacchi, 2010), 435–496. On the reception of Picasso in Italy, see Jean-François Rodriguez, Picasso alla Biennale di Venezia (1905–1948): Soffici, Paresce, De Pisis e Tozzi intermediari di cultura tra la Francia e l’Italia (Padua: CLEUP, 1993), and Elena Scquizzato, ‘Picasso e l’Italia. Un itinerario attraverso le mostre (1905–1970)’ (MA thesis, Università Ca’ Foscari, 2014). 72 Ardengo Soffici to Roberto Longhi, 5 March 1913, FRL, USP, 549. Prima Esposizione Pittura Futurista, 23. 73 Ardengo Soffici to Roberto Longhi, 5 March 1913, FRL, USP, 549. 74 Longhi, ‘The Futurist Painters’, 289. 75 Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du ‘Cubisme’ (Paris: Eugène Figuière et Cie, 1912). For the influence of Bergsonism on Du ‘Cubisme’, see Mark Antliff, ‘Du Cubisme between Bergson and Nietzsche’, in Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 39–66. I thank Mark Antliff for pointing out this important reference. 76 Longhi, ‘The Futurist Painters’, 296. 77 Ibid., 289. 78 Ibid., 291. 79 Longhi mentioned his disagreement with Soffici’s interpretation of Sugarbowl in Roberto Longhi to Ardengo Soffici, 18 March 1913, FAS, ASF, 12/26. 80 Roberto Longhi to Ardengo Soffici, 24 February 1913, FAS, ASF 12/26. Published in Fabio Vittucci, ‘Umberto Boccioni ad Ardengo Soffici’, 527. 81 Umberto Boccioni, Pittura scultura futuriste: dinamismo plastico (Milan: Edizioni futuriste di ‘Poesia’, 1914), 96. D.Mon.Mod. Boccioni 1.1, Fondazione Roberto Longhi-Biblioteca (Florence). 82 Roberto Longhi to Giuseppe Prezzolini, n.d. [January–February 1914], in Viani and Fadda, Roberto Longhi, Giuseppe Prezzolini, 83. 83 Ardengo Soffici to Roberto Longhi, 5 March 1913, FRL, USP, 549. 84 F. T. Marinetti to Francesco Balilla Pratella, April 1913, Fondo Francesco Balilla Pratella, CAM A 2, Fondazione Primo Conti (Fiesole) (from now on FPC), letter from Luciano Folgore to Ardengo Soffici, 11 April 1913, in Archivi del futurismo, ed. Maria Drudi Gambillo (Rome: De Luca, 1958), 262. 85 Carlo Carrà to Giovanni Papini, 14 April 1913, Fondo Giovanni Papini, Corrispondenza Carlo Carrà 1913–1917, 1913, FPC. Published in Carlo Carrà and Giovanni Papini, Il carteggio Carrà-Papini: da ‘Lacerba’ al tempo di ‘Valori plastici’, ed. Massimo Carrà (Milan: Skira, 2001), 19. 86 Giuseppe Prezzolini to Carlo Carrà, 22 November 1913, Fondo Carlo Carrà, Archivio del ’900 – Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Car.I.115.3. 87 Enrico Cajumi to Roberto Longhi, 28 December 1913, FRL, USP, 145. The Società degli Amatori e Cultori operated in Rome between 1829 and 1929. The acquisitions for most public institutions in Rome and Italy were made at the annual art fair of the Società; its organisers tended to oppose artistic innovation. See Daniele Ogliani, Federica Pirani, and Rosselli Siligato, eds, Il Palazzo delle Esposizioni. Urbanistica e architettura. L’esposizione annuale del 1883. Le acquisizioni pubbliche. Le attività espositive (Rome: Carte Segrete, 1990); Sandro Polci, ed., Roma in mostra:

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Sedi e modi di una nuova cultura espositiva (Rome: Società Tipografica Romana, 2002); Giovanna Montani, ‘La Società degli Amatori e Cultori delle Belle Arti in Roma: 1829–1883’ (PhD diss., Università degli Studi di Roma Tre, 2005). Carlo Carrà to Ardengo Soffici, 13 April 1913, in Carlo Carrà, Ardengo Soffici: Lettere 1913/1929, ed. Vittorio Fagone and Massimo Carrà (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983), 4. Boccioni to Longhi, 25 April 1913, in Francesco Grisi, ‘Boccioni e Longhi’, in Boccioni: Cento anni, ed. Luigi Tallarico (Rome: G. Volpe, 1982), 238. Roberto Longhi to Ardengo Soffici, 18 March 1913, FAS, ASF, 12/26. Giuseppe Sprovieri to Roberto Longhi, 14 April 1913, FRL, USP, 554. Ibid. Giuseppe Sprovieri to Roberto Longhi, 16 June 1913, FRL, USP, 555. Giuseppe Sprovieri to Umberto Boccioni, 3 September 1913, Umberto Boccioni Papers, Correspondence, 1899–1917, b. 1, f. 47–48, 36S, The Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles). I am grateful to Loisann Dowd White, head of Research Services, for sending me a copy of these letters. Giuseppe Sprovieri to Roberto Longhi, 14 April 1913, FRL, USP, 554. The history of this book has been thoroughly reconstructed in Laura Mattioli Rossi, ed., ‘La nascita del libro di Roberto Longhi Scultura futurista Boccioni nel carteggio tra Boccioni, Longhi e Prezzolini’, in Boccioni: pittore scultore Futurista (Milan: Skira, 2006), 176–181. See also Umberto Boccioni, Lettere Futuriste, ed. Federica Rovati (Rovereto: Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, 2009), and Zeno Birolli, ‘“La sua scrittura”: Boccioni scrive a Roberto Longhi’, L’uomo nero 8, nos 7/8 (September 2011): 321–330. Umberto Boccioni, Manifesto tecnico della scultura Futurista (Venice: Edizioni del Cavallino, 1912); Umberto Boccioni, ‘Fondamento plastico della scultura e pittura futuriste’, Lacerba 1, no. 6 (15 March 1913); L’Exposition de sculpture Futuriste du peintre et sculpteur Futuriste Boccioni (Paris: Galerie La Boëtie, 1913); Umberto Boccioni, ‘La scultura futurista’, Lacerba 1, no. 13 (1 July 1913); Esposizione di scultura Futurista del pittore e scultore Futurista Boccioni (Rome: Galleria Futurista Sprovieri, 1913). On Boccioni’s sculpture see Christine Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1992), 164–193; Maria Elena Versari, ‘“Impressionism Solidified” – Umberto Boccioni’s Works in Plaster and the Definition of Modernity in Sculpture’, in Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present, ed. Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 331–350. Longhi to Prezzolini, n.d. [1913], in Viani and Fadda, Roberto Longhi, Giuseppe Prezzolini, 68, 73. Ibid., 13 March 1914, in Viani and Fadda, Roberto Longhi, Giuseppe Prezzolini, 94–95. Umberto Boccioni to Roberto Longhi, n.d. [ca. March 1914], FRL, USP, 64. Ibid., FRL, USP, 62. See Giovanna Ginex, ‘Snapshots from the Studio of Umberto Boccioni’, in Boccioni’s Materia: A Futurist Masterpiece and the Avant-Garde in Milan and Paris, ed. Laura Mattioli Rossi (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2004), 63–81. Longhi, ‘Futurist Sculpture Boccioni’, 313. Ibid., 314. Ibid., 340. Ibid., 317. Ibid., 322–323, with slight modifications. Italics in original. Ibid., 315. Umberto Boccioni to Roberto Longhi, n.d. [1914], FRL, USP, 65. See also Umberto Boccioni, ‘I futuristi plagiati in Francia’, Lacerba 1, no. 7 (1 April 1913). Umberto Boccioni, ‘Per l’ignoranza Italiana: Sillabario pittorico’, Lacerba 1, no. 16 (15 August 1913): 179–180, 179.

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Baroquemania 1 09 Vincenzo Trione, Dentro le cose: Ardengo Soffici critico d’arte (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001), 178–197. 110 Alessandro Del Puppo, Modernità e nazione: Temi di ideologia visiva nell’arte italiana del primo Novecento (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2012), 125. 111 Ardengo Soffici, Primi principi di una estetica futurista (Florence:Vallecchi, 1920), 13. First published in Ardengo Soffici, ‘Primi principi di una estetica futurista. VIII. L’arte come generatrice del meraviglioso’, La voce 8 no. 5 (May 1916): 229–232. See Walter Adamson, ‘Ardengo Soffici and the Religion of Art’, in FascistVisions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy, ed. Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 46–72. 1 12 Soffici, Primi principi di una estetica futurista, 49. 113 Jean Starobinski, Portrait de l’artiste en saltimbanque (Geneva: Albert Skira, 1970). 114 The French poet and theoretician Guillaume Apollinaire, with whom Soffici corresponded from 1911 to 1918, certainly influenced these notions of surprise and novelty. Apollinaire, who was born in Italy, had been an early (although not always sympathetic) commentator on the Futurists. His manifesto ‘L’anti-tradition futuriste’ and other texts by him appeared in Lacerba, and he helped publish Soffici and other Italians in the French press. However, the Futurists disputed Apollinaire’s attempts to ascribe their innovations to the French tradition. See Pär Bergman, ‘Guillaume Apollinaire et les discussions sur la simultaneitè de 1912 à 1914’, in ‘Modernolatria’ et ‘simultaneità’: Recherches sur deux tendances dans l’avant-garde littéraire en Italie et en France à la veille de la première guerre mondiale (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1962), 337–411; Pasquale Aniel Jannini, La fortuna di Apollinaire in Italia (Milan: Istituto Editorial Cisalpino, 1965); Marianne W. Martin, ‘Futurism, Unanimism and Apollinaire’, Art Journal 28, no. 3 (1 April 1969): 258–268; Mario Richter, La formazione francese di Ardengo Soffici (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1969); Willard Bohn, ‘Free-Word Poetry and Painting in 1914: Ardengo Soffici and Guillaume Apollinaire’, in Ardengo Soffici: L’artista e lo scrittore nella cultura del ’900 (Florence: Centro Di, 1975), 209–226; Mina Milani, ‘Soffici between Marinetti and Apollinaire’, in The European Avant-Garde: Text and Image, ed. Serena Daly and Monica Insinga (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2012), 154–170. 1 15 Soffici, Primi principi di una estetica futurista, 30. 116 In 1952 he reconsidered his assessment of Futurism in his essay ‘Gusto internazionale’, Commentario, fasc. 2 (April–June 1952): 93–96. He acknowledged that, despite their limitations, the Futurists had been able to transcend the Italian tradition and to participate in the artistic debates taking place in Paris, leaving behind the provincialism of Italian art. 117 Lionello Venturi to Roberto Longhi, 11 August 1913, FRL, USP, 589. 118 Henri des Pruraux, ‘Il soggetto nella pittura’, La voce 4, no. 44 (31 October 1912): 920–922. See a response to this (but one that was rejected by the Futurists): Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo Futurista, ed. Antonella Vigliani Bragaglia ([1913] Turin: Einaudi 1980). For the complex rapport between Futurism and cinema see Mario Verdone, ed., Ginna e Corra: Cinema e letteratura del Futurismo (Rome: Edizioni di Bianco e Nero, 1967); Giovanni Lista, Cinema e fotografia Futurista (Milan: Skira, 2001). 119 Lionello Venturi to Roberto Longhi, 5 July 1914, FRL, USP, 591. Underlined in the original. Published in Giacomo Agosti, ‘Questioni di “logica degli occhi”: 5 lettere di Lionello a Roberto Longhi (1913–1915)’, Autografo IX, no. 26 (1992): 73–84, 74–75. Longhi’s response – in which he tried to convince Venturi of the validity of Futurism in the development of art – can be found in Roberto Longhi to Lionello Venturi, 27 July 1914, Fondo Corrispondenza, b. 12, f. 397, Archivio Lionello Venturi—Università di Roma La Sapienza (Rome). 120 Lionello Venturi, ‘Opere inedite di Michelangelo da Caravaggio’, Bollettino d’arte del Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione 6, no. 1 (January 1912): 1–8. I thank Stefano Valeri and Cristina De Santis for allowing me to consult these letters.

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Baroque Futurism 121 Lionello Venturi, ‘La posizione dell’Italia nelle arti figurative: Prolusione a un corso di Storia dell’arte, tenuta nella Regia Università di Torino, 21 gennaio’, La nuova antologia 260 (16 March 1915): 213–225. 1 22 Longhi, Futurist Sculpture Boccioni, 321. 1 23 Ibid., 326. 1 24 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung: ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie (Munich: Piper, 1908). 125 Longhi, ‘Mattia Preti (critica figurativa pura)’, in Scritti giovanili, 1912–1922, 44. 1 26 Ibid., 33. 127 Rosario Romeo, ‘La Germania e la vita intellettuale italiana dall’Unità alla Prima guerra mondiale’, in L’Italia unita e la prima guerra mondiale (Bari: Laterza, 1978), 109–141; Luisa Mangoni, Una crisi fine secolo: La cultura italiana e la Francia fra Otto e Novecento (Turin: Einaudi, 1985); Seamus Dunn and T. G. Fraser, Europe and Ethnicity: The First World War and Contemporary Ethnic Conflict (London: Routledge, 1996). 128 Giuseppe De Robertis to Roberto Longhi, 3 November 1914, FRL, USP, 238. 129 Longhi, ‘Keine Malerei. Arte Boreale? (1914)’, 55. 130 Ibid., 55. 131 Éric Michaud, ‘Nord-Sud: Du nationalisme et du racisme en histoire de l’art’, in Histoire de l’art: Une discipline à ses frontières (Paris: Hazan, 2005), 49–84; Michela Passini, La fabrique de l’art national: Le nationalisme et les origines de l’histoire de l’art en France et en Allemagne, 1870–1933 (Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2012); Éric Michaud, Les invasions barbares: une généalogie de l’histoire de l’art (Paris: Gallimard, 2015). 132 Longhi, Breve ma veridica storia della pittura italiana, 103–104. 133 Longhi returned to this topic with different views in 1941. See Roberto Longhi, ‘Arte italiana e arte tedesca’, in Romanità e germanesimo, ed. Jolanda de Blasi (Florence: Sansoni, 1941), 209–239. On the ambiguity of Longhi’s position, see Giuliana Tomasella, ‘Romanità e germanesimo’, in Sotto la superficie visibile: scritti in onore di Franco Bernabei, ed. Marta Nezzo and Giuliana Tomasella (Treviso: Canova, 2013), 457–471, and Marco Mascolo and Francesco Torchiani, Roberto Longhi. Percorsi tra le due guerre (Milan: Officina Libraria, 2020). 1 34 Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture, 81. 135 Ibid., 83–84. 136 Ibid., 84–85. 137 Ibid., 86. Italics in original. 138 Ibid., 88. 139 Ibid., 100. 140 Laura Moure Cecchini, ‘The Nave Italia and the Politics of Latinità: Art, Commerce, and Cultural Colonisation in the Early Days of Fascism’, Italian Studies 71, no. 4 (October 2016): 447–476. 141 Enrico Cajumi to Roberto Longhi, 15 August 1915, FRL, USP, 159. 142 On Longhi’s later engagement with contemporary art see Tomasella, ‘Una convivenza difficile’, 203–215; Spadoni, ed., Da Renoir a De Staël: Roberto Longhi e il moderno; Maria Cristina Bandera, ‘Longhi e gli amici pittori’, in La collezione di Roberto Longhi: dal Duecento a Caravaggio a Morandi, ed. Mina Gregori and Giovanni Romano (Savigliano, Cuneo: L’artistica, 2007), 39–58. 143 Longhi, ‘Futurist Sculpture Boccioni’, 340.

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Classical Baroque: the Seicento and the return-to-order

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r i t i ng in the journal Valori plastici in December 1921, Giorgio de Chirico harshly accused the Italian art system of suffering from a veritable ‘mania for the Seicento’.1 By 1919 de Chirico reconsidered his experience of ‘Pittura Metafisica’ 2 and, in his own words, ‘went back to the museum’ to engage in a sustained study of the Italian painting tradition.3 However, the Seicento was not one of de Chirico’s topics of study, despite his later association with the Baroque – an association encouraged by his adoption of a seventeenth-century gentleman’s persona in many of his self-portraits.4 Indeed, no Italian professional category remained untouched by the Seicentomania that de Chirico denounced. Writers and critics praised seventeenth-century painting because its appreciation does not require much critical acumen, he maintained.5 Art dealers, restorers, and collectors promoted seventeenth-century paintings to speculate on their price, as the market for Renaissance art was, by then, saturated. Even editors of high-end magazines, de Chirico concluded, devoted too many pages to Seicento paintings, setting forth what he called ‘the erratic century of bitumen and craquelure’ as a model for young Italian painters.6 In this chapter I will take de Chirico’s denunciation of Seicentomania at face value; after all, Soffici too observed at the time that ‘the art of the Seicento is now most fashionable’.7 In what follows I will outline what the art historian Fernando Mazzocca described as the ‘bourgeois recuperation’ of the Baroque in the art market, the exhibitions, and the editorial initiatives that took place in Italy in the early 1920s.8 Seicentomania flourished among a broader public, I will argue, because a cohort of influential scholars and critics framed the Baroque as an integral part of an allegedly unbroken Italian tradition, thereby asserting that a national ‘essence’ existed prior to actual unification. Matteo Marangoni, Giuseppe Raimondi, Ugo Ojetti, and others argued that painters like Caravaggio and Mattia Preti were part of a persistent ‘Italianness’ that, from the Primitives and up to Antonio Canova, aspired to a purified, idealised, and synthetic representation of reality – to a ‘classic’ approach. Conceptualising the Baroque as a form of classicism encouraged young Italian painters to revere seventeenth-century artists as a form of resistance against the alleged excesses and internationalism of the avant-garde, while still emphasising their modern identity. 122

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Classical Baroque

4.1  Giorgio de Chirico, Self-Portrait in Black, 1948

Rossana Bossaglia has described this Italian return-to-order as a ‘modern counteravant-garde’, and Robert Storr coined the expression ‘modern art despite modernism’ to refer to a broader constellation of artists who yearned to challenge the self-referentiality of modernist (especially abstract) art.9 The ‘return to the Seicento’ that I address in this chapter manifests Bossaglia and Storr’s counter-modern assessment through its apparent retreat from modernity into a reassuring past when artistic values were certain and audiences were cosseted rather than challenged. Yet, as was the case for the episodes addressed in earlier chapters, the 1920s recuperation of the Seicento was neither nostalgic nor escapist. Rather it proposed a model of modernity that did not rescind its ties with the past and that – maybe democratically, maybe demagogically – genuinely desired to

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Baroquemania resume a more organic relation between artists and audiences, between innovation and tradition, between the present and the past. Indeed 1922 was a key year to the recuperation of the Baroque. In this year Valori plastici published important responses by Italian critics and artists to de Chirico’s article. The massive ‘Exhibition of Italian Art of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’ also opened in the Palazzo Pitti, contemporaneously with the Fiorentina Primaverile – a show of contemporary art in which neo-Baroque painting was prominently displayed. During this year, too, journals like La ronda and Dedalo devoted ample space both to the discussion of Seicento painting and to interwar artists inspired by it. The year 1922, integral to the re-emergence of the Baroque, cannot be overlooked in its importance to Italian history, either: On 29 October 1922, after the March on Rome, the King of Italy appointed Benito Mussolini as Prime Minister, effectively handing over political power to the Fascist Party. In examining the cultural debate over the Baroque, I am wary of reducing it to a simple expression of Fascist ideology. Therefore, I strive to model my analysis after T. J. Clark’s famous pronouncement on the relation between art and history: ‘A work of art may have ideology (in other words, those ideas, images, and values which are generally accepted, dominant) as its material, but it works that material; it gives it a new form and at certain moments that new form is in itself a subversion of ideology.’ 10 Yet it is true that key elements of Fascist ideology do appear in the 1922 discussion on the Baroque, including a strong revanchist anti-Austrian sentiment; the dialectical relationship between tradition and modernity; and the troubled links between Italian and European identities. The aim of this chapter, then, is to understand how the 1922 debate over the Baroque, in Clark’s words, ‘worked’ the ideas and circumstances that paved the way for the implementation of the Fascist regime.

The Seicento: ‘homegrown painting’ or ‘the least Italian century’? Who were the art writers with ‘no temperament, ideas, or imagination’ whom de Chirico deemed ‘unable to approach painting from a critical and philosophical perspective’ and accused of engaging with the Baroque only because this ‘facile art’ allowed them to crank out ‘articles, studies, and monographs’?11 The list is too long to name them all: art critics like Margherita Sarfatti and Francesco Sapori; journalists like Ojetti; artists like Cipriano Efisio Oppo and Antonio Maraini; art historians like Adolfo and Lionello Venturi, Longhi, and Antonio Muñoz; literary critics like Emilio Cecchi and Ardengo Soffici, among many other names. All wrote on the Seicento and its influence on contemporary Italian artistic production in the 1920s. Yet one of the most influential readings of the Baroque as a form of classicism – the fil rouge of this chapter – was that of Matteo Marangoni. Marangoni compensated for his lack of academic training in art history (having been formally educated in science and music) with experience as a curator in museums and in-person study of the most prestigious European art collections.12

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Classical Baroque

4.2  Baccio Maria Bacci, Portrait of Matteo Marangoni, 1919

Marangoni’s first critical intervention in the debate on the Baroque was an article on Caravaggio and the Italian tradition of still-life painting, published in late 1917.13 Here he distinguished between what he called the ‘official’ painting of the Seicento (the grandiloquent and classicising work of the Carracci brothers, Guido Reni, and Domenichino) and what he considered properly ‘secentesca’ painting, ‘which is synonymous with a complete renewal of expression’.14 The former aspired to keep alive Renaissance art, while the latter ‘possessed, in addition to a fervent thirst for novelty, seriousness, and honesty, a coherence of intentions, a simplicity and bravery of means’.15 After decades in which art historians struggled to make sense of seventeenth-century artistic diversity, Marangoni proposed a solution: that there is no dominant feature in the Seicento, that its distinctive trait was precisely its heterogeneity.16 Like Longhi before him, Marangoni, too, pointed out that Caravaggio’s art is not realistic, in so far as that term implies a pedestrian reproduction of reality.17 In Marangoni’s Crocean formula, art must transcend reality, and Caravaggio – as did every true artist – aspired to ‘stylistically construct forms into simple masses’, thereby elevating reality through its sublimation.18 He described Caravaggio’s painting as ‘solidly constructed and neatly defined’, and ‘closer to Giotto than to Raphael’.19 This aspect distinguished Caravaggio

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from his followers. Marangoni, for example, compared Jusepe Ribera to a photographer and criticised Rembrandt for dissolving masses. By contrast, Caravaggio’s understanding of realism is ‘closer to our Latin plastic sense – that is classical, in a broad sense – as a lover of clarity, simplicity, synthesis, alien to the fantastical and the unreal’.20 Marangoni further developed this idea, arguing, Every day inevitably gets our public closer – maybe against its will, through the forced cure of the exhibitions widespread today – to this truly homegrown painting, which magnificently translates one of the most profoundly ethnic characteristics of the Italian people, who are inimical – maybe excessively so – to pedantry, are always spontaneous, unaffected, and are lovers of healthy reality more than other people.21 This consideration of Caravaggio as a classical artist, and an exemplar of a quintessentially Italian tendency towards spontaneity and earnestness, eased a sympathetic reading of the Baroque among Italian cultural players committed to the so-called return-to-order. A pan-European cultural movement, after the First World War, it demanded the suspension of avant-garde experimentation and mobilised art-historical legacy in order to reinvigorate contemporary art.22 Proponents of the return-to-order equally rejected the values of the avant-garde and those of academicism, yet appropriated from the first a firm commitment to the present and from the second the importance of craft skills and tradition.23 Such proponents found footing in Italian publications like La ronda and Valori plastici. The journals shared a similar roster of authors, although the former focused on literature and the latter on the visual arts. Both were committed to the reconstruction of Italian art, and both believed in its regenerative role.24 Like Jorge Luis Borges’s alter ego Herbert Quain, these artists would say, ‘I belong not to art but to the history of art’. Arising from the new-found consequence of history to art criticism, the question of which period should be the model for contemporary art became crucial: was the Baroque to be considered a dead letter or a productive reference for modern artists? One of La ronda’s contributors, the writer Giuseppe Raimondi, positively reviewed Marangoni’s text on Baroque still-lifes, accepting the interpretation of the Baroque as a form of classicism.25 Raimondi found important similarities between the art of Caravaggio and that of the neoclassical French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Both studied nature and early Renaissance artists and produced paintings with ‘solidity of planes and volumes’. Raimondi conceptualised Caravaggio as a neoclassicist, emphasising his continuity with tradition rather than his disruption of artistic precedents. In Raimondi’s view Caravaggio did not aspire to represent movement. This was alien to the ‘serene’ Italian tradition, contrary to what Longhi had argued in his writings on Futurism. Rather he ‘rendered objects with a statue-like firmness, an absolutely impassible stillness […] achieving a classical perfection like that of Paolo Uccello or Piero della Francesca’.26 Inspired by the classical, Caravaggio was a worthy exponent of authentic Italian painting. As Raimondi’s assessment may suggest, ‘classicism’ was one of the most (ab)used terms in Italian cultural discussions in the 1920s. To clarify the meaning of the term and

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Classical Baroque to underscore that Caravaggio was by no means to be considered classical, in July 1920 de Chirico published an article titled ‘Pictorial Classicism’. Here he argued that ancient Greek and Roman art, and that of the Quattrocento, shared a defining characteristic: ‘the linear – in terms of drawing or of style – demon’.27 For authentic ‘classical’ artists like Piero della Francesca, drawing is the basis of artistic practice, a move away from the mimetic copying of reality and towards simplification and abstraction. Classicism could appear at any moment of history.Yet de Chirico observed that the last true classical artist was Michelangelo, as most artists of de Chirico’s time emphasised volume instead of line, excess instead of selection. De Chirico agreed with Marangoni’s and Raimondi’s definition of the classical but did not deem that Baroque artists should be considered as such – they were too enthralled by volume and colour and did not aim to ‘reduce the phenomenon […] to its skeleton, its sign’.28 The exhibition in the Palazzo Pitti – celebrating Baroque art as an integral part of Italian heritage – exasperated de Chirico; as a result, the artist felt the need to debunk the idea of ‘Baroque classicism’ promoted by Marangoni, Raimondi, and (more influentially among the broader public) Ugo Ojetti, the principal organiser of this show. Instead of La ronda, de Chirico chose another journal, Valori plastici, to publish his tirade against the Seicento. Valori plastici (1918–1922) was launched by the painter and art critic Mario Broglio.29 The journal paid much attention to art outside of Italy, devoting its second issue, for example, entirely to French Cubism.30 Through the mediation of de Chirico, who had studied at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, and the Triestine critic Theodor Däubler, the journal established a productive dialogue with German culture too.31 Its attention to the relation between the practice and the theory of art sets apart Valori plastici from other journals of the period, as it gave ample space to practising artists such as Carrà, de Chirico, Soffici, and Alberto Savinio. It is, therefore, not surprising that the journal paid attention to the question of the Baroque, a debate that was, in Broglio’s words, ‘very timely, given the enthusiasm with which artists, writers, critics and collectors voice their sympathy for the art of the Seicento’.32 As many advertised the Baroque as quintessentially Italian, a journal like Valori plastici that promoted a new art based on the Italian tradition could not ignore this discussion. Curiously, however, not a single illustration of Valori plastici was of a Baroque painting or sculpture: the debate was instead conducted with words rather than images. De Chirico’s stance against the Baroque in ‘Seicentomania’ was the most antagonistic to appear in the Italian press of the time, defining the seventeenth century as ‘the least Italian century of our painting’ – an explicit rebuttal of Marangoni’s ‘truly homegrown painting’ claim; he even went so far as to christen it ‘the century that marked the beginning of that decadence whose consequences we still see today’.33 Enthralled by colour and oil on canvas, Seicento artists applied themselves to the mere reproduction of reality, he argued. This replication, in turn, suggested to de Chirico that the source for naturalism lay within the Seicento, leading him to compare Caravaggio to the French artist Léon Bonnat, an avid student of the Spanish Baroque and one of the leading academic portraitists and religious painters of the late nineteenth century; though pre-eminent in his time, in

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4.3  Léon Bonnat, The Crucifixion, 1874

1921 Bonnat was still a far less prestigious reference than the Ingres evoked by Raimondi. 34 The return-to-order artists aimed at avoiding academicism, yet evoking the Baroque, de Chirico argued, inevitably turned one into an academic painter. In de Chirico’s eyes Caravaggio and Seicento artists were held in high regard only because their painting was easily appreciated by 1920s Italians, who, like their Baroque counterparts, were intellectually indolent. If there is an ‘Italian spirit determined by fatal reasons of geographic configuration, climate, history, and the physical and metaphysical aspect of our peninsula’, de Chirico argued, it has nothing to do with the seventeenth century – an explicit denial of Marangoni and Raimondi’s theses.35 Further rebutting Marangoni and Raimondi, de Chirico posited that the Seicento expresses the Northern spirit: bourgeois, alien to risks and experimentation, prudent – echoes of Longhi’s and Boccioni’s assessment of Northern painting. The Italian spirit is, by contrast, ‘a spirit of travellers and sailors’, embodied by the work of Italian Primitives

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Classical Baroque like Beato Angelico, Vittore Carpaccio, Sandro Botticelli, and Piero della Francesca.36 Only these painters expressed the specific character of the Italians, and their art has a ‘metaphysical beauty, which has something spring-like and autumnal at the same time’.37 The Quattrocento, understood in this way, is the direct ancestor of de Chirico’s painting of the time. Like that of the Quattrocento, de Chirico’s painting aspires to serenity but is always animated by the spirit of exploration and surprise, which he deemed was out of reach for the Baroque.38 The main aim of the Italian return-to-order was to transcend the uncertainties of the avant-garde and to establish a new revitalised Italian art on a stable and undisputed basis: tradition. Tradition was not to be followed in a servile way, but rather revived and renegotiated. However, tradition had to be asserted without equivocation – a requirement imperilled by Marangoni’s and Raimondi’s suggestion that the Baroque is a form of classicism. And this is the reason for de Chirico’s belligerent tone: for him the Seicento was a shameful past, unable to become tradition because it did not express what he deemed to be the key features of Italianness. Baroque painting was not a valuable part of Italian cultural heritage, but rather an ephemeral and worthless period with no artistic import. Not every cultural event of the past could or should be considered tradition, de Chirico argued: only those that express a significant aspect of national identity.

The debate over the Baroque in Valori plastici One of de Chirico’s most serious accusations was that Seicentomania was a commercial ruse by gallery owners, who revamped seventeenth-century paintings and sold them at a high price.39 Many of the painting materials used by Seicento artists were still in use in the 1920s, facilitating the work of copyists and forgers. The art market was saturated with Renaissance artworks, but seventeenth-century art, though certainly unfamiliar, resonated better with modern taste – attributes which increased its appeal for collectors, de Chirico argued. By 1921, when de Chirico published his tirade, important public art museums were indeed systematically acquiring works by Sebastiano Ricci, Francesco Guardi, Bernardo Bellotto, and Salvator Rosa, who only twenty years before would have been overlooked. Museum directors retrieved seventeenth-century artworks from the deposits where they had been forgotten. Partly for the sake of achieving an encyclopaedic scope in their collections, and partly for genuine enthusiasm for the art of the seventeenth century, museums revived the Seicento art market that de Chirico denounced. Seventeenth-century art was considered no longer an aberration in the history of Italian art but a crucial component of the nation’s cultural heritage. Lifting the scholarly taboo against the Baroque had a galvanising effect on the public at large, primarily through the ‘luxury journals’ that, in de Chirico’s words, devoted ‘all their glossy pages’ to the promotion of seventeenth-century painting. As the editor of some of these journals, Ojetti used his leverage both before and after the Pitti show to promote a favourable view of the Seicento.40

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Baroquemania As mentioned in Chapter 2, after visiting the 1911 exhibitions in Rome and Turin, Ojetti had proposed adopting the Baroque as the style of all state-sponsored buildings. He had then noted that the Baroque is, ‘in the good sense, classical’, anticipating Marangoni’s and Raimondi’s theory of a ‘Baroque classicism’.41 Ojetti’s advocacy of the Baroque as the first truly Italian style did not succeed, however, in disseminating seventeenth-centurystyle public buildings throughout Italy.Yet his dogged promotion of the Baroque through exhibitions and periodicals was crucial for the popularisation of this style beyond intellectual circles. One of Ojetti’s most influential enterprises was the foundation of the art journal Dedalo (1920–1933), where he advanced a vision of the Baroque as an intrinsic manifestation of the Italian Geist. Ojetti believed that art was not the prerogative of specialists but rather must be accessible to a wider public, so, through high-quality reproductions and clearly written articles, Dedalo introduced its middle-class audience to instances of art that exemplified ‘mestiere’ (craftmanship) and a ‘return to national tradition’.42 Reflecting Ojetti’s interests and his investment in the exhibition at the Palazzo Pitti, Dedalo gave extensive coverage to the historiography on the Baroque.Without trivialising their material, articles by art historians taught Dedalo’s readers to appreciate an unfamiliar art tainted by extremely negative prejudices. Although Ojetti was not directly involved in the Biblioteca d’arte illustrata (Library of Illustrated Art), this book series was equally vital in making the Seicento understandable to the general public. Marangoni considered both the exhibition in the Palazzo Pitti and the Biblioteca to be aimed at ‘restoring the honour of the Seicento’.43 The cheap but elegant volumes included an introduction (equal parts brief and rigorous) written by a prominent Italian or foreign scholar, a catalogue of the most famous works attributed to the artists, an up-to-date bibliography, and a comprehensive repertoire of twenty to thirty images of works from Italian and foreign collections.Whilst other channels popularised the Baroque via a primarily Italian context, the Biblioteca included studies of foreign painters such as El Greco and Jan Lys, and referred to collections and books published outside of Italy.44 Each volume was monographic, but, when put together, they formed an ideal encyclopaedia of Baroque art. Despite the research guiding the series, the Biblioteca was more useful in disseminating ideas among a wider public than in advancing scholarship on the Baroque: as the critic Roberto Papini pointed out, writing for non-specialised audiences encouraged scholars to write personal views of the Baroque rather than careful analyses of archival and historical sources.45 By encouraging discussions on the Baroque beyond the confines of art-historical scholarship, the Biblioteca d’arte illustrata and Dedalo confirmed de Chirico’s allegations. There was indeed a Seicentomania, which, in turn, elicited much debate over its value. Mario Bacchelli, a young artist and critic from Bologna, was the first to answer de Chirico’s ‘Seicentomania’ article.46 He agreed with de Chirico that the fashion for the Seicento needed to be interrogated.Yet Bacchelli felt the critique of Seicentomania should not hinder the appreciation of all Seicento painting: ‘We regret that, not unlike those blinded admirers and glorifiers of the Seicento’, he wrote, de Chirico was unable to see

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Classical Baroque the difference between Caravaggio and his mediocre followers.47 Bacchelli challenged de Chirico’s idea that the Baroque was fundamentally foreign to Italian identity, pointing out that identifying the Italian spirit in the art of the Quattrocento rather than in any other period was absolutely arbitrary. What is more, Bacchelli countered, if one wanted to promote an artistic period for nationalistic purposes, the Seicento was a worthy candidate because the period marked a pan-European expansion of Italian art; the Baroque was, in this way, a form of artistic diplomacy.48 Whilst for de Chirico Italianness was to be identified with serenity and stylisation, for Bacchelli it was associated with cultural dominance. Broglio was well aware that ‘Seicentomania’ would cause some scandal, so he prefaced de Chirico’s article with an announcement that the next issue of Valori plastici would publish ‘all those answers that, overcoming aesthetic prejudices, contribute to the debate over the Seicento’.49 For the issue that coincided with the opening of the Pitti exhibition, Broglio invited different cultural players to respond to de Chirico’s article. Many of them remained silent – including the notable absences of Ojetti, Luigi Dami, and Nello Tarchiani, who had organised the Pitti exhibition – and some preferred to reply to de Chirico in other publications. Marangoni and Raimondi, the leading promoters of a new interpretation of the Baroque, and other important scholars of the Baroque such as Longhi did not engage with de Chirico, either. Those who did respond to him, however, represented a wide array of positions and roles: the art historian Lionello Venturi; artists Carlo Carrà and Cipriano Efisio Oppo; writers Curzio Malaparte and Massimo Bontempelli; and art critic and Mussolini’s cultural adviser Margherita Sarfatti, among others.50 Many of them became key cultural figures of the Fascist regime. Some of the issues discussed, furthermore, became central to Fascist discussions of cultural politics: the relationship between the taste of the public and the taste of the intellectuals, the importance of tradition for Italian modern painting, the connection between Italy and Europe – as Simona Storchi has observed, ‘aesthetics and politics intertwined’ in this discussion.51 Lionello Venturi was the only scholar of the Baroque to accept Broglio’s invitation. He had recently published a short monograph on Caravaggio in the Biblioteca d’arte illustrata, in which he asserted that the artist was the one who concluded the Renaissance and started modern art.52 Venturi did not engage with de Chirico’s argument about the classicism or anti-classicism of the Baroque, but rather claimed that art history had no use for personal preferences.53 De Chirico’s love for Piero or Masaccio was biographically important, argued Venturi, because it helps us understand his artistic choices. However, such subjective leanings should not lead to a blanket rejection of Seicento art. Valori plastici gave ample space to artists’ opinions. Venturi seemed to question this choice; de Chirico was too close to the practice of art to make a clear-headed assessment of an artistic movement he despised. Scholars, by contrast, were better positioned to understand the originality of Seicento artists, who had ‘paid attention to the most obscure corners of reality, where previous artists had not cared to look’.54 As an Italian scholar who, as early as 1909, encouraged his compatriots to pay attention to Baroque art, Venturi felt affronted by de Chirico’s blanket rejection.55

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Baroquemania Whilst Venturi’s approach focused on the scholarly value of the Baroque, other respondents commented on whether it was desirable for young artists to follow the lead of Seicento artists. De Chirico’s colleague in the Metafisica movement, Carlo Carrà, began writing his response after visiting the Venice Biennale and witnessing the effect of the Seicento on his contemporaries.56 This occurred, Carrà pointed out, because after the First World War most artists appreciated the aesthetic of ‘volumetric construction of the painting’, which was prevalent among seventeenth-century art, as I will address in the final section of this chapter.57 Despite the pervasiveness of such tendency, Carrà agreed with de Chirico that a ‘return to the Seicento’ was not desirable: ‘Contemporary artists’, he stressed, ‘are too accustomed to chromatic and sensual effects [and thus] need the opposite examples to those that could be provided by the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Rather than push them toward formal virtuosity, we should give them the sense of spirituality, mysticism, and purity.’ 58 It was better to follow the style of Giotto, Piero della Francesca, and Simone Martini: Seicentomania needed to be rectified. The most polemical responses to de Chirico’s article were penned by two literary critics: Kurt Erich Suckert (who then adopted the nom-de-plume Curzio Malaparte) and Massimo Bontempelli. Unlike the aforementioned figures, Suckert framed the Seicentomania not as a purely artistic matter but as a broader issue that touched upon culture and politics.59 For Suckert the Seicento was a transhistorical movement that lived on in avant-garde movements such as Futurism, Cubism, and Dadaism. Akin to bacteria, Suckert described the Seicento as a process of decomposition of classical values and the moment in which Italy became truly modern. Because of their iconoclasm, Suckert viewed ‘d’Annunzio [and] La voce and Lacerba’ as expressions of the spirit of the Seicento. However, their high-minded concerns did not resonate with the rest of the Italians. What Suckert found most unusual in 1922 was that ‘a form of neo-Secentismo has become the public’s taste and has produced a crazy predilection for the seventeenth century’ – de Chirico’s Seicentomania.60 However, intellectualism still abounded; whilst the men of the Seicento produced grandiose art, the ‘desire for greatness’ of the Italians of the early 1920s ‘goes no further than academic discourse, stabs in the street, demagogic enthusiasm, and much talk about the art of the Seicento’.61 Suckert thus linked the urban violence enacted by Fascist thugs with the coeval interest in Seicento art. He claimed to have participated in the March on Rome a couple of months later (though it was unlikely). Throughout the ventennio he insisted upon a historical reading of these current events, proclaiming that Mussolini’s movement responded to modernity just as the Counter-Reformation responded to the Reformation: Fascism was the equivalent of the Baroque against Northern liberalism, to use once more Wölfflin’s categories. In his response to de Chirico, the writer Massimo Bontempelli, too, connected the Seicento with the avant-garde.62 Not the ancestor of naturalism, as de Chirico argued, the Seicento rather engaged with a crisis in the relationship between artists and their audiences. It was not a coincidence, Bontempelli wrote, that ‘in the past few days there has been a sudden and multiple flourishing of avant-garde art’ – a reference to a new

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Classical Baroque wave of Futurist initiatives, including small magazines, cabarets, experimental plays, and concerts – and at the same time ‘an explosion of interest and enthusiasm for Baroque art’.63 This was because, Bontempelli wrote, both phenomena were part of ‘a dissolving and dispersing movement, the ultimate consequence of which is nullity, and the artistic incomprehension and infertility of nowadays’.64 Bontempelli and Suckert are de Chirico’s only respondents to frame the debate over the Seicento in reference to the relationship between artists and their audiences. For Bontempelli in particular the coeval Seicentomania and ‘avant-gardemania’ typify a loss of connection between art and public, of an art that sees itself as autonomous from its consumption and its duty to be understood by a broad public. Despite their profoundly different views on the matter, this is a point of contact between Bontempelli and Ojetti, too: for the latter as well, it was urgent to recuperate a dialogue between artists and audience, to create an art that non-specialists could understand and appreciate. For Ojetti this could be found precisely in the Seicento, while for Bontempelli this was not the case. The art critic Margherita Sarfatti was firmly on de Chirico’s side but, like Bontempelli and Suckert, viewed the debate as addressing not only artistic production but also culture more broadly. Sarfatti was, at the time, helping organise the artist group Novecento, which launched in autumn 1922 and would aspire to become the artistic expression of Fascism in the second half of the decade. In her contribution to Valori plastici, she castigated Baroque art and culture on formal terms but also on moral grounds.65 Although she considered Baroque artists technically proficient, Sarfatti decried her contemporaries’ separation of morals and aesthetics when evaluating the seventeenth century. She disagreed with those critics who reviled the culture of the Baroque – associated with obscurantism, Counter-Reformation Catholicism, and the foreign domination of the peninsula – but still considered its art worthy of praise. Ojetti had proposed precisely such an argument in an article published in the Milanese newspaper Corriere della sera, where he was the resident art critic. Broglio had privately invited him to respond in Valori plastici, anticipating that the next issue would be quite ‘bellicose’.66 After the invitation Ojetti decided to respond to de Chirico on his own turf, arguing that the Seicento would soon become for art lovers what the Quattrocento was since its nineteenth-century rediscovery.67 He also pointed out that the rejection of the Seicento was linked to an ethical rather than an aesthetic argument; despite its moral failings, it produced great art. By contrast, for Sarfatti the culture and art of the Baroque stemmed from a common source: ‘the Seicento was an era without integrity, without courage, without moral dignity: Spain, tyrants, Jesuits […] Art was a game and a mask, pompous as the wigs of the time, opulent and false, and more interested in appearance than substance, in the trompe l’oeil more than in truth.’ 68 Seventeenth-century culture did make valuable contributions to the sciences and to sculpture, but in painting it was pointless.69 This uneven indictment of Seicento art dictated Sarfatti’s analysis throughout the 1920s, as the she hailed the sculptor Adolfo Wildt as a new Bernini, as I will show in Chapter 6, while condemning the influence of the Baroque on modern Italian painting.

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Baroquemania Her ambivalence stemmed from the belief that nothing good could derive from a revival of Baroque painting: it was morally suspect; it valued excess over containment, exteriority over interiority, theatricality over simplicity, the sensuous over the intellectual. Guided by these ideologies, Sarfatti saw the history of Italian painting as a recurrent opposition between classicism and anti-classicism, in which the former coincided with order and the importance of collectivity, whilst the latter represented the exasperation of individual conscience and rebellion. The Renaissance paradigms that Sarfatti proposed to Novecento artists stimulated art that integrated the individual into the collective body politic. Meanwhile, the Baroque provoked chaos, separation, and alienation – all the evils that the newly founded Fascist party (of which Sarfatti was an early supporter) fought against. The Pitti exhibition did not change de Chirico’s views; it confirmed them. After visiting it, de Chirico prepared a scathing critique of the show, summed up by a letter to Broglio in which de Chirico declared, ‘The show is a true disaster’, and included proofs of his article.70 The article was so violent, however, that Broglio decided not to publish it in Valori plastici.71 De Chirico’s blatant contempt manifested itself in, for example, his response to Caravaggio’s paintings, where he dubbed the artist ‘the most perfect exemplar of that monstrous emptiness and that stupefying deafness’ that characterised Seicento painting.72 The artists of the seventeenth century, de Chirico continued, were uninterested in representing spiritual values. They were satisfied with depicting ‘the most boring and worthless aspect of beings and things’: ‘the long beards’ of saints, ‘the stupid faces of soldiers’, ‘the vulgar features of women’.73 In the Baroque artworks displayed in the Pitti, de Chirico identified the core of modern painting’s evils: its sentimentalism and interest for the anecdotal. For de Chirico, Giuseppe Maria Crespi’s Saint John Nepomucene Confessing the Queen of Bohemia (ca. 1740–1743), representative of the artist’s naturalistic technique applied to sentimental subject matter (John Nepomucene, according to tradition, was martyred for refusing to reveal the Queen’s love secrets entrusted to him during confession), had to be studied ‘millimetre by millimetre […] like the police study criminals’.74 De Chirico vilified the influence that this painting had over the macchiaioli, including Silvestro Lega or Telemaco Signorini – on view at the Fiorentina Primaverile, as I will show in the last section – and the grandes machines of the popular painter Ettore Tito, whom de Chirico described as ‘the Tiepolo’ of his time, ‘presenting us with a painting that resembles liquid soap’.75 De Chirico’s unpublished article also included a vicious rebuttal of Bacchelli’s arguments, which had caused him ‘deep pain and great disappointment’.76 Having met Bacchelli through their collaboration in La ronda and Valori plastici, de Chirico described him as ‘not particularly intelligent or gifted, but at least healthy, robust, normal, levelheaded, and athletic’.77 De Chirico even recommended that Bacchelli practise more sports to cure his ‘incipient hysteria’ – a boorish retort, despite Bacchelli’s moderate tone. The cause for de Chirico’s spiteful treatment of Bacchelli is unknown, though one could suspect the latter’s youth and inexperience. The venue in which Bacchelli

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Classical Baroque

4.4  Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Saint John Nepomucene Confessing the Queen of Bohemia, ca. 1740–1743

published his reply might have played a part, too, as de Chirico was also a contributor to La ronda. Regardless of the reason for it, de Chirico’s reply holds particular interest because of its allusion to the tropes of illness and mental affliction – qualities that, for centuries, had been associated with the Baroque. It is not a coincidence that he evoked them in relation to Bacchelli, who had defended the importance of the Seicento.

Exhibiting the Baroque as Italian heritage What precipitated the debate in Valori plastici on the value of the Baroque was, of course, the massive exhibition of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century painting at the Palazzo Pitti, which Ojetti organised alongside several art historians and museum curators.78 Francis Haskell might have been exaggerating when he described this show as ‘the most important one of the entire twentieth century’, yet he was right that ‘it permanently altered the public’s perception of the history of European art’.79

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4.5  Ettore Tito, The Birth of Venus, 1903

The Mostra della Pittura Italiana del Sei e Settecento (Exhibition of Italian Painting of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries) was part of a broader programme to relaunch Florence as a cultural centre since its importance (as Chapter 2 showed) had dimmed after the capital was moved to Rome. Other cities, instead, assumed roles as artistic hubs: Venice, thanks to the Biennale, had become the leading city for international art; Milan, with its Futurist tradition and industrial activity, was the city most attuned to avant-garde experimentation and decorative arts; Rome was the touristic and cultural

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Classical Baroque

4.6  Antonio Maraini, Poster for ‘Mostra della Pittura Italiana del Sei e Settecento’, 1922

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Baroquemania centre of Italy. In order to regain cultural relevance, Florence had to put to good use its artistic heritage and international prestige, organising shows of art from the Renaissance up to the nineteenth century. Ojetti termed this approach ‘retrospective art’: art whose value was beyond dispute. Ojetti deemed Seicento art ideally positioned to achieve these ends. As he wrote to the mayor of Florence, the seventeenth century was a period in which Italian artists travelled through the peninsula, celebrated foreign painters spent time in Italian cities, and art was most heterogeneous; an exhibition of Seicento painting, so entwined with notions of diplomacy, would attract a wide public of Italians and foreigners.80 Though central to the cultural rehabilitation of Florence, putting on the exhibition of Baroque painting in the aftermath of the First World War was no easy feat. A letter from the German art historian Hermann Voss to Longhi gives invaluable insight into the complexity of the show’s organisation. When Longhi informed Voss of the upcoming show, the German art historian responded with excitement: You can probably imagine my enthusiasm for such an idea, as I have been for many years one of the most ardent German admirers of the Italian Baroque. It would be an irreparable harm if, because of the war, this exhibition did not become inclusive, and almost definitive […] I hope that German museums and private collections will contribute [with loans]. The difficulties, it is true, are multiple but not such as to preclude a favourable outcome.81 Voss’s letter indicates two fundamental aspects of the show. Firstly the exhibition at Palazzo Pitti was a collective endeavour. Ojetti gathered a team of art historians from Italy and abroad to advise him on the show’s content, collaborating with Marangoni, Venturi, and Longhi. Collectors like Angelo Cecconi were involved, too, as were artists like Baccio Maria Bacci and art writers like Odoardo Giglioli. Ojetti also invited Seicento experts from France, Britain, and Germany, among them Voss himself and the director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, the art historian Wilhelm von Bode. Although some of the paintings included in the Mostra came from Berlin, Dresden, and private British collections, none was lent by Austria, the main enemy of Italy in the First World War. Indeed, secondly, another noteworthy aspect that Voss’s letter reveals is the effect of the war on the organisation of the show. As Haskell noted, ‘The exhibition was designed to celebrate the victory recently won by Italy’ and to ‘restore national pride […] by demonstrating that Italian art had remained at the very centre of European culture long after it was generally supposed – by the Italians themselves, as well as by foreign historians – to have died out towards the end of the sixteenth century’.82 Indeed the reclamatory impulse of the show was particularly relevant given the recent pattern of other European nations claiming the Baroque as their own. The last major exhibition of Baroque painting, for example, had taken place in 1914 in Darmstadt (Hesse, Germany) and presented this style as an expression of the German spirit.83 Also, in 1923 the art historian Hans Tietze would open the Baroque Museum at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna

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Classical Baroque and characterise the style, as he wrote in Dedalo, ‘not as one among many possible expressions, but simply the national style’ of Austria.84 To combat the monopolisation of the Baroque in Germany and Austria in the aftermath of the Allied victory in the First World War, Ojetti’s exhibition aimed at showing the Italianness of the Baroque, its impact on other European traditions, and its significance for modern art. Though asserting the cultural primacy of Italy in the Baroque was straightforward, defining its chronological scope proved rather difficult for the curators.85 The organising committee decided to make Caravaggio, rather than the Carracci brothers, the starting point of the show because his work embodied tradition and innovation – the two central narratives around Baroque art that Ojetti wanted to display.86 The ending point of the show was more controversial. ‘From Naples to Venice, we found no interruptions,’ Ojetti recounted, ‘so one day we took courage and the exhibition of the Seicento became the exhibition of the Seicento and the Settecento.’ 87 Afforded this generous time range, the Mostra included 1,054 works, primarily by Italian artists such as Caravaggio, the Carracci brothers, Magnasco, Rosalba Carriera, Preti, Salvatore Rosa, Tiepolo, and Pietro Longhi, among many others.88 Only a handful of foreign painters with strong ties to Italy were included: Jusepe Ribera and Valentin de Boulogne, and Martino Knoller and the Unterbergher family, who hailed from the County of Tyrol, which in 1918 was annexed to Italy as war reparations – a slap in the face to Austria. The paintings were then distributed across forty-eight rooms of the Palazzo Pitti. Fabio Amico, whose studies on the exhibition are an indispensable benchmark for its analysis, has noted the symbolic import of this location.89 The Palazzo Pitti, residence to the Medici, Lorraine, and Savoy families, was decorated with Baroque and Rococo frescos, and hosted the art collections of the Tuscan rulers, with works by Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, and Pietro da Cortona. Only in 1919 did the King of Italy restitute the Palazzo Pitti to the Italian state as a national museum, so it was deemed most appropriate to host a show commending the Baroque period’s ability to encapsulate and promote the idea of Italianness. Photographs by Nicolò Cipriani convey the magnificence of the display, made even more spectacular by the clear dialogue between the artworks and their architectural setting.90 For example, religious paintings by Giovanni Battista Piazzetta were in the Palace’s chapel, whilst eighteenth-century Canaletto and Guardi’s views of Venice were exhibited in the Rococo Queen’s apartments. Dividing the rooms of the show by artists and regions reflected Ojetti’s view of the Seicento as a moment when a prime aspect of Italian art – its regionalism – flourished, while also underscoring its national similarities; though an anachronism (since ‘Italy’ did not exist in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) the reference to ‘Italian art’ in the show’s name highlights this unifying objective.91 In addition to these implicit objectives of cultural reclamation, one of the explicit aims of the show was to offer to young artists, in Ojetti’s words, ‘guides and models much more prestigious and important than those that, pursuing fashions, they search for outside of Italy’.92 Seicento painting could teach contemporary artists ‘the perfect knowledge of art, the balance between reason and fantasy, between fantasy and truth, between

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4.7  Nicolò Cipriani, Firenze. Mostra Della Pittura Italiana del Sei e Settecento a Palazzo Pitti. Cappella. Sala del Caravaggio, photograph, 1922

originality and tradition, and the wish to speak clearly to everybody, not only – with hieroglyphs and cryptograms – to the initiated’.93 This quotation reveals the anti-avant-garde role reserved for the Seicento in Ojetti’s cultural program. The language of the avant-garde, which valued intellectual complexity and difficulty as a marker of artistic quality, could not be easily marshalled for Ojetti’s nationalistic project, which required unambiguous references to Italianness. Instead he supported an aesthetic that was effortlessly appreciated by a broad public. To illustrate this desire for accessibility Ojetti utilised the expression a ‘return to humanity’, a pun on the return-to-order. As Ojetti wrote, condemning all the avant-gardes, ‘The so-called Cubists, who painted boxes to break them, rejected [humanity] […] It was forgotten by the Metaphysical painters. Humanity is coming back. And the dialogue between the public and art can now resume.’ 94 The effects of Baroque art on Italian painters of the 1920s – ‘return to humanity’ included – will be addressed in this chapter’s last section. In Ojetti’s view the Palazzo Pitti exhibition was an undisputed success. It showed the importance of Italian art in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It demonstrated that modern painting developed ideas that were first experimented with in Italy. It hosted 140,000 visitors, bringing significant revenue for the city of Florence. Despite such obvious triumph, some reviewers remained quite critical. Soffici, echoing de Chirico, was sceptical of the ‘exaggerated and fanatic enthusiasm’ for Caravaggio.95 The literary

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Classical Baroque critic Corrado Pavolini appreciated Caravaggio but found that most of the other artworks in the show were not on par with him, and that the exhibition demonstrated that in the Seicento ‘there circulated not young creative blood, but the pathetic breath of spiritual decadence’.96 Even more interestingly for the focus of this chapter and, by extension, this book, the literary critic Enrico Thovez denounced ‘the patriotic aspiration of exalting the greatness and superiority of Italian art’.97 Thovez questioned Ojetti’s construction of Italian art as devoid of conflict, as a pacified but also stagnant tradition. More devastating still, the art historian Sergio Ortolani denounced the Mostra’s nationalistic stance: there was no Italian nation during the Seicento, Ortolani underlined, no ‘concrete unity, collective humanity, common impulse’. Art is a field resistant to nationalisms, Ortolani pointed out, and only ‘right-wing journalists and the representatives of the government’ argue otherwise. Especially in the aftermath of the First World War, which demonstrated the terrible consequences of nationalistic arguments, art critics must resist these nationalistic impulses.98 Though firm and politically grounded, Thovez’s cautionary comments were heeded by neither Ojetti nor most Italian critics involved in the debate over the Baroque.

‘The first passionate Seicentophiles’: neo-Baroque painting in 1922–1923 In Broglio’s preface to de Chirico’s polemic he anticipated that the discussion over the Baroque was a very timely subject, ‘given the fervour with which artists everywhere […] declare their sympathy for the art of the Seicento’.99 Yet a series of iconic paintings come to mind when thinking of the Italian return-to-order, for example Felice Casorati’s Silvana Cenni (1922). These paintings are marked by uniform light, precise contours, and a sober palette without contrasts. Figures and objects are represented in their integrity and according to classical proportions but look strangely two-dimensional. The construction of the picture is made through line rather than colour, and nearly invisible brushstrokes conceal the presence of the artist. Space, too, is constructed in a rational manner: unlike pre-Second World War avant-garde works, which often need to be deciphered through extended visual study and theoretical reflection, these return-to-order artworks appear immediately apprehensible. Still, they manage to provoke a sense of mystery, suspension, and strangeness. In the early 1920s a different series of paintings were also produced in Italy. Not inspired by the Quattrocento, they rather contain explicit citations (in terms of genre, iconography, and style) from Baroque art. Carlo Socrate’s SleepingVenus (1921) has echoes of the Borghese Hermaphrodite, with its cushion added by Bernini, and of Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (1647–1651) – a painting that received much attention in 1914 when it became an involuntary feminist symbol after Mary Richardson defaced it to denounce the arrest of the suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst. Gregorio Sciltian’s sharply painted still-lifes look like direct descendants of those by Giovan Battista Ruoppolo and Francisco de Zurbarán, avidly collected by Cecconi, Contini Bonacossi (advised by Longhi), and other

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4.8  Felice Casorati, Portrait of Silvana Cenni, 1922

Italian lovers of the Seicento.100 In addition to quoting masterpieces from the Seicento or engaging with a genre cultivated at the time, these works look markedly different from Casorati’s. Painstakingly rendered details give an impression of solidity and reality, and colour rather than line predominates. The objects and figures appear three-dimensional,

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Classical Baroque

4.9  Carlo Socrate, Sleeping Venus, 1921

heavy, and solid – they give the impression of being tactile in addition to visual. These paintings provoke a sensorial rather than intellectual experience, and do not perturb their viewers but rather encourage purely aesthetic enjoyment. What, then, is the relation between these coeval paintings, all engaging with ‘returns’? Like other critics of the time, Sarfatti used the oxymoron ‘modern classicism’ to explain the difference between a creative appropriation of tradition and its mere copy. 101 ‘Classical’ was to be identified not with a specific era but rather with an art that aspired to eternal beauty through the use of established techniques, styles, and genres. Yet as Giuliana Tomasella has argued, ‘the “classical” par excellence’ for this generation was first and foremost equivalent to the Italian Primitives of the Quattrocento.102 Some interwar Italian artists evoked other periods of the artistic tradition, interpreting them, too, as forms of ‘primitive classicism’: for Massimo Campigli, for example, it was the Etruscans; for Leonardo Dudreville and Cagnaccio di San Pietro, the Flemish Renaissance; for Ugo Celada da Virgilio, the Venetian Cinquecento; for Achille Funi, the Quattrocento of Cosmé Tura; and for Virgilio Guidi, it was Correggio. Like its classical counterpart, could the Baroque likewise be considered an Italian tradition worthy of being reinterpreted and revived? Could this quintessentially ‘anticlassical’ style be marshalled by the return-to-order? Artists such as Socrate and Sciltian, but also Felice Carena, Armando Spadini, and Cipriano Efisio Oppo, whom art historian Giuliano Briganti described as ‘the first passionate seicentophiles’, received great acclaim for their contributions to important contemporary art shows of the early 1920s, such as the Fiorentina Primaverile (Florence Spring Exhibition, 1922) and the Second Roman Biennale (1923).103 These exhibitions gave ample space to what I would argue was an alternative but intersecting tradition of the return-to-order, one that was ‘seduced’ by the Baroque – to refer to the 2011 exhibition ‘Novecento

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4.10  Gregorio Sciltian, Still life, 1925

Sedotto. Il Fascino del Seicento tra le due Guerre. Da Velásquez a Annigoni’ (Museo Pietro Annigoni-Villa Bardini, Florence), the first to address systematically this underexplored element in Italian interwar art.104 In the reception of the Fiorentina Primaverile and the Roman Biennale, critics constantly blurred notions of the Baroque and notions of classicism, revealing the influence of Marangoni, Raimondi, and Ojetti’s critical work, and of their popularisation of Seicento art. The fact that many works were exhibited in both shows, for example Socrate’s Sleeping Venus, further reinforced the idea of a positive Baroquemania among young Italian painters. The Fiorentina Primaverile aspired to exhibit, as the journalist (and one of the coorganisers for the Pitti show) Nello Tarchiani put it, ‘the tendencies of our art in these postwar years, tendencies that could be summarised in one: to go back to the ancients, to return to tradition’.105 The Primaverile presented a specific genealogy for Italian contemporary art: it began with the nineteenth-century macchiaioli and the Futurists were completely ignored. Unlike the Venice Biennale, which exhibited both Italian and foreign art, the Primaverile showed only art made in Italy; the aim was to establish a new art that would be based on the Italian tradition rather than look abroad for inspiration, which, in the curators’ view, inevitably condemned it to derivativeness and irrelevance. Both the Fiorentina Primaverile and the Pitti shows opened to much praise in the same city and month, allowing critics to detect the influence of Baroque painting on contemporary artists – one of Ojetti’s aims. Further crossover between the two shows occurred when many young artists whose work was on view at the Primaverile helped hang the Baroque rooms at the Mostra in the Palazzo Pitti. Some, such as Baccio Maria Bacci (a close friend of Marangoni, whose portrait he painted in 1919), were also profoundly interested in the Seicento and reinterpreted its genres and style in their own painting. In Bacci’s The Levee (1922) the figure with her back turned towards the viewer is a reinvention of the angel in Caravaggio’s

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Classical Baroque Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1597), a work that Bacci admired for its composition and style.106 Yet Bacci was not merely copying Caravaggio: his colour palette is not rich and saturated, he exasperates the chiaroscuros, and he sets his scene en plein air. Critics revelled in Bacci’s reinvention, highlighting the artist’s ‘solid and robust figures’, painted with a ‘sober and concise style’.107 His fourteen paintings at the Fiorentina were viewed as instances of a ‘new classicism’, which Italian critics considered a reaction against French Impressionism, with its love for contemporaneity, the ephemeral, and the unfinished. The critic Mario Tinti described Bacci as ‘illustrating the restoration of Italian art, understood as the expression of a civilisation and a race in which the emotional faculties are always balanced with the rational ones’, echoing Marangoni’s assessment of Seicento painting as a foremost example of ‘homegrown art’ and the expression of the Italian ethnic character.108 Bacci’s work, with its anti-avant-garde stance yet simultaneously anti-academic approach via its reference to the Baroque, helped critics think through the meanings and implications of the interwar ‘return to the classic’.

4.11  Baccio Maria Bacci, The Levee, 1922

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Baroquemania Whilst the Valori plastici group were in charge of publishing the catalogue of the Fiorentina Primaverile, they also had an entire room in the exhibition, to which they could invite any artists they wished.109 In addition to the original set of artists associated with the group – Carrà, de Chirico (the artist with the greatest number of works), Edita Broglio, and Giorgio Morandi – the group extended invitations to artists such as the Rome-based Carlo Socrate, Cipriano Efisio Oppo, and Armando Spadini. Spadini was an artist alternatively read at the time as an epigone of French Impressionism or as neoBaroque due to his mimetic realism, rich palette, and solid figures. As Spadini’s deliberate invitation suggests, in the 1920s a wide range of Italian cultural players (from Ojetti to the critics Emilio Cecchi and Ardengo Soffici, and art historian Adolfo Venturi) went through what could be aptly termed ‘Spadinimania’.110 Ojetti, for example, singled out Spadini’s connection with the Seicento as proof of his democratic stance: ‘Spadini receives pleasure from being understood by all, by the poet as well as by the shoemaker’, Ojetti argued.111 Spadini’s work, celebrated in retrospective exhibitions at the Venice Biennale of 1924 and 1926, was seen as a paramount example of a returnto-order that engaged with the colouristic tradition that ran from the Italian Seicento up to French Impressionism, rather than with the high-brow linear aesthetic of the Quattrocento, the Pittura Metafisica, Valori plastici, and Novecento. Although Spadini was represented only by three paintings, his mere inclusion in the Primaverile was unexpected. In 1919 Valori plastici had panned Spadini’s work, with the 4.12  Armando Spadini, Still Life, 1922

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Classical Baroque critic Roberto Melli describing it as akin to voluptuous women and flashy fruit because it was ‘substantially bland and insignificant’.112 The audience of the Primaverile was also well aware of the acerbic debate on the Seicento in Valori plastici: the issue with responses to de Chirico’s ‘Seicentomania’ appeared in April 1922, coinciding with the opening of the Primaverile. Under such acute scrutiny, Savinio felt compelled to defend the invitation to Spadini, claiming in the Primaverile’s catalogue that his painting was neither facile, as Melli had argued, nor a copy of French Impressionism: ‘In its most interesting and vital side,’ Savinio concluded, ‘it remains profoundly Italian and aims to retrieve the heaviness of volumes, the desire for colour, the fanciful play of lights and shadows of the Caravaggesque seventeenth century.’ 113 Reclaiming the Baroqueness of Spadini allowed Savinio to argue conspicuously for the Italian origins of French Impressionism, and thus Italy’s key role in the development of modern art. The kinship between the Baroque art on view at the Palazzo Pitti and the work of living Italian artists at the Fiorentina Primaverile was seen as evidence of what should be the main characters of an Italian post-Second World War art: unlike the avant-garde, legible; engaged in a productive relationship with cultural tradition; committed to figuration; and autonomous from foreign influences.Yet some critics underscored the distance between the revolutionary claims of these artists and their aesthetic results: If one wanted to see truly revolutionary art in Florence, one needed to go to the Mostra di Palazzo Pitti: ‘the world upside down. Caravaggio or Tiepolo on the throne of de Chirico and Carrà’, Ojetti quipped.114 The Primaverile was not the only exhibition to reveal the tensions between notions of the classical and the Baroque; the Second Roman Biennale, too, which opened in November 1923, gave ample space to this ideological friction. The Roman Biennale was modelled on the Venice Biennale, and thus it included both national and foreign artists. In the aftermath of the First World War, despite a lack of official support for the arts, Rome was an active centre for artistic discussions. Illustrating the robust artistic community in Rome, art magazines such as Valori plastici, La ronda, Roma futurista, and Noi were based in the city, and Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes repeatedly performed there from 1911 to 1921. Since its opening in 1918, the Casa d’Arte Bragaglia gallery, too, had hosted exhibitions of the Dadaists, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Ossip Zadkine, as well as experimental theatre.115 In the Villa Strohl-Fern worked artists who had participated in the Roman Secession (1913–1917) and who opposed the academic establishment, such as Oppo, Spadini, Trombadori, Socrate, and Felice Carena. As Fabio Benzi has pointed out, the evocation of the Seicento allowed these artists to question the academy and to reflect on the heritage of nineteenth-century art, from Gustave Courbet to Renoir, from Ingres to Francesco Hayez.116 Different artistic tendencies were on view at the Roman Biennale, but, as in the case of the Fiorentina Primaverile, the Futurists were absent – with the exception of ex-Futurists such as Ferruccio Ferrazzi or Gino Severini, who had renounced the disruptive language of the avant-garde. Instead, individual shows were devoted to Giulio Aristide Sartorio and Antonio Mancini, among other living Italian painters. Although he belonged to a

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Baroquemania different generation from the neo-Baroque artists highlighted by most art critics, the seventy-one-year-old Mancini, too, had long been associated with the Seicento. His strong chromatic hues and animated brushwork, as well as the rich impasto that was his trademark, were seen as reminiscent of ‘some Neapolitan secentisti (for example [Bernardo] Cavallino)’, as Cipriano Efisio Oppo (the organiser of and contributing artist to the Biennale) pointed out in the Roman Biennale’s catalogue; this apparently ‘bizarre technique’, Oppo continued, is actually ‘very respectful of the eternal laws of painting, so that it is almost always possible to see under the unsettled epidermis the traditional memory of the juiciest and flamboyant Italian and Spanish classical painting.117 The use of the word ‘classical’ here is worthy of analysis: Mancini’s painting aligns more with the proto-Impressionist brushstroke 4.13  Antonio Mancini, Self-Portrait, 1927

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Classical Baroque and dissolution of volume of Rembrandt or Alessandro Magnasco than with the clear-cut masses of Caravaggio, but Oppo labelled both as ‘classical’. The show captivated its audiences, yet rooms 5 and 6 in particular caught the attention of visitors and critics; during the inauguration, the Prime Minister Benito Mussolini reportedly said ‘this room reconciles me with youth’.118 As Oppo intended, these rooms would show the distance between the young Italian artists (those who were between twenty-five and forty years old, according to the Biennale organisers) and the ‘rebellious, and let us say it, Bolshevik art’ being created outside Italy. As in the Fiorentina Primaverile, the objective was to advance an Italian art that was autonomous from, if not running counter to, foreign art, a form of modernism that eschewed avant-garde values considered fundamentally alien to the Italian tradition. Abiding by this nationalistic brief, the paintings on view in this room were solidly plastic and rich in art-historical citations. At least five artists presented nudes, among them Socrate’s SleepingVenus and Oppo’s The Sleeping Girl (1923, location unknown), which Sarfatti condemned as a mediocre reinterpretation of Manet’s Olympia: ‘smaller, sadder, and more faded’ than the original. Oppo responded that his piece was not ‘impressionistic’ but rather ‘massive, solid, rotund’ – Italian Baroque, not French modernism.119 De Chirico’s contribution to room 6 deserves particular mention.120 Considered by some to be the leader of the attention-catching ‘neoclassical’ artists, de Chirico exhibited eighteen paintings, including many still-lifes and mythological scenes. These still-lifes, when exhibited at the Fiorentina Primaverile, had prompted a retort of de Chirico’s

4.14  Cipriano Efisio Oppo, The Sleeping Girl, 1923

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4.15  Giorgio de Chirico, Still Life with Salami, 1919

Seicentomania, as Oppo noted that ‘whenever [de Chirico] is most naturalist, he imitates his hated “secentisti”’.121 In his thorough review of de Chirico’s contribution, the critic Emilio Cecchi questioned de Chirico’s purported ‘neoclassicism’ and instead found him ‘an artist of absolute romanticism’ whose representations of nature ‘suggest its destruction and putrefaction’.122 In de Chirico’s memoir (1962) the artist recalled Cecchi’s ‘incomprehension, confusion, bad faith, and acrimony’ and what de Chirico considered a misreading of his ‘most beautiful paintings of fruit, in which Cecchi saw corpses, cemeteries, and things in a state of advanced putrefaction’.123 It is not a stretch to see in this constellation of terms (‘romanticism’, ‘destruction’, and ‘putrefaction’) a leitmotiv of criticism of the Baroque. Sarfatti used a similar set of concepts: she did not reject de Chirico’s aspiration towards classicism, but she viewed him as the heir of the Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin, ‘a typical German with the ambition to become Italian’. De Chirico’s was not a ‘serene classicism’, then, but the expression of chthonic forces with ‘torbid anxieties’, and his ‘strangely composite and tormented painting’ seemed to Sarfatti rather influenced by the Italian Seicento.124 Unyielding in her assessment, Sarfatti deemed the Baroque and Seicento painting as fundamentally foreign, not ‘homegrown’. For some reviewers, calling the artists in rooms 5 and 6 ‘neoclassical’ was a form of praise – it is important to note that one of Pablo Picasso’s recent neoclassical works, a Head of a Woman, was on view in the Second Roman Biennale. Roberto Papini, for example, celebrated young Italian artists’ desire for ‘order and discipline in art’, whilst

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Classical Baroque Sarfatti concluded that, with the return to a ‘precise line and decisive colour’ and to traditional subject matter and genres, ‘beauty has returned’.125 The critic Antonio Maraini went further, finding a profound affinity between the return to genres such as the nude, the landscape, the portrait, and the still-life, and the Fascist movement: the concepts of ‘order, hierarchy, willpower’ are appreciated in both the political and the artistic realms.126 Oppo rejected altogether the term ‘neoclassical’. His response to those critics who used the term shows the tensions between terms such as ‘academic’ and ‘classical’ when dealing with artists who were, or were considered to be, inspired by the Baroque. Not only did Oppo emphasise the differences between the artists on view but he also argued that these painters rejected any form of idealisation, and painted lofty as well as quotidian subjects with the same care: for him, this was the opposite of ‘neoclassical’ art and rather aligned them with the Baroque. Oppo cited Carlo Socrate’s Martyrdom of Saint Mauritius (1922), in which (as in other paintings on view in rooms 5 and 6) there was no reference to the ‘codified beauty’ of the Renaissance; Oppo rejected the label of ‘classical’ so that he could reject that of ‘academic’, which he feared would be too easily attached to young Italian artists who looked back to the Baroque.127 Rather, he argued that these Italian artists were engaged with forms of naturalism that artists from Caravaggio to Courbet depicted, approaching both high and low subject matter. 4.16  Carlo Socrate, Martyrdom of Saint Mauritius, 1922

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Baroquemania References to the Seicento, compounded with notions of classicism, indeed served to replace a series of terms that were rarely used in the Italian debate on the return-toorder: the ideas of ‘realism’ and ‘naturalism’.128 I would argue that the aforementioned artists – Bacci, Spadini, Socrate, Trombadori, Oppo – represented an alternative line in the Italian return-to-order.Whilst Carrà, de Chirico, Morandi, or Savinio (or the Novecento artists championed by Sarfatti) looked back at the Quattrocento in order to transfigure reality, the artists whom I have addressed here emphasised concreteness, clarity, and solidity. Neither enigmatic nor mysterious, archaic nor purist, the ‘return to the Seicento’ pursued not sentimental detachment but rather an engagement with both materiality and audiences. They replaced austerity and hermeticism with a voluptuous engagement with colour and solid volumes. Pursuing sensual reinterpretations of tradition above visionary perceptions of reality, their paintings transcended beyond the avant-garde by mining periods that the academy, too, had disparaged. These two forms of the return-to-order may appear independent from each other, but in truth they are inextricably intertwined: Not only were they exhibited in the same shows and discussed in the same reviews but they also enabled critics to unpack terms such as ‘classical’, ‘order’, and ‘tradition’ via their engagement with different versions of tradition. The critical history of the artistic reception of the Baroque around 1922 reveals the instability of such terms and the impact that the concept of a ‘classical Baroque’ has on artists and cultural players alike. Such instability concluded around 1926, when Sarfatti inaugurated the First Exhibition of the refounded Novecento Italiano. By then both Valori plastici and Pittura Metafisica had folded. Novecento did not have a dominant aesthetic, and most discussions around it had to do with the definition of ‘Fascist’ rather than ‘classical’ art. While the uncertainties of 1922–1923 faded out, so did the return to the Baroque in painting.129 Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s Sarfatti organised exhibitions of the Novecento outside of Italy, solidifying this aesthetics’ association with the Italian modern path to classicism. Few of the Italian intellectuals who participated in the debate over the Baroque around 1922 saw explicit connections between it and the rise of Fascism: Malaparte, Sarfatti, and Maraini were among the few. Yet a very prescient assessment of the Seicentomania was published by the British art critic Roger Fry in October 1922 in The Burlington Magazine. In Fry’s opinion Caravaggio and his followers (whose work he studied, he claimed, in the volumes of the Biblioteca d’arte illustrata) initiated academic art. Like de Chirico, Fry also singled out Giuseppe Maria Crespi’s Saint John Nepomucene Confessing the Queen of Bohemia, with its ‘accent […] upon what is sensational and theatrically effective in the narrative’: for both Fry and de Chirico this was the origin of academic and Salon painting.130 Caravaggio was a better painter, Fry conceded, but his talents were equally theatrical, and in Carlo Maderno, Pietro da Cortona, and Filippo Borromini Fry found a dangerous tendency towards ‘sensationalism’: this architecture anticipated ‘its far more degraded modern analogue, Art Nouveau’ – an argument that critics had marshalled during the 1902 and 1911 world fairs, as I showed in Chapter 2.131

Classical Baroque

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The question remains, however, as to why Baroque art became so popular in the 1920s. This is Fry’s diagnosis: It is not uninteresting to note that a generation of Italians who have been brought up on Futurism should turn with such zest to their own painters of the seventeenth century. Caravaggio was an expression of a turbulence and an impatience of tradition similar to that which Futurism displays. Like the Futurists, he appealed to the love of violent sensations and uncontrolled passions. Like them, he loved what was brutal and excessive. Like them, he mocked tradition. Like them, he was fundamentally conventional and journalistic. The strange thing is that the aspect of the Italian character which creates Futurism and Fascism has taken so long to find its expression in art.132 In the attribution of ‘aesthetic value to violent sensations’, Fry identified Baroquemania as the unacknowledged link between Futurist experimentation and Fascism, subsuming both movements’ fraught relation to the avant-garde and to modernity.

Notes 1 Giorgio de Chirico, ‘La manìa del Seicento’, Valori plastici III, no. 3 (December 1921): 60–62. See Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, Giorgio de Chirico, il tempo di ‘Valori plastici’ 1918/1922 (Rome: De Luca, 1980); Paolo Fossati, La pittura metafisica (Turin: Einaudi, 1988); Paolo Baldacci, De Chirico: 1888–1919: la metafisica (Milan: Leonardo arte, 1997); Willard Bohn, ‘De Chirico’s Early Years in Paris’, The Burlington Magazine 145, no. 1206 (September 2003): 649–652; Ara H. Merjian, Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Modernism, Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 2 Federica Rovati, Carrà tra futurismo e metafisica (Milan: Scalpendi Editore, 2011). 3 Giorgio de Chirico, ‘Il ritorno al mestiere’, Valori plastici I, nos 11–12 (November–December 1919), 15–19; Achille Bonito Oliva and Maïthé Vallès-Bled, De Chirico et la peinture Italienne de l’entre-deux guerres: du futurisme au retour a l’ordre (Cinisello Balsamo, Milan: Silvana, 2003). 4 Giorgio Pillon, De Chirico e il Fascino di Rubens (Rome: Serarcangeli, 1991); Emily Braun, ed., Giorgio de Chirico and America, exh. cat. (New York: Hunter College of the City University of New York, 1996); Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, Osvaldo Patani, and Flavia Matitti, Giorgio De Chirico, romantico e barocco: gli anni Quaranta e Cinquanta (Prato: Farsettiarte, 2001). 5 De Chirico, ‘La manìa del Seicento’, 60. 6 Ibid., 60. 7 Ardengo Soffici, ‘Principî di una estetica futurista. Parte seconda. L’arte e la moda’, Valori plastici I, nos 11–12 (December 1919): 4–5, 5. 8 Fernando Mazzocca, ‘La mostra fiorentina del 1922 e la polemica sul Seicento’, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa V, no. 2, III (1979): 843. 9 Rossana Bossaglia, ‘Valori plastici: la nascita della moderna contro-avanguardia’, in Paolo Baldacci and Rossana Bossaglia, Novecento: catalogo dell’arte italiana dal Futurismo a Corrente, vol. 6 (Milan: Mondadori, 1996), 7–11; Robert Storr, Modern Art despite Modernism (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2000). 10 T. J. Clark, Image of the People. Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848–1851 (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 13.

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Baroquemania 11 Giorgio de Chirico, ‘La manìa del Seicento’, 60. 12 See Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, ‘Marangoni e il Seicento’, in Arte barocca, ed. Matteo Marangoni ([1927] Florence: Vallecchi, 1973), VII–XXV; Matteo Marangoni, Carteggi (1909–1958), ed. Luca Barreca (Palermo: Editrice Mediterranea, 2006). 13 Matteo Marangoni, ‘Valori mal noti e trascurati della pittura italiana del seicento in alcuni pittori di “Natura morta”’, Rivista d’arte X (1917): 1–31. 14 Ibid., 2. 15 Ibid., ‘Valori mal noti e trascurati’, 3. 16 Matteo Marangoni, ‘La raccolta Cecconi di pittura Seicentesca’, Dedalo II, no. 6 (June 1921): 362–380. 17 Matteo Marangoni, Il Caravaggio (Florence: Battistelli, 1922). 18 Ibid., 6. 19 Matteo Marangoni to Roberto Longhi, 5 October 1918, Fondo Roberto Longhi, Centro di ricerca sulla tradizione manoscritta – Università degli Studi di Pavia (Pavia). 20 Marangoni, ‘Valori mal noti e trascurati’, 8. 21 Marangoni, ‘La raccolta Cecconi di pittura Seicentesca’, 380. 22 On the limitations of the term ‘return-to-order’, see Annick Lantenois, ‘Analyse critique d’une formule “retour à l’ordre”’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’Histoire 45, no. 1 (1995): 40–53. 23 Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer A. Mundy, ‘Introduction’, in On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910–1930 (London: Tate Gallery, 1990), 11–30. 24 For the relations between the concept of palingenesis, and key tropes of interwar art such as primitivism, avant-gardism, and secular religion, see Mark Antliff, ‘Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity’, Art Bulletin 84, no. 1 (March 2002): 148–169. 25 Giuseppe Raimondi, ‘Recensione a Matteo Marangoni. “Valori malnoti e trascurati della pittura italiana del seicento in alcuni pittori di Natura morta” Edit. Olschki, Florence, 1918’, La ronda I, no. 2 (May 1919): 69. 26 Raimondi, ‘Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’, 48. 27 Giorgio de Chirico, ‘Classicismo pittorico’, La ronda II, no. 7 (July 1920): 50–55, 50. 28 Ibid., 53. 29 Paolo Fossati, Valori plastici, 1918–22 (Turin: Einaudi, 1981);  Simona Storchi, Valori plastici 1918–1922: le inquietudini del nuovo Classico (Reading: University of Reading, 2006); Federica Rovati, ‘“Pittura senza aggettivi”: tradizione italiana e metafisica negli anni di “Valori plastici”’, in De Chirico a Ferrara: metafisica e avanguardie, ed. Paolo Baldacci (Ferrara: Fondazione Ferrara Arte, 2015), 143–151. 30 Maria Grazia Messina, ‘Valori plastici. Il confronto con la Francia e la questione dell’arcaismo’, in Il futuro alle spalle. Italia Francia – L’arte tra le due guerre, ed. Federica Pirani (Rome: Edizioni De Luca, 1998), 19–35; Catherine Fraixe, Christophe Poupault, and Lucia Piccioni, Vers une Europe latine: acteurs et enjeux des échanges culturels entre la France et l’Italie Fasciste (Paris: Peter Lang, 2014). 31 Andrés Lepik, ‘Un nuovo Rinascimento per l’arte italiana?: “Valori plastici” e il dialogo artistico Italia – Germania’, in Valori plastici, ed. Paolo Fossati, Patrizia Rosazza Ferraris, and Livia Velani (Milan: Skira, 1998), 155–164; Lucia Presilla, ‘Alcune note sulle mostre di Valori plastici in Germania’, Commentari d’arte 5, no. 12 (2000): 51–67. 32 Mario Broglio, preface to Giorgio de Chirico, ‘La manìa del Seicento’, 60. 33 De Chirico, ‘La manìa del Seicento’, 60. 34 Paolo Fossati, ‘La manía del Seicento’, in Valori plastici, 1918–22, 246–264. 35 Ibid., 61. Italics in original. 36 Ibid., 62. 37 Ibid., 62.

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Classical Baroque 38 Alessandro Del Puppo, ‘Il “realismo magico” e la fortuna dei primitivi nella pittura italiana dei primi anni Venti’, in Realismo magico fantastico e iperrealismo nell’arte e nella letteratura latinoamericane, ed. Mario Sartor (Udine: Forum, 2005), 46–61. 39 Ibid., 60–61. 40 Valeria Minervini, ‘Le riviste di Ojetti’, in Le letterature straniere nell’Italia dell’entre-deux-guerres, ed. Edoardo Esposito (Lecce: Pensa multimedia, 2004), 383–403. 41 Ugo Ojetti, ‘A Rome e a Turin. Per un’architettura italiana’, Corriere della sera (8 August 1911). 42 Cited in Miriam Fileti Mazza, ed., La fototeca di Dedalo (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 1995), 7–8. 43 Roberto Papini, ‘Il barocco e la critica d’arte’, Il convegno 11–12 (December 1922): 646–661; Matteo Marangoni, ‘Per riabilitare Il Seicento’, Lo spettatore I, no. 3 (March 1922): 225–228. 44 For example see Rudolf Oldenbourg, Jan Lys (Rome: Biblioteca d’Arte Illustrata 1921); A. L. Mayer, El Greco (Rome: Biblioteca d’Arte Illustrata, 1922). 45 Papini, ‘Il barocco e la critica d’arte’: 652. 46 Mario Bacchelli, ‘Della manìa del Seicento e di altre manìe’, La ronda IV, no. 1 (January 1922): 75–80. 47 Ibid., 77. 48 Ibid., 79. 49 Preface to Giorgio de Chirico, ‘La manìa del Seicento’, 60. 50 Other respondents were the artist Cipriano Efisio Oppo, writer Emilio Cecchi, poet and art critic Raffaello Franchi, and archaeologist Eva Tea. 51 Simona Storchi, ‘Il dibattito sul Seicento. Classicità, modernità, nazione’, in Valori plastici 1918–1922, 150. See also Fernando Mazzocca, ‘La mostra fiorentina el 1922 e la polemica sul Seicento’, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, classe di Lettere e Filosofia V, no. 2, III (1979): 837–901; Marta Nezzo, ‘1922. Logica e logistica di un apparato barocco,’ in Ugo Ojetti - critica, azione, ideologia: dalla Biennali d’arte antica al Premio Cremona (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2016), 81–122. 52 Lionello Venturi, Il Caravaggio (Rome: Biblioteca d’arte illustrata, 1921). 53 Lionello Venturi, ‘Lettera al Direttore’, in Valori plastici III, no. 4 (April 1922): 76–77. 54 Ibid., 77. 55 Lionello Venturi, ‘Il 1609 e la pittura italiana’, La nuova antologia 144, no. 912 (December 1909): 613–619. 56 Carlo Carrà, ‘Il Seicento e la Critica Italiana’, Valori plastici III, no. 4 (April 1922): 78; Carlo Carrà to Mario Broglio, 18 May 1922, Fondo Valori Plastici, U.A. 42. Archivio Storico della Galleria d’Arte Moderna (Rome). 57 Carrà, ‘Il Seicento e la Critica Italiana’, 78. 58 Ibid., 80, italics in the original. 59 C. E. Suckert, ‘Commemorazione del Seicento’, Valori plastici III, no. 4 (April 1922): 80–87. 60 Ibid., 86. 61 Ibid., 87. 62 Massimo Bontempelli, ‘Lettera al Direttore’, Valori plastici III, no. 4 (April 1922): 94. 63 Enrico Crispolti, ‘Pittura, scultura, architettura e ambientazioni futuriste a Roma: Appunti’, Studi romani 25, no. 4 (October–December 1977): 507–539; Elisabetta Mondello, Roma futurista. I periodici e i luoghi dell’avanguardia nella Roma degli anni Venti (Rome: Franco Angeli, 1990); Claudia Salaris, La Roma delle avanguardie: dal futurismo all’underground (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1999); Emilio Gentile, ‘La nostra sfida alle stelle’. Futuristi in politica (Rome: Laterza, 2009). 64 Massimo Bontempelli, ‘Lettera al Direttore’, 94. 65 Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Il Seicento’, Valori plastici III, no. 4 (April 1922): 95–96.

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Baroquemania 66 Letter of Mario Broglio to Ugo Ojetti, 3 November 1921, Fondo Ugo Ojetti, P.V.P. I, I, 3B, f. 7, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (Florence) (from now on FUO). Published in Fabio Amico, ‘La Mostra della Pittura Italiana del Seicento e del Settecento a Palazzo Pitti nel 1922: documenti, dibattiti e rivisitazioni su due secoli “resuscitati” dell’arte italiana’ (doctoral dissertation, Università degli Studi di Florence, 2007), 268. 67 Ugo Ojetti, ‘La mostra della pittura dal Caravaggio al Tiepolo’, Corriere della sera (21 February 1922). 68 Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Il Seicento’, 95. 69 Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Il ritratto dell’Ottocento a Venezia (1923)’, in Segni, colouri e luci. Note d’arte (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1925), 69–74. 70 Giorgio de Chirico to Mario Broglio, 1922, Fondo Valori Plastici, U.A. 62, Archivio Storico della Galleria d’Arte Moderna (Rome). 71 Giorgio de Chirico, ‘Il monomanco parla’, in Valori plastici, 1918–22, ed. Paolo Fossati (Turin: Einaudi, 1981), 251–254. 72 Ibid., 251. 73 Ibid., 251. 74 Ibid., 252. 75 Giorgio de Chirico, ‘La Galleria d’Arte Moderna a Rome. (Valori plastici, luglio 1919)’, in Il meccanismo del pensiero: critica, polemica, autobiografia, 1911–1943, ed. Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco (Turin: Einaudi, 1985), 112–118, 116. 76 De Chirico, ‘Il monomanco parla’, 254. 77 Ibid., 254. 78 Mostra della pittura italiana del Sei e Settecento in Palazzo Pitti MCMXXII (Rome: Bestetti & Tumminelli, 1922). 79 Francis Haskell, ‘The Redirection of Taste in Florence and Paris’, in The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 128–142, 130. 80 Ugo Ojetti, ‘Mostre Biennali d’Arte a Florence. Minuta della relazione al Regio Commissario del Comune di Florence’, 10 June 1919, Ojetti 5,31, FUO. 81 Hermann Voss to Roberto Longhi, 5 July 1919, Fondo Roberto Longhi, Centro di ricerca sulla tradizione manoscritta – Università degli Studi di Pavia (Pavia). 82 Haskell, ‘The Redirection of Taste in Florence and Paris’, 131. 83 Georg Biermann, Deutsches Barock und Rokoko: herausgegeben im Anschluss an die Jahrhundert-ausstellung Deutscher Kunst 1650–1800 (Leipzig: E. E. Schwabach, 1914). 84 Hans Tietze, ‘Il Museo Barocco dell’Austria a Vienna’, Dedalo IV (1923): 571–584, 571. 85 Ugo Ojetti, La mostra fiorentina della pittura italiana del Seicento e del Settecento. Relazione del Presidente della Commissione Esecutiva (Florence: Francolini, 1922). 86 Ugo Ojetti, ‘Discorso per la chiusura della Mostra Del ’600 e ’700 in Palazzo Pitti’, 6 November 1922, Ojetti 2, 5, FUO. 87 Ibid. 88 Ugo Ojetti, Luigi Dami, and Nello Tarchiani, La pittura italiana del Seicento e Settecento alla Mostra di Palazzo Pitti (Rome: Bestelli e Tuminelli, 1922). 89 Fabio Amico, ‘Firenze 1922: Dal Seicento al contemporaneo’, in Novecento Sedotto: il Fascino del Seicento tra le due guerre, ed. Anna Mazzanti, Lucia Mannini, and Valentina Gensini (Florence: Polistampa, 2010), 57–67. See also Marta Nezzo, ‘1922. Logica e logistica di un apparato barocco’, in Ugo Ojetti – critica, azione, ideologia: dalla Biennali d’arte antica al Premio Cremona, Biblioteca di arte (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2016), 81–122, and Giada Policicchio, ‘La mostra della pittura italiana del Seicento e del Settecento. Rilettura e riscoperta di uno stile, il Barocco’,

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Classical Baroque in Mostre a Firenze 1911–1942: nuove indagini per un itinerario tra arte e cultura, ed. Cristiano Giometti (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2019), 41–57. 90 Published in Margherita Nugent, Alla mostra della pittura italiana del ’600 e ’700, note e impressioni (San Casciano, Val di Pesa: Società editrice Toscana, 1925). 91 Ugo Ojetti, ‘Discorso per la chiusura della Mostra del ’600 e ’700 in Palazzo Pitti’, 6 November 1922, Ojetti 2, 5, FUO; Ojetti, La pittura italiana del seicento e del settecento alla Mostra di palazzo Pitti, 12. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid. 94 Arte Italiana contemporanea. Catalogo con prefazione di Ugo Ojetti (Milan: Galleria Pesaro, 1921), 9. 95 Ardengo Soffici, ‘La mostra di Palazzo Pitti’, Il Resto del Carlino (14 July 1922) 96 Corrado Pavolini, ‘La Mostra del Sei e Settecento a Florence’, L’esame 1, nos 4–5 (August 1922): 257–266, 264. 97 Enrico Thovez, ‘Fantasie Critiche’, Gazzetta del popolo (29 June 1922). Other texts by Thovez on this topic are Enrico Thovez, ‘Il 600 e Il 700 a Firenze. Caravaggio’, Gazzetta del popolo (18 June 1922); Enrico Thovez, ‘Il Seicento Italiano e la pittura europea’, Gazzetta del popolo (17 November 1922). 98 Sergio Ortolani, ‘Le mostre fiorentine’, Le cronache d’Italia (6 July 1922). 99 Broglio, preface to Giorgio de Chirico, ‘La manìa del Seicento’, 60. 100 Alessandro Del Puppo, ‘Qualche caso nella moderna fortuna visiva di Zurbarán’, in Zurbarán (1598–1664), ed. Ignacio Cano Rivero (Ferrara: Ferrara Arte, 2013), 98–111. 101 Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Dove va l’arte d’Italia’, Rivista illustrata del popolo d’Italia II, no. 4 (30 April 1924); Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Alcune considerazioni intorno alla prima Mostra del Novecento Italiano, Il popolo d’Italia (12 February 1926), reprinted in Elena Pontiggia, Il Novecento Italiano (Milan: Abscondita, 2003), 62–63; Elena Pontiggia, ‘L’idea del classico. Il dibattito sulla classicità in Italia 1916–1932’, in L’idea del classico, 1916–1932: temi classici nell’arte italiana degli anniVenti ed. Elena Pontiggia (Milan: Fabbri, 1992), 9–38. 1 02 Giuliana Tomasella, Avanguardia in crisi nel dibattito artistico fra le due guerre (Padua: CLEUP, 1995), 128. 103 Giuliano Briganti, Pietro da Cortona o, Della pittura barocca (Florence: Sansoni, 1962), 116. 104 Anna Mazzanti, Lucia Mannini, and Valentina Gensini, eds, Novecento sedotto: il Fascino del Seicento tra le due guerre (Florence: Polistampa, 2010), see especially Mazzanti, ‘“Mania del Seicento”. Da Novecento a Roma, recezione nella penisola’, 43–55. 105 Nello Tarchiani, ‘La Fiorentina Primaverile di Belle Arti’, Emporium LV, no. 329 (1922): 281–290. 106 Baccio Maria Bacci, ‘Note sulla tradizione italiana e Corot. I’, Solaria (January 1928): 41–49; Susanna Pampaloni, ‘Baccio Maria Bacci: un critico d’arte tra le due guerre (1923–1943)’, in Arte e critica in Italia nella prima metà del Novecento, ed. Giuliana De Lorenzi (Rome: Gangemi, 2010), 117–141. 107 Nello Tarchiani, ‘Pittura d’oggi alla Primaverile fiorentina’, Il Marzocco (16 April 1922). 108 Mario Tinti, ‘Alcune opere d’arte alla “Primaverile Fiorentina”’, Rassegna d’arte antica e moderna (1922): 232–237. 109 Emanuele Greco, ‘La mostra “Fiorentina Primaverile” del 1922. Ricostruzione filologica dell’esposizione e del dibattito critico’ (PhD diss., Università degli Studi di Firenze, 2018); Emanuele Greco, ‘The Origins of an Ambiguity: Considerations of the Exhibition Strategies of Metaphysical Painting in the Exhibitions of the Valori plastici Group, 1921–22’, in Metaphysical Masterpieces 1916–1920: Morandi, Sironi, anperCarrà, ed. Erica Bernardi, Antonio David Fiore,

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Baroquemania Caterina Caputo, and Carlotta Castellani, monographic issue of Italian Modern Art 4 (July 2020), https://www.italianmodernart.org/journal/articles/the-origins-of-an-ambiguity-considerationson-the-exhibition-strategies-of-metaphysical-painting-in-the-exhibitions-of-the-valori-plasticigroup-1921–22/, accessed 20 July 2020. 110 For the ‘questione Spadini’, see Barbara Cinelli, ‘Ambiguità e fortuna di Spadini’, in Artisti e cultura visiva del Novecento, ed. Barbara Cinelli and Fernando Mazzocca (Pistoia: Comune di Pistoia, 1980), 30–32; Flavia Matitti and Maurizio Fagiolo Dell’Arco, Armando Spadini al tempo di Valori plastici: 1918–1925 (Rome: Galleria Campo dei Fiori, 1994); Flavio Fergonzi, ‘Adolfo Venturi e la “questione Spadini”’, in IncontriVenturiani, ed. Giacomo Agosti (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 1995), 169–190; Chiara Traversaro, ‘Which “Classicism”? Beyond Brushwork and Form to Situate Armando Spadini in the Context of the 1920s’ (BA thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, 2019). 1 11 Ugo Ojetti, Armando Spadini (Rome: La Voce, 1920), no page. 112 Roberto Melli, ‘Mostre Romane’, Valori plastici I, nos 6–10 (June–October 1919), 27. 113 Alberto Savinio, La Fiorentina Primaverile: prima esposizione nazionale dell’opera e del lavoro d’arte (Florence: Valori plastici, 1922), 209. The first page of the catalogue contains a mistake: the show opened in 1922, not 1921. 114 Ugo Ojetti, ‘Esposizioni. La Fiorentina Primaverile’, Corriere della sera (8 April 1922). 115 Giuliana Scimé, ed. Il laboratorio Bragaglia 1911–1932 (Ravenna: Agenzia Editoriale Essegi, 1986); Giovanni Lista, Lo spettacolo futurista (Florence: Edizioni Cantini, 1990); Mario Verdone, La Casa d’Arte Bragaglia: 1918–1930 (Rome: Bulzoni, 1992); Patricia Gaborik, ‘Lo spettacolo del futurismo’, in Sergio Luzzatto and Gabriele Pedullà, eds, Atlante della letteratura italiana, vol. III (Turin: Einaudi, 2012), 589–613. 1 16 Fabio Benzi, Gli artisti di Villa Strohl-Fern (Rome: Newton Compton Editori, 1983); Fabio Benzi, ‘Villa Strohl-Fern. Tra Caffé Aragno, “Valori plastici” e “Novecento”’, in Gli artisti di Villa Strohl-Fern: tra Simbolismo e Novecento, ed. Lucia Stefanelli Torossi (Rome: De Luca, 1983), 14–20. 117 Cipriano Efisio Oppo, ‘Antonio Mancini’, Seconda Biennale Romana: mostra internazionale di belle arti, Roma MCMXXIII (Rome: Casa Editrice d’Arte Enzo Pinci, 1923), 27–28. 118 Alberto Cecchi, ‘La Seconda Biennale inaugurata dal Re’, L’idea nazionale (16 November 1923). 119 Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Alla Biennale di Rome: la bellezza che ritorna’, Il popolo d’Italia (7 December 1923); Cipriano Efisio Oppo, ‘La seconda biennale romana. I. I cosiddetti neoclassici’, L’idea nazionale (16 December 1923). 120 Luca Pietro Nicoletti, ‘La ricezione critica di de Chirico tra il 1918 e il 1922’, in Origine e sviluppi dell’arte Metafisica. Milano e Firenze 1909–1911 e 1919–1922 (Milan: Scalpendi-Archivio dell’arte Metafisica, 2011), 143–158. 121 Cipriano Efisio Oppo, ‘Alla esposizione “Primaverile” di Firenze. Valori plastici’, L’idea nazionale (15 July 1922). Emanuele Greco, ‘De Chirico Alla Fiorentina Primaverile (1922)’, in Origine e Sviluppi dell’arte Metafisica. Milano e Firenze 1909–1911 e 1919–1922 (Milan: Scalpendi-Archivio dell’arte Metafisica, 2011), 159–208. 122 Emilio Cecchi, ‘La seconda biennale romana – Gli artisti italiani’, L’esame III, no. II (29 February 1924): 117–134, 126. 123 Giorgio de Chirico, Memorie della mia vita (Milan: Rizzoli, 1962), 124. 124 Margherita Sarfatti, ‘La Biennale Romana’, in Segni, colouri e luci. Note d’arte (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1925), 43–46. 125 Roberto Papini, ‘La Seconda Biennale Romana. II. – Noi e gli antenati’, Emporium LIX, no. 352 (1924): 206–225; Margherita Sarfatti, ‘La Biennale Romana’, in Segni, Colouri e Luci. Note d’arte (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1925), 44–46.

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Classical Baroque 1 26 Antonio Maraini, ‘La II Biennale Romana’, La tribuna (16 December 1923) 127 Cipriano Efisio Oppo, ‘La seconda biennale romana. I. I cosiddetti neoclassici’, L’idea nazionale (16 December 1923): 3. 128 Giuseppe di Natale, ‘Courbet in Italia: una storia novecentesca, I’, Paragone, no. 139 (2018): 26–64.Giuseppe di Natale, ‘Courbet in Italia: una storia novecentesca, II’, Paragone. Parte arte, no. 142 (2018): 19–47. 129 Which is not to say that Novecento Italiano was the dominant Fascist aesthetic; many currents vied for this position but Mussolini never fully committed to one and rather explicitly distanced himself from the Novecento Italiano in 1929. See among others Marla Susan Stone, The Patron State. Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), especially chapter 7; Sileno Salvagnini, Il sistema delle arti in Italia 1919–1943 (Bologna: Minerva, 2000); Francesca Billiani, Fascist Modernism:The Arts under Dictatorship (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017); Ruth Ben-Ghiat et al., Post Zang Tumb Tuuum: Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943, ed. Germano Celant (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2018). 130 Roger Fry, ‘Settecentismo’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 41, no. 235 (1 October 1922): 159. 131 Ibid., 169. 132 Ibid., 158.

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Baroque memories in the architecture of interwar Rome

I

t is 30 March 1931, and Benito Mussolini attends the inauguration of the polemical Second Exhibition of Rational Architecture at the Galleria di Roma. Surrounded by modernist architects, the Duce examines a photomontage of the buildings that they (the self-labelled ‘rationalists’) most despise. The ‘Tavolo degli Orrori’ or Table of Horrors, designed by the art dealer and cultural critic Pier Maria Bardi in the form of a whirlwind of images and text, juxtaposes cut-outs from nineteenth-century newspapers and fashion plates with examples of historicist architecture (neoclassical, neo-medieval, neo-Renaissance, neo-Baroque) commissioned by the Fascist state during its first decade in power. 1 Bardi caustically described ‘culturalist architects’ – those responsible for the creation of buildings included in the Table of Horrors – as ‘born in the shop of a junk dealer, the son of an eclectic father and an accommodating mother’.2 In critiques like this Bardi portrays many historicist architects whom I will address in this chapter, such as Vincenzo Fasolo and Armando Brasini, as undisciplined in their excessive love for ornamentation,

5.1  Pier Maria Bardi, Tavolo degli orrori, 1931

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Baroque memories a trope closely connected with the notion of the Baroque. These artists, due to the nature of their style, are chronologically contemporary but ideologically belong to the past. The rationalist architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers, for example, lambasted Baroque surfaces as the expression of an immoral and hedonistic culture where ‘the decoration has taken possession of the structure and this takes on new forms only to obey that which was its own servant. The illogicality, the pure aesthetic feeling, reign supreme.’ 3 Nathan Rogers revived the moral criticisms of the Seicento, concluding with an indictment of the Baroque (and neo-Baroque) architect as antisocial and egoistic – an argument that Sarfatti had already mobilised against Baroque (and neo-Baroque) painters.4 Dominant narratives about Italian interwar architecture, like Bardi, often oppose nostalgic historicism to future-oriented rationalism. 5 However, in this chapter I will examine the work of three architects working in Rome in the interwar period who engaged with the Baroque repertoire with radically different agendas, all the while jointly considering it to be profoundly enmeshed with notions of modernity, rather than backwardlooking. As the art historian Roberto Papini put it in 1932, while reviewing recent architecture in Rome that repeatedly boasted concave and convex volumes, it is as if the city coerced local architects (even some rationalists!) to reconnect with the Baroque, thereby ‘forcing the power of contrasts of chiaroscuro with a marked movement of the masses, with the curving of the surfaces, with the choice of materials’.6 Papini concluded that such a tendency was, in Rome, ‘the homeland of the Baroque, a spontaneous reconnecting with the spirit of tradition’.7 No matter how modernist rationalist architecture was, it still had to be recognisably Roman – as if being local were a mandate for any architect working in Rome, no matter how attuned to international tendencies. For the three architects examined in this chapter – though two designed heavily ornamented structures whilst one eschewed any surface apparatus – reclaiming the Baroque heritage was an integral part of making an architecture that were both modern and Italian. Vincenzo Fasolo made pointed references to certain Baroque churches in his building for the elite high school Liceo Mamiani, evoking the history of the institution as well as the expectations that it set for its students. Armando Brasini, in turn, absorbed the spectacle-oriented urbanist lessons of Baroque and repurposed them for Mussolini during a period when the latter was engaged in a grand plan to redesign Rome. Although Brasini’s most destructive plans were never executed, two of his major architectural projects of the 1920s, a building for the National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work (henceforth referred to as INAIL), included in Bardi’s ‘Table of Horrors’, and the Convent of the Good Shepherd, on the outskirts of the city, imaginatively reinterpreted the architectural legacy of the seventeenth century. Finally, the rationalist Giuseppe Capponi distilled to its essence the idiosyncratic Baroque use of concave and convex façades. Though Capponi’s Baroque-inspired modernism (best articulated by his apartment building for upper-class patrons) had little to no cultural connection with the Seicento and its meanings, he still projected a distinctively Italian (and Roman) flavour. Inspired by such fervent adoptions of Baroque styles and ideologies, this chapter will address the many souls of the architectural Baroque in its fraught relation to Fascist

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5.2  Vincenzo Fasolo, Liceo Terenzio Mamiani, 1921–1924

5.3  Giuseppe Capponi, Palazzina Nervi Nebbiosi, 1927–1930

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Baroque memories modernity. This was a particular challenge for practitioners working in Rome, an iconically Baroque city: as Papini had observed, to do any Roman architecture seemed to require, inevitably, to address its Baroqueness.8 Furthermore, scholarship on seventeenth-century architecture by authors such as Wölfflin and Riegl centred on Rome and took its variety of the Baroque as somewhat the default version of this style. Such geographical focus represented a difficult task: how to construct Fascist, modern, Italian architecture in Rome, one that emphasised national belonging but still incorporated references to local style? The three architects whom I will study in this chapter offered different answers to this question – all of whom, however, captured partial but historically correct aspects of the Roman Baroque approach to the built environment. For Fasolo the Roman Baroque symbolised the point of origin of Italian unification, so his inclusion of the style’s ornamental motifs suited his school building design; after all, education was one of the key institutions tasked with both rearing and indoctrinating a new generation of unified Italians. For Brasini the Roman Baroque offered strategies for modern urbanism because it did not shun the destruction of the past in service of reshaping cities to support spectacular politics. Finally, for Capponi, purely formal references to the Baroque supplied elegant models for a technocratic architecture while still eschewing internationalism and grounding modernist buildings in their location. For all three the Baroque was an inescapable point of reference for any modern Italian architecture built in Rome. The Fascist regime systematically sponsored architecture as a mechanism for the construction of consent, but (with the exception of INAIL, as I will show below) Mussolini did not show any direct interest in the buildings addressed in this chapter and did not directly intervene in their design.9 Nevertheless Fasolo, Brasini, and Capponi were well inserted in the regime, and, in other projects, explicitly served the propagandistic designs that Mussolini had for Fascist architecture. As these artists demonstrate, divergences between rationalist and culturalist architects were not a matter of investment in Fascism, as political commitment did not preclude their Fascist loyalty.10 They might have had different views of what Fascism must achieve, but they did not express any doubts that Mussolini and Fascism were uniquely positioned to do so. The Baroque in this context was vastly challenging for interwar architects, simultaneously conceptualised as indigenously Italian but also rooted in regional idiosyncrasies. In the overall narrative of this book, the Roman neo-Baroque nexus represented by Fasolo, Brasini, and Capponi’s projects supplies key insights into the structural ambivalence of the interwar reimagination of the Seicento, and into how references to the Baroque were incorporated into Fascist cultural politics and its construction of a modern Italian identity.

The Baroque and the modern vernacular In the interwar period iconic Italian modernist journals like Quadrante, Domus, or Casabella devoted little to no space to neo-Baroque buildings – except to criticise them, that is.

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Baroquemania Whilst these journals convey a view of interwar Italian architecture as dominated either by reactionary classicism or by modernist rationalism, other outlets tell a different story, in which the use of the Baroque style was a vital reference for Fascist practitioners. An example of this is the journal Architettura e arti decorative (Architecture and Decorative Arts, 1921–1931), founded by the architects Pio Piacentini and Gustavo Giovannoni, who encouraged the opening of the first Italian school of architecture (Regia Scuola Superiore di Architettura, Rome, 1919).11 First connected with the amateur Associazione Artistica fra i Cultori di Architettura (Artistic Association of the Appreciators of Architecture), and from 1927 the official mouthpiece of the Fascist Syndicate of Italian Architects, Architettura e arti decorative reveals that in architecture too – as in painting – the Baroque and its legacy were very much at the centre of interwar architectural thought and practice. It was precisely its ubiquity (now concealed by the very selective picture of Fascist architecture provided by the aforementioned modernist architectural journals) that provoked Bardi and the rationalists’ invectives. Giovannoni, one of the most prominent teachers in the Regia Scuola, profoundly influenced architects working in Rome.12 He advocated for the protection of vernacular architecture and for the coexistence of the ancient and modern elements of Rome – a city that contained both an exceptional architectural heritage and an urgent need for efficiency, saddled between preservation and modernisation. The two principles of Giovannoni’s urbanistic theory were the diradamento (thinning out) of the urban fabric, and ambientismo (contextualism). The first principle aimed at creating picturesque views through selective demolitions rather than the indiscriminate razing of entire quarters.13 The second principle argued for a harmonious relation between individual buildings and the existing urban fabric, urging to respect local architectural character.14 It was precisely the respect for the local sense of place, a guiding principle in the Roman architecture school, that compelled the architects addressed in this chapter to engage with the Baroque – even those who, like Capponi, profoundly challenged the aesthetics encouraged in Giovannoni’s teaching. Indeed, whilst critics like Ojetti viewed the Baroque as part of the national Italian tradition, the style was also frequently reimagined as an expression of the regional and the vernacular – a ‘modern vernacular’, as Richard Etlin has observed, or a ‘rooted’ ‘path to modernism’, in Aristotle Kallis’s formula.15 In the various explicitly Baroque-inspired projects made in Rome during the interwar period, evoking this style signified a connection with the territory, a desire to respect the local ambiente, and a self-consciously Roman feeling. For architects such as Fasolo references to the Seicento gave new buildings in recently developed areas the grandeur of historic buildings in the city centre. In the case of the Liceo Mamiani, Fasolo utilised Baroque details to conjure the history of this high school, which used to be in a Baroque edifice in the centre of Rome, in order to give a historic flavour to the newly developed area in which the Mamiani was located. Fasolo was born in an Italian family in the Dalmatian city of Split (present-day Croatia) when it was still under Austrian dominion. When his father died in 1900 the family moved to Rome, and Vincenzo became an Italian citizen in 1905 – one could assume

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Baroque memories that Fasolo’s emphasis on the Italian architectural tradition was in part a reaction to his adoption of a fully Italian identity despite having been born and raised in a multicultural contact zone.16 A civil engineer by training who had studied under Giovannoni, Fasolo shared with his professor (and later colleague at the Regia Scuola) a historiographic approach to architecture, an interest in vernacular models, and a commitment to ambientismo. For Fasolo new buildings should adapt to what the architect or urbanist has already found on the site: the personal vision of the architect must be less significant than the existing character of the area and its history. Fasolo’s architectural practice and teaching were based on the belief that deep knowledge of the history of architecture was of fundamental importance for young practitioners. He even recommended that his students have ‘a mental filing cabinet of the immense variety of the architectural and decorative types produced through time’.17 Following the formula set out by Mariastella Casciato to describe a key element of architectural practice in early twentieth-century Italy, Fasolo held that architects had to be historians.18 An overview of Fasolo’s practice – and his use of medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo forms in buildings made in the same years – reveals the extent of his ‘mental filing cabinet’. Yet for him this was not a nostalgic approach to architecture: As Fasolo put it, it was a ‘study of the past for the purposes of the modern’, in which ‘modern’ meant not something that looked radically different from the past but rather a building that well served contemporary practices.19 Given such commitment to both modernity and tradition, Fasolo’s views constituted a modern counter avant-garde similar to that created by 1920s Seicentophile painters addressed in the last chapter. Fasolo, to demonstrate his dedication to efficiency, produced a readable floorplan for the Liceo Mamiani that suited the needs of students, teachers, and staff: bilaterally symmetrical, with the main entrance, hall, and courtyard on the same axis.20 The building’s façade, courtyard, and exterior decoration have multiple references to Roman Baroque religious architecture, and it was admired by its contemporaries because ‘of its seicentesco character but with modern feeling’ that truly responded to the ‘demands of hygiene, aesthetics, practicality, and didactics’.21 The entrance to the Liceo’s frontal courtyard, enclosed by a perimeter wall, has a rounded pediment and lateral scrolls that call to mind Jesuit architecture – in particular, the façade of the Church of St Ignatius in Rome (1626–1650) – whilst the entryways are a direct citation from Francesco Borromini’s Oratorio dei Filippini (1637–1651) in the same city. The motif of the volutes repeats throughout the school, as illustrated by the lateral entrance and many side windows. Heads of Minerva, goddess of wisdom, are positioned on both sides of the entrance arch, actively reframing references to religious Baroque architecture in a profoundly secular vein. The school’s main building, three storeys high, has multiple windows that become denser in the upper part of the building. It is symmetrical, but the different decorations on each floor maintain visual variety and interest. The central body is also decorated with motifs inspired by the Baroque and the Rococo styles, especially the double-columned pronaos decorated with volutes, shells, and scrolls. Its curvilinear pediment (a leitmotiv

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Baroquemania in the building) is a streamlined version of the windows and cornices that Borromini designed for the Palace of Propaganda Fide in Rome’s city centre (1646) – a meaningful choice, given that that Propaganda Fide is the branch of the Catholic Church in charge of missionary work, much as schools were instruments of proselytism on behalf of the unified Italian state. Upon entering the school, one is greeted by another Baroque element: an entry cubicle, like the ones often present in Catholic churches. This reference to ecclesiastical architecture encourages visitors to enter the school with deference, perhaps in service of the foyer’s purpose as a sacrarium to the students of the Liceo Mamiani who had died in the First World War. The religious motif persists in a political tenor, however, as the plaque, still extant, was flanked by mottoes by Mussolini and the words ‘God’ and ‘People’ during the ventennio, though they have since been removed. On the other side of the foyer, highlighting once more the cultural matrix of interwar Italian education, was General Armando Diaz’s declaration of Italy’s victory in the First World War; after 1918 commemorative plaques of this Victory Bulletin were placed in Italian town halls, barracks, and schools as a reminder of the formative role of the conflict for the new Italy. The school’s interior is guided by practical rather than decorative concerns: it has ample and luminous spaces that favour studying. The interior courtyard’s oval plan is a tribute to Borromini’s cloister of the Oratorio dei Filippini and to Giacomo della Porta’s courtyard of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza. Like the first, it has curved niches at the angles, and, like the second, it has a rectangular ground plan with a concave recess. A plaque on the wall reproduces some uplifting verses on education by the Roman poet Horace, crowned by the recognisable profile of Dante – two key secular references for Italian early twentiethcentury education. The reference to the university of Rome (La Sapienza was founded in 1303) is not arbitrary. The Liceo Mamiani was (and is still today) a liceo classico, that is, the most rigorous secondary-school type in the Italian education system, based on the study of history, literature, ancient Greek, and Latin. In 1923, one year before the inauguration of Fasolo’s building, Italian education was reorganised by Mussolini’s minister, the philosopher Giovanni Gentile. In what the Duce had termed ‘the most Fascist of reforms’, the liceo classico was tasked with the forming of the Italian élites, and it became the only secondary-school type that allowed access to the university.22 Citing the architecture of Rome’s university in a secondary school was thus a direct reference to what was expected from the Mamiani students: to enter university and become part of the Fascist intelligentsia and managerial class. When it was founded in 1885, the Liceo Mamiani was in the building of the Collegio Romano or Roman College, and it stayed there until 1889. The Collegio Romano, designed by the Mannerist architect Bartolomeo Amannati in 1584, sits near the Pantheon. The building originally housed the Jesuits’ school, located next to the Church of St Ignatius – as mentioned, a direct inspiration for the Mamiani’s entrance. After unification the Collegio Romano was expropriated by the Italian state and used for both the Mamiani and its rival school, the Liceo Visconti. The two prestigious secondary schools found that sharing a

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5.4  Courtyard of the Liceo Mamiani

single building was impractical. From 1889 to 1923, therefore, the Mamiani was moved to a palace in the nearby Corso Vittorio Emanuele, but this former aristocratic residence lacked the facilities for the well-rounded instruction that was the Mamiani’s pride. Finally in 1924, the school moved to its current location in the tree-lined Viale delle Milizie, an avenue on the border between the Rione Prati and the Quartiere della Vittoria

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Baroquemania neighbourhoods.23 The Rione Prati was developed after 1873 to host administrative buildings and middle-class housing for the bureaucrats of the new Italy. As it had been designed when the relationship between the Italian state and the Papacy was extremely tense, Prati adopted a peculiarly anti-clerical physiognomy. Its streets are named after Italian patriots or secular political leaders and intellectuals, and St Peter’s cupola – usually a salient feature of the city’s urbanism – is famously invisible from any of the new streets. The presence of Guglielmo Calderini’s infamous neo-Baroque Palace of Justice (1889–1911) in the area might have inspired Fasolo in choosing this style, as both buildings symbolised the emergence of the unified state and its conflict with the Catholic Church over the control of law and education. Fasolo’s choice, in turn, shaped later constructions in the vicinity of the Liceo, such as the neo-Baroque public housing next to the school, built in the late 1920s for bureaucrats working for the city of Rome.24 Calderini’s palace was not the only secular reference to possibly inspire Fasolo. The Quartiere della Vittoria was developed after the 1911 exhibitions: the current Piazza Mazzini occupies the area of the ornamental lake and Forum of the Regions, and the Viale delle Milizie marked the limit of the fairgrounds. Given the importance of the Baroque in the 1911 jubilee, where the Seicento was presented as a symbolic Italian koiné, it made sense to choose this style for an institution such as a school, which was similarly tasked with assimilating the culturally and linguistically diverse inhabitants of the peninsula into relatively uniform Italians. Fasolo was not the only architect working in Rome during the interwar period to reimagine Baroque architecture. Though apparently historicist in nature, this movement was heralded by some as supremely modern. An article published in Architettura e arti decorative by the art historian Roberto Papini, for example, argued that this practice was an anti-academic, transgressive move. Papini primarily examined Carlo Broggi, who had designed a neo-Baroque housing complex in Rome’s working-class neighbourhood Testaccio – complete with shell and volute decorations, and a Borrominian false perspective inspired by that of Palazzo Spada in Rome. The post-First World War Geist called for a comforting return to the established values of tradition, avoiding antagonistic experimentation, Papini argued. Yet evoking the neoclassical was too academic, authorised, and restrictive. That is why, Papini claimed, ‘inevitably, young architects in Rome have felt an attraction towards those forms of the Baroque age that suggest new lines and new shapes. In those forms decried by the academy they have found something healthy, alive, and profoundly Roman, that is classical – the point of departure for the architecture of tomorrow.’ 25 For Papini the return to the Baroque was not an anti-modern move. Rather, it was a strategy that looked back at tradition to transcend the Beaux-Arts nineteenth century’s nefarious influence and develop a genuinely modern, Roman style.26 Fasolo’s Liceo Mamiani is an example of a new building (made to serve a modern education that heavily referenced tradition) that adopted Baroque stylistic devices to encourage young Romans to feel a connection to their city’s architectural vernacular. At the same time, references to the Baroque in the Mamiani evokes not Catholicism but rather another aspect of the Seicento: its perceived role as a precedent for Italian unification, and its reinterpretation as such in the 1911 Cinquantenario.

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Baroque memories

5.5  Carlo Broggi, Middle-class housing in the Roman neighbourhood of Testaccio, also known as ‘the Cremlin.’ (1924–1926), and detail

Baroque-inspired urban projects in the early days of Fascism Armando Brasini turned the Baroque repertoire, often used by his contemporaries such as Fasolo for decorative purposes, into a monumental vocabulary for state architecture and urbanism. More than a set of decorative patterns, the Baroque represented for Brasini a specific approach towards the built environment, animated by a desire for grandeur and ritualistic uses of urban space. Brasini was originally trained as a decorator, priming him to engage with materials rather than with blueprints, with surfaces rather than plans.27 Unlike his rationalist contemporaries, Brasini saw ornamentation and surface embellishment as indispensable components of architecture.Yet whilst his urban projects made use of architectural motifs from the past, they were also designed to ease automotive circulation. This Janus-like approach – with one eye on tradition and another on the future – made Brasini’s projects for Rome’s centre neither a complete modernist remaking of the city nor a historicist preservation of the past. He had few qualms about destroying old sections of the city to

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Baroquemania highlight key buildings and to allow for military parades – an approach that profoundly shaped Mussolini’s urbanism. Compiling Brasini’s output and unbuilt urban projects, in 1917 a lavishly illustrated book titled L’urbe massima: l’architettura e la decorazione di Armando Brasini (The Greatest City: The Architecture and Decoration of Armando Brasini) celebrated Brasini’s works as ‘Baroque architecture’.28 The text itself was written by Paolo Orano, a revolutionary syndicalist and writer who later became involved with the Fascist regime. Orano pointed out that Brasini’s Baroqueness was linked to his anti-classicism: ‘Brasini is Baroque in so far as the architecture that we call with this name is the only one that does not constrain the artist with the rules of Vitruvius […] What we are fighting here is a battle for the freedom of art and the restoration of the Roman taste.’ 29 Like Roberto Papini, Orano considered the use of the Baroque an anti-academic move, a legitimate reaction against the Beaux-Arts fascination with a classicising idiom that curtailed architects’ creativity. Looking back at the Baroque meant being modern, in so far as modernity meant shedding false respect for exhausted traditions and aspiring, instead, towards innovation and originality. Orano also asserted that the Roman architecture Brasini admired was all ‘seicentesca and Baroque’, as it is the one ‘that gives its character to Rome’.Yet Brasini’s love for the Baroque was neither nostalgic nor anachronistic. Rather, as Orano put it, ‘[Brasini] discovered that the Roman Seicento began, but did not accomplish, the architecture of the Rome

5.6  Frontispiece of Paolo Orano, L’urbe massima: l’architettura e la decorazione di Armando Brasini (Rome: Formiggini, 1917)

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Baroque memories of the future […] He discovered that Bernini anticipates the vision of a gigantic metropolis.’ 30 Thus for Brasini Bernini’s architectural projects inspired the ‘impossible capital’ that post-unification Italy aspired to build.31 Furthermore the Seicento constituted, in Brasini’s eyes, the period in which ‘a unilateral lordship turns […] into a centralised state’, describing the Baroque as the style of an authoritarian, unified state.32 Papal Rome was no longer perceived as shameful but rather as the beginning of modern Italian statehood – a reference first employed to describe the desire for a centralised post-unification Italy, and later extended to Fascist Italy. At first Brasini’s destructive urban proposals did not garner much coverage in the press. In 1923 Sarfatti suggested why: ‘To make a great architect, Brasini says, one needs a great man of state who commissions remarkable things. Buonarrotti, without Julius II, would have not become Michelangelo.’ Sarfatti concluded, ‘To justify a great architecture we need great means, great men, great eras, a great people. There are moments in which no hope seems chimerical. There are moments in which hope becomes faith.’ 33 This direct message to Mussolini, who had been nominated Prime Minister less than a year before, benevolently predisposed him toward the architect. This inclined affinity crystallised when Mussolini met the architect in 1923, and the latter, through Ojetti’s mediation, proposed a monument to the First World War Italian fallen: a series of memorial stones that would stretch from Rome to Gorizia, currently on the Slovenian border.34 Although it was (understandably, given its scale) not to be realised, Brasini’s overambitious proposal pleased Mussolini and Sarfatti, who at the time counselled the Duce on artistic matters and had lost her seventeen-year-old son during the war.35 Thanks to this encounter Brasini received important commissions in the regime’s early years, such as the artistic directorship of the Vittoriano, the unfinished monument to Victor Emanuel II in Piazza Venezia, and the Italian pavilion at the 1925 Paris Exhibition – a boxy structure with Corinthian columns and classicising sculptures that Bardi included in the ‘Table of Horrors’. Although none of these projects was inspired by the Baroque, Ojetti described Brasini as an artist from the Seicento. Upon meeting him, Ojetti wrote, one was reminded of a portrait of Franz Hals and felt ‘in the Rome of Urban VIII, Innocent X, or Alexander VII, at the time of Bernini and Algardi, Pietro da Cortona and Salvator Rosa’ – equating Brasini’s visionary projects (monumental, opulent, expensive) with an architectural mode that contrasted with modern architectural practices that aspired towards simplification in service of utilitarian concerns.36 Brasini’s plans were a statement against simplification and financial prudence, against any form of standardisation and internationalism – an identification of Italianness (and Romanity in particular) with opulent splendour. The vital role of urbanism in Fascist cultural politics was plain as early as 1924, when Mussolini announced, ‘We must create the monumental Rome of the twentieth century. Rome cannot, must not, be solely a modern city, in the by now banal sense of that word; it must be a city worthy of its glory.’ 37 A year later, he directly addressed Italian urbanists: ‘You will continue to free the trunk of the large oak from all that which still adheres to it. You will open throughways around Augustus’s mausoleum, the

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Baroquemania Theatre of Marcellus, the Campidoglio and the Pantheon. Within five years, from Piazza Colonna it will be possible to see the mass of the Pantheon’ – one of Brasini’s unrealised projects. For Mussolini, as for Brasini, there were two pillars of modern urbanism: isolation and monumentalisation, which now replaced Giovannoni’s ambientismo.38 ‘The ancient monuments of our history must loom gigantic in essential solitude’, Mussolini concluded.39 As Mussolini’s rhetoric illustrates, the liberation of Roman buildings from later accretions symbolised the relation between modern Italy and its heroic past, and between Italy and other nations. Like its monuments, Fascist Italy would finally liberate itself from the ballast of the past and from its subservient position in international politics. Echoing Brasini’s own architectural and design practice, Mussolini’s words were taken to heart by the Baroque-inspired architect. After all, Brasini’s urban projects did not aim to erase the past but rather to redefine it in heroic terms by selectively preserving certain monuments and opening thoroughfares. They reframed the city as the setting for public rituals and ceremonies, celebrating the Fascist state much as Baroque projects had celebrated the Papacy. As testament to these processes of historical redefinition, in 1927 Brasini unveiled his profoundly destructive proposal for the radical redesign of the densely populated area of Campus Martius and the opening of a ‘Via Imperiale’.40 In direct response to Mussolini’s indications, Brasini suggested connecting the Pantheon with the Mausoleum of Augustus via a monumental highway, which would necessitate a systematic razing of buildings.41 The Pantheon, the columns of Marcus Aurelius, and Hadrian’s temple would thereby be cleared of surrounding structures. Calculated demolitions such as these would highlight two key institutions of Fascist Italy housed in Baroque palaces: Palazzo Montecitorio (since 1871 the Italian Parliament) and Palazzo Chigi (Mussolini’s headquarters at the time, from which he addressed crowds of supporters) – superseding the other two foci of power, the King and the Pope. The ‘Via Imperiale’ would afford many views (for example the cupola of St Peter’s) that were obscured by the dense palimpsest of buildings in Rome’s city centre. In addition to avenues, Brasini envisioned an enormous square (the Foro Mussolini) that would house the stock exchange, the opera house, and other public buildings. As proper for such a symbolic centre of power, the Foro would be embellished by spolia: the fountain of Piazza Colonna, the Column of Marcus Aurelius, the obelisk now in front of Montecitorio, and two colossal memorial stones inscribed with fasces. The colonnaded ‘Via Imperiale’ would have been 5 kilometres long and 40 metres wide. Brasini intended his project to realise Mussolini’s desires: ‘Let us remember that we need to sincerely, and Fascistically, obey the Duce’s orders. With my project I have just wanted to obey’, he stated.42 Brasini’s proposal addressed the challenges of modern cities, especially traffic, while at the same time emphasising the ceremonial aspect of Rome and short-circuiting the relationship between Fascist Rome and classical Rome. If it had been implemented, Brasini’s project would have stressed the continuity between ancient Rome and Mussolini’s Italy – mediated, as contemporary

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5.7  Armando Brasini, Bird’s-eye view of the Foro Mussolini, 1927 in Armando Brasini, Sistemazione del Campo Marzio: La Via Imperiale, il Foro Mussolini (1927)

observers pointed out, by ‘a Berninian impetus’ due to its emphasis on demolition and monumentalisation.43 In October 1927 Mussolini approved a partial implementation of the plan, recognising it as an expression of the directions he himself had supplied years before. Brasini commended the Duce for the approval of his project, viewing it as a fulfilment of Mussolini’s programme, ‘which ties to the spirit of that of Augustus and Sixtus V’. Brasini added, ‘In the future it will be possible to admire through architecture a period of life, in the shadow of the fasces, which is not inferior to the imperial or papal ones’.44 Brasini’s project – aimed at merging the first Rome (classical) with the second (Baroque) and the third (Fascist) – would have cast Mussolini as a modern Augustus and a modern Sixtus V. The ‘Via Imperiale’, though subjected to harsh criticism for many reasons, including its disregard for much of Rome’s architectural heritage, was primarily lambasted for its

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Baroquemania estimated cost. Critics of the project appealed to a series of tropes evocative of the Baroque; Corrado Pavolini, for example, observed that the Via Imperiale had ‘the same set design rhetoric, the very same exaggeration, cumbersome, megalomaniac, and fictitious, the same abuse of spasmodic decoration, and Romanity in papier-mâché’ that was evident in all of Brasini’s theatrical projects.45 Even Ojetti, Brasini’s champion in the recent past, questioned the extensive demolitions required by Brasini’s plans. Brasini responded to Ojetti by appealing to the Baroque: ‘I do not see buildings but just architectural motives, necessary to form a stage for beautiful scenari [settings].’ Brasini even claimed Bernini as his precedent, appealing to an urban approach that mimicked what he claimed ‘was done, in greater dimensions, for St Peter’s piazza; and I believe that even then too there were many polemics’.46 The use of the term scenari, too, is central to understanding Brasini’s theatrical imperatives: Brasini (who had worked as a film set designer) conceived his urban projects as theatrical sets, designed to provide the background for a ritual performance of the city rather than for the daily life of people.47 Perhaps in response to this influx of negative responses, after the approval of the 1931 urban plan of Rome, Brasini’s project was shelved.48 Still, the architect refused to admit defeat; instead he claimed that the ‘Via dell’Impero’ – now Via dei Fori Imperiali, which opened in 1932 and still remains a favourite tourist spot in Rome due to its accentuation of the city’s Roman past – was a reduced version of his own project.49 As he wrote to Mussolini in 1938, ‘What little I have been able to accomplish in the renewal of Rome I could realise by being faithful to Your directions, so that it was possible for me, following Your precise order of making visible the Colosseum, to first envisage the Via dell’Impero’. Despite his seeming insistence, Brasini was careful to not take too much credit for the Via dell’Impero, ‘which, if it resulted in a road of exceptional importance, it is not for the merit of governors, ideologues, or executioners: but only because of Your great vision’.50 Regardless of the fruition of Brasini’s grand project, a paradox remains: many of the buildings and spaces that would have been demolished if Brasini’s Via Imperiale had been realised were from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, Brasini’s proposals were rife with Baroque elements, and not only because of their colossal scale and cost, theatricality and grandeur. It was Pope Sixtus V, with his architect Domenico Fontana, who first approached the renovation of Rome at an urban scale rather than focusing on single sections, planning avenues that would crisscross the city and centre on points of interest marked by obelisks – the same approach Brasini would take.51 This entailed the demolition of older quarters, but, for Baroque Popes, rendering the city a grand capital was a more pressing concern than historical preservation. Seventeenth-century popes thus transformed what had been a relatively small city into a metropolis through systematic demolitions that opened dramatic vistas, an approach also echoed by Brasini. Under Sixtus V and his successors, the piazza also changed its function: from a civic and public role, it became the setting for the exaltation of authority – as in the case of St Peter’s square and Brasini’s Foro Mussolini. Finally, as Medina Lasansky has pointed

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Baroque memories out, about ‘inventive self-promotion, Mussolini learned the most from Sixtus V’, as both the Pope and the Duce were often portrayed surrounded by the urban sites they were renovating.52 Brasini was not the only one to underscore the parallels between Mussolini’s and Sixtus V’s ideologies. In fact the reading of Fascism as a revival of the Counter-Reformation had informed many cultural debates immediately after the March on Rome. In 1923, in a book that analysed the connections between Fascist ideology and George Sorel’s revolutionary syndicalism (and that built upon his response to de Chirico in Valori plastici), Malaparte described Fascism as an anti-modern, anti-European, and quintessentially Italian rebellion against the rationalist, materialist, and Germanic ideology of the Reformation.53 In his preface Soffici expanded on this idea, emphasising that the causes of what he perceived as Italian decadence were linked to Italy’s adoption of a ‘Protestant mentality’, which provoked the loss of the ‘native character, serene, measured, realistic in the ancient and classical sense’ of Italian cultural production, politics, and moral character. To emphasise the ‘anti-Reformation’ character of Fascism was, for Soffici, to restore the properly ‘Italian, that is Latin, that is universal’ character of Italy.54 Croce – who at the time was working on his History of the Baroque Era in Italy, published in 1929 – regarded these debates with interest. Although he could find similarities between the Seicento and his own time – and label both as examples of ‘decadence’ and popularisation, as well as exploitation of culture at the service of political power – Croce feared that the frequent evocation of the Counter-Reformation masked the fundamental void of Fascist ideology, as I will address in Chapter 6.55 After the signing in 1929 of the Lateran Pacts, which marked the reconciliation between the Italian state and the Catholic Church, the alleged affinities between Sixtus V and Mussolini became the subject of several books. Augusto Zucconi, director of the Catholic publishing house Desclée, described Mussolini as a ‘historical return’ of Sixtus V.56 The journalist Ugo Cuesta described Sixtus V as a ‘Fascist pope’, and among the similarities between the Pope and Mussolini he singled out their impulsive approach to politics as well as their commitment to realpolitik.57 Brasini’s juxtaposition of Mussolini with Sixtus V was not merely a rhetorical flourish but part of a widespread discourse on the similarities between the Counter-Reformation and Fascism.58 That the Baroque (and Catholic propaganda) were simultaneously models and adversaries for Fascist spectacle is revealed by Brasini’s 1937 proposal for the new Fascist headquarters in Rome. Brasini described his (never-built) project for the Mole Littoria as ‘bigger than St. Peter’s’, submitting to Mussolini a meticulous drawing in which his proposed building purposefully dwarfed the spiritual centre of Catholicism, as ‘its diameter was the same as that of the Pantheon’.59 Brasini’s proposals for the redesign of Piazza Colonna and the Campus Martius were influenced by a Baroque approach to the city that favoured set design over practicality – their description by contemporaries as having ‘flame and dazzle’ was, if nothing else, warranted.60 And although they ultimately would not be implemented, they shaped

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5.8  Armando Brasini, ‘Modello della Mole Littoria, più grande di S. Pietro’, 7 February 1937

Mussolini’s views on city planning, which relied heavily upon the destruction of existing buildings, the so-called ‘sventramenti’ (literally, ‘gutting’, ‘disembowelment’). Like Brasini’s proposals, Fascist urban projects aspired to destroy the palimpsest of Rome’s architectural history in favour of a more streamlined image, one that conscientiously fashioned a direct

Baroque memories link between the Fascist present and its selective, distant past; all of this architectural reimagination, in turn, monumentalised the public space, transforming it into a scenographic but inhospitable space of political ritual.61

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Brasini the baroquephile In 1929 Brasini was inducted into the Accademia d’Italia, an institution modelled upon the Académie Française and tasked to augment the cultural capital of Fascism. He was directly nominated by Mussolini, who admired his ‘tendency towards set design’, as he claimed in an interview.62 Despite this conspicuous acclaim Brasini’s proposals for urban renewal were not implemented. Concerns about cost and practicality came into consideration, though other Fascist urban projects also destroyed extensive sections of the city. Nevertheless, in the late 1920s Brasini received two commissions that allow us to see the import of Baroque architecture on his own practice in Rome: the INAIL and the Convento del Buon Pastore (Convent of the Good Shepherd). A comparison between these two buildings – one commissioned by the state, the other by a religious order – reveals how Brasini adapted the Baroque approach to architecture and decoration to two structures made during the interwar period, and the temporary marriage between Fascist values and the whimsical Seicento style. Writing in 1927, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, one of the most innovative promoters of the Italian and foreign avant-garde in interwar Rome, stated: Even if architect Brasini, the praised Baroquephile, knew always infallibly how to recreate the spirit of seventeenth-century architects, and never failed in the taste of these rehashes […] even then he would remain, in historical comparisons, a diligent and studious artist; but certainly not equipped with the powerful attributes that allow a genius to give shape and expression to an era. Brasini would be an architect if he had invented the Baroque. As such, he is a falsifier.63 Whether as an inventor of a style or a mere revivalist, Brasini conceived of INAIL and the Convento del Buon Pastore as monuments: Their scale and position make them visible from afar, and their dazzling appearance and surplus aesthetic value – their Baroqueness, in sum – emphasise their status as modern landmarks. Both buildings, too, require distance in order to appreciate their size; from such distance, however, they also conceal their modernity, appearing instead as an integral part of the Roman historical landscape. Yet both buildings also reveal a profound truth about revivals that escaped Bragaglia: that stylistic nomenclatures are fictions that, far from aspiring to return to the past, reactivate it to serve the concerns of the present.64 Such an epiphany raises the question: Which concerns of the late 1920s were given shape by Brasini’s neo-Baroque? To answer said question, one must begin at the building for INAIL, which was commissioned by the National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work.65 Because

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Baroquemania the office represented Fascism’s championing of the working class, a prime spot in the heart of Rome’s historic centre was chosen, thereby signifying the office’s importance. The building, therefore, sits in Via Quattro Novembre, which connects Piazza Venezia and the Vittoriano or Altar of the Fatherland – key ritual sites of Fascism – with Via Nazionale, one of the throughways opened after unification to connect the city centre with the railway station. Because the site rests on the slopes of the Quirinal Hill, Brasini and engineer Guido Zevi had to design the building to sit on unlevel ground. The surrounding structures posed another challenge: the INAIL stands near Palazzo Colonna, the seat of the princely family, and it adjoins the palazzo’s famous terraced Baroque gardens; on the other side of the hill, too, is the Palazzo del Quirinale, the Pope’s former residence, redesigned during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Brasini wrote to Ojetti, ‘I had to do something in the style of the Seicento, to reconnect with the Villa Colonna and the Quirinal, where everything is built between the end of the 1500s and the 1700s’.66 Ambientismo, once more, ruled Brasini’s decisions, yet his building is not a mere replica of a Baroque building. Brasini designed the INAIL to sit at the same level as the Baroque nymphaeum on the Colonna gardens, thereby forming an ideal continuation. The façade has two distinct levels in travertine and brick respectively, two materials with a long pedigree in Rome’s architecture, and the building’s concave entrance welcomes visitors to the building. Whilst the same strategy would be used by Capponi too, here it is paired with a richly textured rustication. Crowned by a balustrade, which visually extends the one in the Colonna nymphaeum, the ground floor has a rounded-arched portal, inspired by the Baroque fountain of Aqua Paola located on the Janiculum Hill. The symmetry of the building is broken by a belfry on the left, pierced by openings on all four sides. The central courtyard, too, mirrors this complexity, necessary to combat the topographical unevenness of the site. Clearly, Brasini did not shy away from irregularity: although the courtyard is bilaterally symmetrical, every floor has a different height and decorative patterns. On the ground floor, a central portal topped by a trapezoidal window is flanked by two entrances that mimic Baroque fake perspectives. Although the façade has three levels, the INAIL is actually seven storeys high. The building was criticised because of its height, and ironically called ‘Torre Brasini’ due to its resemblance to an American-style skyscraper; notably, in cartoons published at the time, the building is represented as a modernist block, ornamentation completely absent. The engineering feat of constructing such a tall building on uneven ground marked INAIL as a modern structure and concealed its ambition to fit seamlessly within its site. The author of this cartoon even juxtaposed Brasini’s building with the outline of St Peter’s basilica (and represented a horrified Michelangelo) to emphasise how out of place the INAIL was in Rome, how little ambientismo had been respected. Brasini responded by defending the orthodoxy of his design and its relation to the Roman Baroque architectural tradition: ‘It is a grave mistake to confuse with an American architecture a building that is greatly inspired by our Roman seventeenth-century architecture […] and which aspires to harmonise with the architectural character of its site.’ 67 As modern architecture was

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Baroque memories

5.9  Armando Brasini, Istituto Nazionale per la Assicurazione contro gli Infortuni sul Lavoro (1926–1929) 5.10  The INAIL building as an American skyscraper, Marc’Aurelio (23 March 1931)

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Baroquemania often accused of being internationalist, Germanic, Bolshevik, or foreign, Brasini took pains to emphasise the indigenous nature of his style. Yet it would be precisely the importance of the site, the height of the building, and its Baroque magniloquence that would ultimately undermine the INAIL commission. Mussolini considered it a form of architectural hubris, and famously declared it ‘an authentic accident that happened precisely to the Insurance against Accidents’.68 A closer look at Mussolini’s full quotation, however, shows that he did not really question the style of the building but rather its use, and the megalomania of the INAIL administrators. The building appeared too important for the institution it hosted, so INAIL was forced to cede a few floors to house a circle of aviation officers. When designing the INAIL building, Brasini considered the historical continuity between the site, its history, and the new construction to be of paramount importance. The use of the Baroque was thus justified to complement the Baroque style of the preexisting structures. This focus on structural coherence is precisely the approach that Giovannoni, and defenders of ambientismo, would take. For someone standing at the beginning of Via Quattro Novembre in Piazza Venezia, the INAIL forged an ideal continuity between the classicising past, represented by the Vittoriano, the heroic Papacy, represented by the Quirinale Palace, and the Fascist present, represented by Mussolini’s headquarters in Palazzo Venezia. The Baroque, however, was not just employed to create unity among pre-existing buildings. When planning the Convento del Buon Pastore in Forte Bravetta, located on the outskirts of Rome where no extant structure existed, Brasini also relied on the Baroque.69 The patrons for this gigantic building (it occupies an area of 12,000 square metres and currently lodges three state schools) were the order of nuns of the Congregazione di Nostra Signora della Carità del Buon Pastore di Angers. The nuns, who often worked with former prostitutes, had commissioned it to be their residence and novitiate, as well as a hospital and a residence for orphaned girls. Brasini began work on the Convento in 1929, but it was not completed until 1943. Because of its isolation, Brasini chose to design the convent as a sort of religious bastion, more a fortress than a welcoming structure. Brasini was aware of this potentially surprising connotation of the building: ‘This work, judged bizarre, has its own uncommon originality, and its thin central cupola forms, with the rest of the building, a vast complex that looks like a citadel’, he wrote about the Buon Pastore.70 This was not the first religious commission that Brasini had received. His association with the style most identified with the triumphant Catholic Church spurred his commission of religious structures. Though commissions were frequent, however, none of his religious projects was carried to completion as he envisioned, except for the Buon Pastore. In 1921, for example, Brasini designed a dome for the Church of Sant’Ignazio, which would have finally completed the structure at the expense of Andrea Pozzo’s famous trompe l’oeil dome (1685) – a neo-Baroque structure demolishing a Baroque masterpiece of illusion and deceit. Suffice it to say, the project was not completed. In 1923, too, construction began for the Chiesa del Cuore Immacolato di Maria in the upscale Parioli neighbourhood.

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Baroque memories If it had been completed according to Brasini’s plan, its dome would have been as big as St Peter’s, but to this day it remains unfinished.71 Given these repeated hurdles to Brasini’s religious commissions, the Buon Pastore finally gave the architect the opportunity to put to practice his decades-long contemplation of Baroque space and ornamentation; this long-awaited release of creative energy might explain why Brasini’s structure grew so starkly in size and embellishment, despite the horror of the religious congregation that commissioned it. As so often happened during Brasini’s projects, throughout the construction of Buon Pastore, the cost of the project continually increased so as to accommodate the architect’s ever-expanding vision. 72 One of the nuns recounts that Brasini, instead of designing a space that would be practical for the use they required, cunningly ignored the Mother General’s requests for more simplicity and gave rise to unnecessary structures, not foreseen at all either in the plan or in the contract […] We cite only one example: on one of his visits to Rome, the Mother General saw a pyramid or granite spire on one of the corners of the roof. She protested strongly against this waste: it was fantastical and elaborate. The architect did not give in to the insistence of Mother General to remove them (there were four), even managed to wrest the consent of Mother General to leave them in their place. On the next visit to Rome, she found not four but thirty-six pinnacles!73 It is as if Brasini was finally allowed to realise his dream of being an inventive and extravagant Baroque architect unshackled by practical concerns. The Buon Pastore’s excessive embellishments reveal an anxiety about modernism’s push for the abolition of ornament and its power to move the bodies that inhabit architecture. As Alina Payne has shown, ornament was ‘profoundly a part of architecture’s rhetorical apparatus since time immemorial’; to the silence of rationalist architecture, Brasini countered the cacophony of his neo-Baroque structures.74 If rationalists like Bardi (and Capponi) envisioned an architecture that aligned with industrial processes and mass production, Brasini celebrated the handcrafted and bespoke. Unlike many of its modernist counterparts, the sheer size and design complexity of the Buon Pastore resists description. At the centre stand the chapel and a courtyard; two massive wings flank this central structure. Only historic photographs can still convey its magnitude, as new constructions have encroached upon it since then. From the outside the impression is that of a guarded structure, with a receding and protruding façade animated by multiple volumes and crowned by a central pointed dome. The interior is labyrinthine, interrupted by smaller courtyards, twisting corridors, and multiple entryways. These convoluted internal schemes make physical orientation difficult – not a practical feature in an educational or religious building but one that, through conflict and asymmetry, keeps visitors constantly engaged and alert. The architect Robert Venturi, one of the first international champions of Brasini as a postmodernist ante litteram, and as an example of the complexity and contradiction

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5.11  Armando Brasini, Convent of the Good Shepherd under construction (1929–1943)

that Venturi proposed as challenges to international modernism, described the Buon Pastore in this way: ‘At all levels of scale it is an example of inflections within inflections successively directed toward different centres […] You are aware of elements related by inflection to elements already seen or not yet seen, like the unravelling of a symphony.’ 75 The visitor’s attention cannot settle on a single element, but is constantly stirred with terraces at different levels, broken pediments, blind windows, arches, columns, and pinnacles. Against functionalism, Brasini’s Buon Pastore celebrates excess and superfluousness. It allows visitors to experience a building that seems not to belong to its own time, and that constantly dazzles and surprises. Embodying the building’s astonishing aspect, the spire on the cupola recalls Borromini’s fanciful corkscrew lantern of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza. A side-by-side comparison between the two edifices, however, reveals not only Brasini’s debts to but also his creative reinterpretation of the Baroque: The spire looks like an amalgamation of Sant’Ivo’s helical tower and the bell towers of the Church of Sant’Agnese (also designed by Borromini), albeit at a grander scale and with additional detailing such as volutes and scrolls. Instead of the two-level portico of Sant’Ivo, Brasini created a colonnade that both projects and recedes, creating a sense of suspension and uncertainty in the viewer. Brasini’s homage to Borromini is explicit, too, in the heraldic symbols incorporated throughout the building, including the stars and the mounts that represent the Chigi, the family of Alexander VII and the last patron of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza.76 Whilst still acknowledging his stylistic

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Baroque memories

5.12  Courtyard of Convento del Buon Pastore

muses like Borromini, Brasini also presented himself as a modern Baroque architect working for a Papal patron (although this was not the case): flanking the entrance he incorporated the coat of arms of Pope Pius XI. Unlike with INAIL, there seems to have been no public questioning about the Buon Pastore. This was not a state-sponsored building, so its cost and extravagance were not of public concern. Yet it provoked the ire of rationalist architects – their opposition to extravagance and unessential decoration doomed their reception of the Convento. Bardi wrote in Quadrante that the Convento del Buon Pastore looked like ‘an enchanted castle, a refuge for magicians, dragons, snakes with ten thousand heads? Impossible to define. Impossible to describe […] The result is fantastically monstrous. A twist of frames, tympani, balls, arches, columns; a succession of niches, railings, shelves; a variety of materials; pinnacles, bell towers, windows of a hundred dimensions, different things all inconceivable.’ 77 References to fairy tales, ubiquitous ornamentation, lack of symmetry – all anathema to the rationalists – singled out Brasini as a culturalist architect who viewed architecture as an irrational and whimsical tradition rather than as a modernist response to construction and form.78 For the rationalists, ‘modern’ meant unadorned, true to form, with clarity of function: a metaphor for the efficient Fascist state they envisioned. For Brasini, by contrast, ‘modern’ meant awe-inspiring and spectacular. Though different at their core, both notions of modernity were central to the Fascist regime, which, throughout its twenty years, attempted to mediate between forward- and backward-looking impulses, and to merge innovation with tradition.79 The structural ambivalence of the Baroque – associated with the Catholic

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Church, with Decadentism, with liberal pre-First World War Italy – prevented the neoBaroque from becoming Fascist state architecture. Yet buildings such as INAIL and the Buon Pastore complicate a still-dominant view of interwar Italian architecture; instead, they show challenges to modernism posed not by anti-modern perspectives but rather by alternative visions of what modernity could be. 80

The rationalist Baroque: Giuseppe Capponi, a ‘white collar Borromini’ 81 It is undeniable that the Baroque held, at its core, an ever-shifting meaning for Italian interwar architects: For Fasolo the Baroque stood for a repertoire that he could utilise (as he could use those of other periods of architectural history) to convey a sense of place. For Brasini Seicento urban and architectural visions shaped his projects in substantial ways as they were revived at the service of Fascist politics. In contrast to both, Giuseppe Capponi was not concerned with the historical Baroque, either as a set of decorative motifs or as a specific artistic period. His Palazzina Nervi Nebbiosi evokes the seventeenth century only on a purely formal level; unlike his contemporaries, Capponi condensed the Baroque’s manifold interpretations, accrued over the period I have thus far examined, into an abstracted form: protrusive and receding masses, concave and convex curves. This building, because of its elemental abstraction, answers a version of the question that animates this chapter: how can one achieve a Fascist, modern, Italian, rationalist architecture in Rome? Like Fasolo, Capponi was a civil engineer by training.82 He struggled to enter the very close-knit Roman architectural world and had to work as a salesperson for some years. It was through these business travels, which often took him to Germany, that he became acquainted with the most recent developments of modernist architecture – an exposure that, in turn, would shape his brief career as an architect. Rationalists such as Capponi aspired to make buildings that were modernist but also conveyed a sense of Italian identity.83 As early as 1926, when the Gruppo 7 (seven young architects, most of whom were based in the industrial city of Milan) presented its first public pronouncement, these architects aspired to mediate between the new international style – that of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe – and the Italian vernacular tradition. As they proclaimed, ‘Between our past and our present there is no incompatibility. We do not want to break with tradition: it is tradition that transforms, adopts new aspects, so that few can recognise it.’ 84 Rather the rationalists carefully chose the tradition they harked back to, and their choice vehemently excluded the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As they explained in their manifesto, ‘the new forms of architecture should receive their aesthetic value solely from necessity, and only after, through selection, will they obtain a style’; rationalist architecture thereby subsisted upon rationality, functionalism, logic, constructivism, respect of materials to fashion their style, whereas the Baroque, Beaux-Arts, and historicist architecture opted, instead, for elements like additive ornamentation.85 Rationalists then appealed to the concept of mediterraneità

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5.13  Giuseppe Capponi, Façade of Palazzina Nervi Nebbiosi, 1927–1930

(Mediterraneity) to argue that their austere buildings – which many accused of being fundamentally alien to the Italian tradition – sprang from ancestral Italian traditions that shared this same aesthetic.86 For the Gruppo 7 utilitarian Roman classicism (understood as a commitment to symmetry, balance, and purity of form) was quintessentially Italian architecture.87 Yet many critics noted that, for other rationalists, especially those working in Rome – formed under the aegis of Giovannoni and encountering daily the work of Fasolo and Brasini, in which the late Renaissance and the Baroque modelled an indigenous vernacular – it was impossible to ignore the presence of other rooted local traditions beyond classicism that should also be considered as autochthonous to Italy.88 One of the buildings that expressed this push was Capponi’s Palazzina Nervi Nebbiosi, designed in 1927 and completed in 1930. A palazzina, literally ‘little palace’, is an urban low-rise and low-density building designed for the middle and upper-middle classes. The exterior of Capponi’s palazzina is remarkable for its elegant play between protruding and receding volumes. Whilst the ground floor has a convex portico, the higher storeys are distributed around a concave central body. The smooth travertine exterior is punctuated by a series of rectangular windows, framed by rectangular detailing around their perimeter. The top level, however, which separates a series of terraces, has

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Baroquemania rounded arched windows. Finally, the interior, decorated only through the colour and texture of materials such as marble and alabaster,.89 centres on a dramatic corkscrew staircase – celebrated by Giò Ponti in a detailed article he devoted to this building in Domus.90 A comparison between Carlo Broggi’s building in Testaccio and Capponi’s reveals the uniqueness of the latter’s rationalist neo-Baroque. Whilst for Broggi the reference to the

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5.14  Staircase of Palazzina Nervi Nebbiosi

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5.14 (Continued)

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Baroquemania seventeenth century implied ornamental profusion, Capponi eschewed any decoration intended as an addition to the construction. This is not to say his building is devoid of elegant forms of decoration, however – for example, Capponi included carefully chosen plaques of marble whose veins create patterns and alabaster lamps that produce a soft-focus illumination – but they are integral to the construction materials rather than applied to them. The Baroque references in the Palazzina Nervi Nebbiosi extend beyond the building’s mere decorative aspect, too, and ground themselves in the peculiar volumes of the façade, constructed through the play of convexity and concavity. A trained eye might detect that Capponi was inspired by Bernini’s Sant’Andrea al Quirinale, which also has a concave portico. The Palazzina’s façade is also reminiscent of Pietro da Cortona’s Santa Maria della Pace (1656–1667), which also has a semicircular pronaos, or of the stagelike shape of Filippo Raguzzini’s Sant’Ignazio Square (1728), in which the buildings create a dramatic interplay of protruding and receding façades. Yet whilst with Fasolo, Brasini, or even Broggi one can at once trace back the references to specific Baroque buildings, the same is not possible with Capponi. Unlike his contemporaries, Capponi distilled the lesson of the Baroque and actualised it according to rationalist principles of economy of means and simplicity. As the architect was so thoroughly enmeshed in rationalist principles, Capponi’s choice raises the question: Why choose the Baroque as a reference while designing a residential building? To answer the question one must first examine the location of the Palazzina Nervi Nebbiosi. Like the zone around the Liceo Mamiani, the Flaminio area where the Palazzina is located was developed after the 1911 exhibitions. It extended the city beyond the Porta del Popolo, next to the piazza of the same name, with its twin Baroque churches – one of the limits of Rome’s historic city centre. A neo-Baroque building, Giulio Magni’s Ministry of the Navy (1912–1923) gave its stylistic notes to the area – much like Calderini’s Palace of Justice had done so in the area of the Liceo Mamiani. We might suppose, then, that, like Fasolo and Brasini before him, and like other Roman rationalists, Capponi also rooted his rationalist design in the history and urban fabric of its area – a history entangled with the 1911 neo-Baroque rather than with its seventeenth-century precedents. Whilst Fasolo encouraged architects to cultivate a mental archive, Capponi called for the ‘great gift of beautiful and pure ignorance’, which would enable them to create in a spontaneous way. Capponi described rationalist architecture as that which is ‘free from false traditionalism’ and which looks at machines not ‘as the only and essential inspiration of every new architectural expression’ but a ‘faithful and beautiful collaborator […] that gives us joy’. 91 Sounding like an explicit rebuttal of Le Corbusier’s famous theory of houses as ‘machines to live in’, Capponi’s statements allude to his stance against machinist and impersonal architecture, instead envisioning an emotional architecture still free from conventional notions of the past. Yet this rational architecture is not unmoored and international: It is Italian, Capponi argues, and it is Fascist. It aspires to ‘fix with works

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Baroque memories the spirit of our New Renaissance […] with the enthusiasm of the youth and the will of a Single Man’.92 Like Sarfatti on behalf of Brasini, Capponi, too, explicitly appealed to Mussolini. The modernism of the Palazzina Nervi Nebbiosi was clear to his rationalist colleagues who often described it as ‘the most modern house of Rome’.Yet Bardi and other rationalists had strong anti-Baroque feelings, as demonstrated by their reception of Brasini’s Buon Pastore, which complicates our understanding of their admiration for a building that many contemporaries, starting with Roberto Papini, viewed as a reinterpretation of the Baroque. In a report on Italian architecture that he gave to Mussolini after the Second Exhibition of Rational Architecture, for example, Bardi attacked the culturalists’ obsession with imitating styles of the past, and exhorted his contemporaries: ‘Fascists must be Fascists, and not baroques, fake Romans, citizens of Sixtus [V] and Leo [XI]’ – a not too subtle reference to Brasini’s hailing of Mussolini as the heir of Baroque popes.93 Bardi concluded that ‘Mussolini does not have a Bernini but here is a group of young people who can serve him well. Mussolini will have his architects, Fascist architects.’ 94 For Bardi, rationalism was the antithesis of the excessive Baroque, which he attacked as the source of culturalist architecture. Yet Capponi was not the only rationalist to harness Baroque influences in order to produce a modern architecture in close dialogue with both tradition and regional specificity. The architectural historian Giorgio Muratore has diagnosed Capponi, Enrico del Debbio, and Luigi Moretti’s fascination with ‘a certain Baroque transgressive spirit’ as ‘an academic corrective to certain exasperated futurist influences’; whilst in 1924 Papini had diagnosed the return to the Baroque as anti-academic in nature, by the 1930s this same return challenged the avant-garde ‘clean slate’ approach and its internationalism.95 The reimagination of the Baroque among Roman rationalists indicates that, for some, the value of the style was no longer questioned and that it could be extracted from the negative associations of the Seicento. Fully digested, the Baroque became the source for vernacular forms that could be appropriated in rationalist buildings. In an obituary after Capponi’s sudden death in 1936, Piacentini defined the work of his younger colleague as a dialectic between two types of forces: ‘the fantastical and the rational’. Capponi was a rationalist, but for Piacentini ‘he never enslaved his art, his sentiment, to mere functionalism’.96 Piacentini’s reading might be the key to understanding Capponi’s body of work, seldom explored in the literature on Italian interwar architecture because of his early death and few completed buildings. Whilst his architecture did not engage with the Baroque as strategically as Fasolo or systematically as Brasini, Capponi’s Palazzina Nervi Nebbiosi adds an essential element in this book’s narrative. It reveals the ways in which the Baroque could be reduced to a purely formal approach to volume and utilised in an anti-ornamental way, as part of the vernacular – not the classical – vocabulary of Italian architecture. Rationalists like Capponi concluded that modern architecture needed to be Italian and that the Baroque was one of the elements of this tradition – an element that added a whimsical, inventive, imaginative component integral to the alleged

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Baroquemania ‘Italian genius’. But as a modernist Capponi distilled the elements and gestures of seventeenth-century architecture so that all that remained was the dramatic counterpoint of concave and convex forms.97 Despite the originality of Fasolo’s, Brasini’s, and Capponi’s work, the Baroque did not become central to Fascist architectural debates – which explains why these architects are not part of the usual canon of Italian interwar architecture. Perhaps the problem with the architectural Baroque was that it could not be disciplined and turned into something unitary, as Piacentini had been able to do with classicists and rationalists by the mid-1930s. It could hardly promote a unitary collective identity. Identified as it had been since 1911 with unity within variation, with regionalism within the nation, with ecclesiastical as well as secular values, it had little space for the identity that the regime promoted to replace all the others, that of the Fascist. The Baroque was also too associated with excess, expense, and lack of discipline – as vividly conveyed by the debates surrounding Brasini’s projects – and thus it contrasted with the military image that Mussolini wanted to impose upon Italians. It was a national style yet, unlike rationalism, it could not be confused with an internationalist tendency. Still it was not sufficiently disciplined. Excess, a term that since the Enlightenment had been associated with the Ancien Régime (both Baroque and Rococo), was easily identified with corruption: at odds with Mussolini’s famous dictum ‘Fascism is a house of glass’, the adoption of the Baroque as the Fascist architectural style, therefore, would have revealed the financial unscrupulousness and bureaucratic bloat integral to the regime’s functioning. The Baroque was also seen as an individualistic form of architecture, expressing the subjective whims of the architect. By contrast Mussolini wanted the personality of the architect to be subdued so that he could take credit for it, as Brasini had intuited, and so that buildings did not express the personal views of the designers but rather the prestige of the regime. Unable to fully mediate the tension between the Baroque and the Fascist state, Capponi died young, and Fasolo and Brasini were only tangentially or not at all involved in the design of the major Fascist-sponsored urban projects of the 1930s. Yet the work of all three is worthy of consideration in the longue durée of the modern Baroquemania. A cartoon by Mino Maccari and Leo Longanesi published in the Fascist journal Il Selvaggio (TheWild One) reveals that what they called a ‘Baroque tempest’ loomed over the orderly rationalist and classicist buildings patronised by the regime.98 In the cartoon a boisterous whirlwind of cherubs and angels threatens to annihilate modernist structures with a spirited storm of flaming hearts and arrows – as the Baroque constantly endangered Fascist certitudes with its evocation of excess and exuberance. For the architects considered in this chapter, looking back at the Seicento was neither a nostalgic nor an anachronistic endeavour. They conceived of the Baroque as the starting point of an alternative modernity that could intensely express contemporary concerns. At the same time the failure of their proposal to adapt Baroque forms to Fascist ends reveals that the style was, at a fundamental level, unamenable to the propagandistic ends that it had served so well in the seventeenth century.

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Baroque memories

5.15  Mino Maccari and Leo Longanesi, ‘Tempesta barocca sul razionale’, Il Selvaggio (October 1933)

Notes 1 Giorgio Ciucci, Gli architetti e il Fascismo: architettura e città, 1922–1944 (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1989); Richard Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 1890–1940 (Boston: MIT Press, 1991); Diane Ghirardo, ‘Architects, Exhibitions, and the Politics of Culture in Fascist Italy’, Journal of Architectural Education 45, no. 2 (1992): 67–75; Vittorio Magnano Lampugnani, ‘Razionalismo e italianità. L’architettura italiana moderna tra cosmopolitismo e nazionalismo (1926–1936)’, in L’Europa e l’arte italiana, ed. Max Seidel (Venice: Marsilio, 2000); David Rifkind, The Battle for Modernism: ‘Quadrante’ and the Politicisation of Architectural Discourse in Fascist Italy (Vicenza: Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio – Marsilio, 2012). 2 Pier Maria Bardi, ‘Tavolo degli Orrori (tavola fuori testo e commento)’, Quadrante I, no. 2 (June 1933): 10. See Adrian Anagnost, ‘Limitless Museum: P. M. Bardi’s Aesthetic Reeducation’, Modernism/Modernity 26, no. 4 (2019): 687–725. 3 Ernesto Nathan Rogers, ‘Significato della decorazione dell’architettura’, Quadrante, no. 7 (November 1933): 19. 4 Ibid., 19. 5 Giorgio Ciucci, ‘Italian Architecture during the Fascist Period: Classicism between Neo- Classicism and Rationalism: The Many Souls of the Classical’, Harvard Architectural Review, no. 5 (1987): 76–87.

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Baroquemania 6 Roberto Papini, ‘Architetti giovani in Roma’, Dedalo XII, no. I (1932): 134–163, 148. 7 Ibid., 149. 8 Although out of the scope of this chapter, neo-Baroque buildings were also made in other Italian regions: see F. R., ‘Corriere architettonico. Edifici dell’Arch. Vittorio Morpurgo in Varese’, Architettura e arti decorative IX, no. V–VI (February 1930): 236–250; Marcello Piacentini, ‘Francesco Fichera architetto siciliano’, Architettura e arti decorative IX, no. X (June 1930): 433–460. 9 Paolo Nicoloso, Mussolini architetto: propaganda e paesaggio urbano nell’Italia Fascista (Turin: Einaudi, 2008); Paolo Nicoloso, Architetture per un’identità italiana: progetti e opere per fare gli italiani Fascisti (Udine: Gaspari, 2012). 10 Dennis P. Doordan, ‘The Political Content in Italian Architecture during the Fascist Era’, Art Journal 43, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 121–131. 11 Until then architecture could be studied either in engineering schools (in Turin and Milan at the Polytechnical Schools) or in Schools of Fine Arts. The Regia Scuola di Architettura was the first university institution to bypass the opposition between these two antithetical approaches to architecture, embracing both the technical and the artistic. 12 Guido Zucconi, ‘Gustavo Giovannoni: A Theory and a Practice of Urban Conservation’, Change Over Time 4, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 76–91, 77. 13 Gustavo Giovannoni, ‘Il “diradamento edilizio” dei vecchi centri. Il quartiere della Rinascenza a Roma’, Nuova antologia XLVIII, 997 (July 1913): 53–76; Piero Cimbolli Spagnesi, ‘Storicità di Gustavo Giovannoni e del suo “diradamento edilizio”’, in Gustavo Giovannoni. Riflessioni agli albori del XXI secolo., ed. Maria Piera Sette (Rome: Bonsignori Editore, 2005), 41–56. 14 Gustavo Giovannoni, ‘L’ambiente dei monumenti (Relazione per l’Associazione Artistica dei Cultori dell’Architettura, Roma 1918)’, cited and translated in Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 116. 15 Richard Etlin, ‘A Modern Vernacular Architecture’, Modernism in Italian architecture, 1890–1940, 129–164; Aristotle Kallis, ‘Rome’s Singular Path to Modernism: Innocenzo Sabbatini and the “Rooted”’ Architecture of the Istituto Case Popolari (ICP), 1925–30’, Papers of the British School at Rome 85 (October 2017): 269–301. 16 Bruno Crevato Selvaggi, ed., Vincenzo Fasolo dalla Dalmazia a Roma: vita e opere dell’architetto spalatino (Lido di Venezia: La Musa Talia Editrice, 2011). 17 Gustavo Giovannoni, ‘Discussioni didattiche’, in Questioni di architettura, 43–83, 56–57. 18 Maristella Casciato, ‘The Italian Mosaic: The Architect as Historian’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 62, no. 1 (2003): 92–101. 19 Vincenzo Fasolo, Analisi grafica dei valori architettonici (Rome: Istituto di storia dell’architettura, 1955), 3. 20 On school architecture in Italy see Stefano Brusaporci and Pamela Maiezza, ‘“La casa della scuola”: Architetture per l’istruzione nella prima metà del Novecento. Rilievo e conoscenza’, in Le ragioni del disegno, ed. by Marco Bini and Stefano Bertocci (Rome: Gangemi, 2016), 179–186. 21 Ghino Venturi, ‘I nuovi edifici scolastici del municipio di Roma’, Architettura e arti decorative III, no. XII (August 1924): 536–555, 548 and 536. 22 Edoardo and Duilio Susmel, eds, Opera omnia di Benito Mussolini, vol. XX (Florence: La fenice, 1956), 366. See also Jürgen Charnitzky, Fascismo e scuola. La politica scolastica del regime 1922–1943 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1996). 23 ‘Rione’ is the traditional subdivision of the areas of the Rome city centre or ‘centro storico’. Prati is the last rione to be created and it is the only one outside of the Aurelian and Leonine walls. All neighbourhoods formed in Rome after Prati are named ‘quartieri’ rather than ‘rioni’. The rione Prati was officially constituted in 1921.

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Baroque memories 24 Piero Ostilio Rossi, Roma: guida all’architettura moderna, 1909–1984 (Rome: Laterza, 2000), 24. 25 Roberto Papini, ‘Notizie varie. Note d’edilizia romana. Architetture di Carlo Broggi’, Architettura e arti decorative IV, no. III (November 1924): 126–131. 26 Roberto Papini, ‘Le Arti Decorative a Parigi nel 1925. Primo: L’Architettura’, Architettura e arti decorative V, no. V (January 1926): 201–233, 221. 27 See Luca Brasini, L’opera architettonica e urbanistica di Armando Brasini: dall’Urbe Massima al ponte sullo stretto di Messina (Rome: Arti grafiche joniche, 1979); Mario Pisani, Architetture di Armando Brasini (Rome: Officina edizioni, 1996); Elena Bassi, ‘Armando Brasini. Architetto imperiale per l’Italia Di Mussolini, 1923–1938’ (BA dissertation, Facoltà di Architettura di Trieste, 2006). 28 Paolo Orano, L’urbe massima: l’architettura e la decorazione di Armando Brasini (Rome: Formiggini, 1917). 29 Ibid., 81. 30 Ibid., 15–16. 31 John Agnew, ‘The Impossible Capital: Monumental Rome under Liberal and Fascist Regimes, 1870– ’, Geografiska Annaler 80, no. 4 (January 1998): 229–240; Borden W, Painter, Mussolini’s Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Paul Baxa, Roads and Ruins: The Symbolic Landscape of Fascist Rome (Toronto, Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2010); Aristotle Kallis, The Third Rome, 1922–1943:The Making of the Fascist Capital (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 32 Orano, L’urbe massima, 15–16. 33 Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Un Architetto: Brasini’, Il Giornale d’Italia (1 May 1923). 34 Armando Brasini to Ugo Ojetti, April 1923, Fondo Ugo Ojetti – 287-77, Archivio Storico della Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (Rome), from now on ASGNAM. See also Flavio Fergonzi, ‘Dalla monumentomania alla scultura arte monumentale’, in Flavio Fergonzi and Paolo Fossati, eds, La scultura monumentale negli anni del Fascismo: Arturo Martini e il monumento al Duca d’Aosta (Turin: U. Allemandi, 1992), 135–204; Martina Carraro and Massimiliano Savorra, eds, Pietre ignee cadute dal cielo. I monumenti della Grande Guerra (Venice: Ateneo Veneto: 2014); Laura Wittman, The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). 35 Armando Brasini to Ugo Ojetti, April 1923, Fondo Ugo Ojetti 287 – 74, ASGNAM.Yet for the 1935 memorial for her son Roberto, Margherita Sarfatti commissioned Giuseppe Terragni, an architect with an aesthetics diametrically opposed to Brasini’s. See In cima. Giuseppe Terragni per Margherita Sarfatti – architetture della memoria del ’900, ed. Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2004). 36 Ugo Ojetti, ‘A tavola con Pogliaghi e Bombacci’, in Cose viste ([1924] Florence: Sansoni, 1951), 72–73. 37 Scritti e discorsi di Benito Mussolini, vol. IV (Milan: Hoepli, 1934), 93. 38 Antonio Cederna, Mussolini urbanista: lo sventramento di Roma negli anni del consenso (Rome: Laterza, 1979); Gian Paolo Consoli, ‘Dal primato della città al primato della strada: il ruolo del piano di Armando Brasini per Roma nello sviluppo della città Fascista’, in L’architettura nelle città italiane del XX secolo: dagli anniVenti agli anni Ottanta, ed. Vittorio Franchetti Pardo (Milan: Jaca Book, 2003), 203–211. 39 ‘L’insediamento del Primo Governatore di Roma’, Capitolium I, no. 10 (1926): 596. 40 ‘La ‘“Via Imperiale” e il “Foro Mussolini” in un nuovo progetto di Armando Brasini’, Il giornale d’Italia (17 July 1927). See also ‘Progetto dell’architetto Armando Brasini per la sistemazione del centro di Roma. Piano Finanziario di Massima’, Segreteria Particolare del Duce, Carteggio Ordinario 1922–43, b. 59, f. 500.019/I, ACS; Domenico delli Santi, ‘L’opera del governo Fascista per Roma’, Capitolium 3, no. 12 (1928): 637–656.

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Baroquemania 41 ‘La ‘“Via Imperiale” e il ‘“Foro Mussolini” in un nuovo progetto di Armando Brasini’. 42 Ibid. 43 Domenico Delli Santi, ‘L’opera del Governo Fascista per Roma’, Capitolium 3, no. 12 (1928): 637–658, 642–643. Aristotle Kallis, ‘The “Third Rome” of Fascism: Demolitions and the Search for a New Urban Syntax’, The Journal of Modern History 84, no. 1 (March 2012): 40–79, 61. See also Giorgio Ciucci, ‘Roma capitale imperiale’, in Giorgio Ciucci and Giorgio Muratore, eds, Storia dell’architettura italiana. Il primo Novecento (Milan: Electa, 2004), 396–414, 398–399; Aristotle Kallis, ‘“In Miglior Tempo …”: What Fascism Did Not Build in Rome’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 16, no. 1 (January 2011): 59–83. 44 Armando Brasini to Benito Mussolini, 23 October 1927, Segreteria Particolare del Duce, Carteggio Ordinario, Armando Brasini, 174.093, ACS. 45 Corrado Pavolini, ‘La Sistemazione di Roma e un nuovo progetto di Armando Brasini’, Il tevere (13 July 1927). 46 Armando Brasini to Ugo Ojetti, 11 April 1930, Fondo Ugo Ojetti – 287–45, ASGNAM. 47 Franco Borsi, L’architettura dell’unità d’Italia (Florence: Le Monnier, 1966), 207–211; Paolo Portoghesi, I grandi architetti del Novecento (Rome: Newton & Compton, 1998). 48 ‘La ‘“Via Imperiale” e il “Foro Mussolini” in un nuovo progetto di Armando Brasini’; Secretary of Benito Mussolini to Armando Brasini, 31 July 1927 and 12 September 1929, Segreteria Particolare del Duce, Carteggio Ordinario, Armando Brasini, 174.093, ACS. 49 Armando Brasini to Ugo Ojetti, 11 April 1930, Fondo Ugo Ojetti – 287 – 45, ASGNAM. 50 Armando Brasini to Benito Mussolini, 27 April 1938, Segreteria Particolare del Duce, Carteggio Ordinario, Armando Brasini, 174.093, ACS. 51 Spiro Kostof, ‘The Popes as Planners, 1450–1650’, in A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals, ed. Greg Castillo and Spiro Kostof (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 485–509; Dorothy Metzger Habel, ‘When All of RomeWas under Construction’:The Building Process in Baroque Rome (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013). 52 Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected, 14. 53 Kurt Erich Suckert (Curzio Malaparte), L’Europa vivente: teoria storica del sindacalismo nazionale (Florence: La Voce, 1923), 377–378. See Maria Rosa Chiapparo, ‘L’Europa Vivente de Curzio Malaparte: Contre-Réforme et Fascisme’, in Réforme et Contre-Réforme (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2008), 313–336. 54 Ardengo Soffici, ‘Prefazione a Curzio Malaparte’, in L’Europa vivente e altri scritti politici (Florence: Vallecchi, 1961), 647–648. 55 Benedetto Croce, ‘Controriforma’, La Critica. Rivista di letteratura, storia e filosofia 22 (1924): 321–333, 333. 56 Augusto Zucconi, Sisto quinto e Benito Mussolini: ritorni storici (Rome: Desclée & C., 1928). 57 Ugo Cuesta, Un papa Fascista (Rome: Augustea, 1929), 14–15, 14. 58 For a contemporary analysis of this analogy see Andrew Anker, ‘Il Papa e Il Duce: Sixtus V’s and Mussolini’s Plans for Rome’, Journal of Urban Design 1, no. 2 (June 1996): 165–178. 59 Flavia Marcello, ‘The Politics of Place: Citing and Re-siting the Palazzo Littorio, Mussolini’s New Fascist Party Headquarters in Rome’, Architectural Theory Review (December 2007), 146–172; Andrew J. Manson, ‘Rationalism and Ruins in Roma Mussoliniana: The 1934 Palazzo del Littorio Competition’ (doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 2015). 60 Domenico Delli Santi, ‘L’opera del governo Fascista per Roma’, 642, quoted in Donald Clinton and Karen Wilkin, Armando Brasini: Roma imperiale (Edmonton: Edmonton Art Gallery, 1978), 8. 61 Claudia Lazzaro, ‘Forging a Visible Fascist Nation. Strategies for Fusing Past and Present’, in Donatello among the Blackshirts, ed. Crum and Lazzaro, 13–31, 21. 62 Yvon De Begnac, Taccuini mussoliniani (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 326.

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Baroque memories 63 Anton Giulio Bragaglia, ‘Lo Stile Geometrico’, La stirpe (August 1927): 471–474. 64 Sarah Linford, ‘Comme si: rationalitè et fiction de la nomenclature stylistique’, Les nomenclatures stylistiques à l’épreuve de l’objet. Construction et déconstruction du langage de l’histoire de l’art, Institut Suisse- Académie de France à Rome, 24–26 October 2018. 65 Elisabetta Procida, curator of the Brasini archive, has published an extensive study of this building in Elisabetta Procida, ed., La sede storica dell’INAIL a Roma (Rome: INAIL, 2009). 66 Armando Brasini to Ugo Ojetti, 6 August 1929, Fondo Ugo Ojetti – 287 – 42, ASGNAM. 67 ‘Una lettera di Brasini per il Palazzo di Via Nazionale’, Il giornale d’Italia (4 January 1931). 68 Atti parlamentari, Senato del Regno (18 March 1932), 4874. 69 Two seventeenth-century structures – Villa York and the Casal Ninfeo – are in the vicinity but are not visible from Brasini’s convent. 70 Luca Brasini, L’opera architettonica e urbanistica di Armando Brasini: dall’Urbe Massima al ponte sullo stretto di Messina (Rome: Arti grafiche joniche, 1979). 71 Richard A. Etlin, ‘St. Peter’s in the Modern Era: The Paradoxical Colossus’, in St. Peter’s in the Vatican, ed. William Tronzo (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 270–304. 72 Suor Maria Eufrasia Littel, ‘Bravetta’ (Casa Provinciale Suore del Buon Pastore, 1982), 7ff. 73 Ibid., 10. 74 Alina Alexandra Payne, From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 1. 75 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 92. See also Robert Venturi, ‘Armando Brasini Revisited’, in his Iconography and Electronics upon a Generic Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 59–61. 76 John Beldon Scott, ‘S. Ivo alla Sapienza and Borromini’s Symbolic Language’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 41, no. 4 (December 1982), 294–317. 77 Pier Maria Bardi, ‘Corsivo n. 7’, Quadrante I, no. 2 (June 1933): 11. 78 Bardi, ‘Tavolo degli Orrori (tavola fuori testo e commento)’, 10. 79 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 80 Gabriele Tagliaventi, L’altra modernità 1900–2000: l’architettura classica e tradizionale nella costruzione della città del XX secolo (Savona: Dogma, 2000); Paolo Micalizzi, ‘L’“altra” modernità di Armando Brasini’, in L’architettura dell’’altra’ modernità, ed. Marina Docci (Rome: Gangemi, 2010), 414–423; Steven W. Semes, ‘Another Rome: The Architecture and Urbanism of Armando Brasini’, The Classicist, no. 10 (June 2013): 42–59. This latter article is, to my knowledge, the only monographic analysis of Brasini in English. 81 Capponi was often described as a ‘Borromini in maniche di camicia’. Enrico Valeriani, ‘Architetti a Roma: Giuseppe Capponi e altri’, in Giuseppe Capponi (1893–1936), ed. Paolo Cortese and Isabella Sacco (Rome: Gangemi, 1991), 13. 82 See Alberto Clementi, ‘Razionalismo e Novecento nell’opera di Giuseppe Capponi’, Rassegna dell’istituto di architettura e urbanistica, no. 10 (December 1974): 7–26; Paolo Cortese and Isabella Sacco, Giuseppe Capponi (1893–1936) (Rome: Gangemi, 1991); Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 1890–1940, 272–276. 83 Richard A Etlin, ‘Nationalism in Modern Italian Architecture 1900–1940’, in Nationalism in the Visual Arts, ed. Richard A. Etlin (Hanover: National Gallery of Art, 1991), 88–109, 99. 84 Gruppo 7, ‘Architettura I’, La rassegna Italiana (December 1926): 849–854. 85 Ibid., 854. 86 Giuseppe Pagano, ‘L’architettura moderna di venti secoli fa’, La casa bella III (1931): 332. See Silvia Danesi, ‘Aporie dell’architettura italiana in periodo Fascista – mediterraneità e purismo, in Il razionalismo e l’architettura in Italia durante il Fascismo, ed. Valerio Castronovo, Silvia Danesi, and Luciano Patetta (Milan: Electa, 1996), 21–28; Michelangelo Sabatino, ‘The Politics of

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Baroquemania Mediterraneità in Italian Modernist Architecture, in Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities, ed. Jean-François Lejeune and Michelangelo Sabatino (London: Routledge, 2010), 41–65. 87 Il Gruppo 7, ‘Architettura (II): Gli stranieri’, Rassegna italiana 19 (February 1927): 133–136; Il Gruppo 7, ‘Architettura (IV): Una nuova epoca arcaica, Rassegna italiana 19 (May 1927),: 471. 88 See Michele Biancale, ‘Il disordine artistico: Esposizione di Architettura Razionale’, Il popolo d’Italia (31 March 1928); Plinio Marconi, ‘Edilizia attuale in Roma’, Capitolium 8 (October 1932): 513. 89 On the use of marble in interwar Italy see David Rifkind, ‘The Radical Politics of Marble in Fascist Italy’, in Radical Marble: Architectural Innovation from Antiquity to the Present, ed. William Tronzo and Nicholas Napoli (New York: Routledge, 2018), 133–157. 90 Gio Ponti, ‘Palazzina Nebbiosi al Lungotevere Arnaldo da Brescia Architettata da Giuseppe Capponi, Domus. L’arte della casa IX, no. 57 (January 1931). 91 Giuseppe Capponi, ‘Per una architettura italiana moderna’, La tribuna (13 March 1931). 92 Ibid. 93 Pietro Maria Bardi, Rapporto sull’architettura (per Mussolini) (Rome: Critica Fascista, 1932), 84. 94 Ibid., 64. 95 Giorgio Muratore, ‘Architetture e arti decorative a Romo intorno al Trenta’, in Roma anni Trenta: gli elementi dell’architettura, ed. Beata Di Gaddo (Rome: Officina edizioni, 2001), 7–12, 12. 96 Marcello Piacentini, ‘Giuseppe Capponi Architetto (n. 1893–m. 1936)’, Architettura XVIII, no. V (May 1939): 267–282, 270 and 267. 97 Alberto Clementi, ‘Razionalismo e Novecento nell’opera di Giuseppe Capponi’, Rassegna dell’istituto di architettura e urbanistica, no. 10 (December 1974): 7–26, 10. 98 Michela Rosso, ‘Il Selvaggio 1926–1942: Architectural Polemics and Invective Imagery’, Architectural Histories 4, no. 1 (11 May 2016): 1–42.

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Form and formlessness: the reimagination of Baroque sculpture during Fascism

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n v i s i on two radically different sculptures made twenty years apart. Firstly, Adolfo Wildt’s haunting Santa Lucia (1926), whose luminous surface, skilful undercutting, and theatrical gesture are directly inspired by Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–1652). The pleading lips and rapturous expression of Bernini’s sculpture are echoed by Wildt, although he truncated the figure and framed Santa Lucia’s head with a golden halo on a polished marble slat.Wildt also hollowed out the saint’s eye sockets, producing a beseeching image of suffering and ecstasy. Santa Lucia is Wildt’s most explicitly Baroque sculpture, and the only one that directly cites a seventeenth-century precedent. However, even up to his death in 1931, many critics conjured the Baroque when analysing the entirety of Wildt’s oeuvre, calling attention to the sculptor’s technical skill and his preference for dramatic subject matter. Secondly, the Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana’s The Baroque Chair (1946). This sculpture of an imposing, seated figure was executed in Buenos Aires in the same year as the publication of the Manifiesto Blanco (White Manifesto), a text co-written by Fontana 6.1  Adolfo Wildt, Santa Lucia, 1926

6.2  Detail of Gianlorenzo Bernini, Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 1647–1652

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6.3  Lucio Fontana, The Baroque Chair, 1946

and his students that heralded a new synthesis of space, time, colour, sound, and movement, inspired by Baroque spatial experiments and Futurist dynamism.1 Rather than drama and theatricality, as is the case in Santa Lucia, The Baroque Chair uses the Baroque to signify the unresolved tension between movement and stasis. Such was the reading of Italian and Argentine critics, who described the Baroqueness of Fontana’s work as an ‘intensity, a vibration that distresses forms’.2 In the twenty years that separated Wildt’s and Fontana’s sculptures, thus, the Baroque shifted meaning: from a disciplined engagement with technique that kept materials under control to a vitalist and unresolved confrontation with matter. For the purposes of this book Wildt is important for two reasons. First of all, he systematically looked back to the Baroque (and to other past styles) both to counter the avant-garde’s internationalism and to produce an essentially Italian modern art. Furthermore Wildt was a key influence on the young Fontana and other postwar modernists such as

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Form and formlessness Luigi Broggini and Fausto Melotti.3 Fontana is well known as a paramount representative of the gestural aesthetics of postwar art, epitomised by his slash paintings, perforated canvases, and spatial environments.4 These, however, were the endpoint of a sculptural investigation that had begun more than thirty-five years earlier, in Wildt’s classes. Fontana was the son of Italian emigrants to Argentina. He studied in Italy, volunteered to fight in the First World War, and then returned to Rosario to work at his family’s funerary sculpture business. Though he won some important competitions in Argentina, Fontana left Rosario and moved to Milan in 1927. Fontana was, unfortunately, not as smitten with Italian sculpture as he initially hoped, proclaiming one exhibition ‘worse than the Buenos Aires salon’; however, all was not lost, as he wrote to a friend that the only sculptor worth seeing was Wildt, ‘who is truly marvellous’.5 Thus, he decided to study with Wildt. Fontana’s early works, like The Charioteer (1928, plaster, location unknown), reveal Wildt’s influence, particularly in the empty orbits of the horse and the sculpted muscles of the male figure. Even the typeface on the socle is similar to that often used by Wildt. Soon Fontana felt the need to produce a form of sculpture that, liberated from the dictates of sculptural tradition, engaged with materials in a less historically mediated way. Even so, the Baroqueness of Fontana’s work at the time – which, instead of the marble championed by Wildt, used materials such as ceramic, maiolica, plaster, and porcelain – was still unmistakable to many critics. In this chapter I will contrast the reception of Wildt’s and Fontana’s work as Baroque, and study how it manifests important shifts in the reimagination of Seicento art in the interwar period: from conceptualising the Baroque as a discipline of matter through technical prowess, to a clear-eyed, direct, and unmediated engagement with materials and social reality. This points to two competing interpretations of the Baroque – one emphasising the reaffirmation of form and the other the dissolution of form – that, by the 1940s, acquired distinctive political connotations.

‘The most original milanese sculptor’: Adolfo Wildt (1868–1931)6 Adolfo Wildt was born in Milan in 1868. His family could not afford to pay for his artistic training. He attended the Academy of Brera only for one year, and instead gained proficiency in sculpture by apprenticing with the scapigliato sculptor Giuseppe Grandi, famous for his impressionist plasticism, and Federico Villa, a sculptor who followed Canova’s tradition.7 Because of his non-academic training Wildt often emphasised his identity as an autodidact, downplaying the various artistic influences that had clearly shaped his artistic practice – a typically modernist move that Richard Schiff termed a ‘technique of originality’.8 Still, Wildt did not wholly embrace this modernist claim to originality and sometimes acknowledged his debt to past artistic traditions, often insisting that the source of his art was a diligent study of the Italian sculptural tradition.9 As a working-class apprenticesculptor Wildt could not afford to travel outside Milan and had no first-hand knowledge of canonical sculptures beyond his hometown. He encountered them, instead, through

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Baroquemania photographs. Such experience,Wildt claimed, allowed him to see in sculptural masterpieces something that was not visible even to their makers: ‘those small photographs had the great advantage of emphasising all the chiaroscuro of sculpture, and I spent many hours reflecting and studying them. When in later years I went to Florence and for the first time could see those masterpieces, I found out that those immortal works were inferior to those that I had studied and contemplated in photography.’ He added: ‘A critic said that I exaggerate in enhancing the chiaroscuro; but that is the secret of my art, a secret that I thought I had stolen from the great sculptors of the Cinquecento, but that I have actually taken only from the photographs of their masterpieces.’ 10 Wildt’s words exemplify a ‘rhetoric of substitution’, in Joel Snyder’s formula: the belief that viewing photographs is equivalent to (if not even better than) the direct experience of the artwork.11 For Wildt photography did not diminish but rather replaced the auratic power of the original. Indeed, he preferred a sculpture’s image over its physical form, viewing photographs as a manipulation that was ultimately more useful for him than direct study. As the art critic Carlo Ludovico Luzzato pointed out in a revealing testimony, Wildt recalls that he admired the photographs of Donatello’s Zuccone or Michelangelo’s David more than the originals. He felt that the energy that he saw and admired in the photographs in stark black and white was missing or diminished in the stone. The discovery of his language came from this experience. All modern culture seemed to him the greatest intensification of full creation of reliefs and carvings, of tormented excavations, of luminous pauses, of vortexes, and shapes. Thus, his style derived from a planar vision of sculpture which he loved more than sculpture itself.12 Luzzatto’s description of the photos Wildt admired calls to mind the photographs of Baroque sculpture examined in Chapter 1, which emphasised the richness of effects and the deep modelling of surfaces. Admittedly there is no proof that Baroque sculpture was the subject of the photographs Wildt so avidly perused; in fact, he refers to Donatello and Michelangelo in the aforementioned quotations. However, scholars like Wölfflin often complained that professional photographers reproduced all sculptures using a vocabulary that rendered them ‘Baroque’. In a series of articles published between 1896 and 1915, Wölfflin argued that, instead of emphasising the frontal viewpoint and clear outline that classical and Renaissance sculptors vied for, photographers stressed a ‘“painterly” side view’.13 For Wölfflin this preferential angling introduced an unduly ‘Baroqueness’ to photographs of non-Baroque statuary – that is, animation instead of calmness, colour instead of outline, recession instead of planarity, and, more importantly, chiaroscuro instead of fixed contours. Wildt’s study of sculpture mediated by photography – and his sculptural translation of traits that he associated with historical sculpture but really stemmed from specific photographic choices – was biased in favour of those features of sculpture that were then associated in contemporary scholarship with the Baroque, such as the suggestion of tense vigour and bold carving. Such photographic mediation affected not

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Form and formlessness only Wildt’s sculptural practice but also the photographic presentation of his work and his critical reception, as I will show below. In 1894 Wildt met his patron Franz Rose, a German industrialist whose villa in Dassau housed a carefully curated collection of fine and decorative arts by artists of the German Secessions. Rose and Wildt signed a contract that stipulated that Rose would be paid annually with Wildt’s original sculptures, while Wildt could keep copies and preparatory sketches and continue working in Milan. Thanks to Rose’s patronage, from 1894 until Rose’s death in 1912, Wildt fully devoted himself to art.14 Though Wildt was relatively isolated from the Italian artistic milieu, he often showed his work in Munich, Berlin, and Dresden. In spite of his economic security and artistic productivity, between 1906 and 1909 Wildt suffered what he later described as an existential crisis. Marking the conclusion of this crisis, Wildt produced Maschera del dolore – Autoritratto (Mask of Pain – Self-Portrait, 1909), in which three golden crosses, incised on the marble pane behind the head, symbolise his three years of inactivity. In addition to Wildt’s spiritual distress, Maschera

6.4  Adolfo Wildt, Mask of Pain [Self-Portrait], 1909

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Baroquemania del dolore also represented a clear break from the artist’s previous production. Until then Wildt had practised a classicising sculpture of harmony and restraint. Maschera del dolore, by contrast, inaugurates the style that characterises Wildt’s production throughout the 1920s: empty orbits, pronounced hollow shapes, and extremely polished marble surfaces, with a melodramatic expressiveness evoking Matthias Grünewald’s angst-laden paintings and Bernini’s tortured saints. In 1912 Rose died unexpectedly and Wildt lost his economic stability. Though distressing, this misfortune encouraged the artist to participate more assiduously in Italian exhibitions. Still the outbreak of the First World War drastically reduced the art market, and the close associations between Wildt and Germany (as well as his German-sounding last name) cast doubt on his patriotic allegiances. His economic difficulties became so dire that he worked as an assistant in other sculptors’ workshops just to get by.15 Wildt’s fortunes changed after the First World War. His sculptures memorialising the war, both melancholic and triumphalist, aptly suited the après-guerre. For example, La Vittoria (The Victory, 1918–1919) celebrated the defeat of Austria and Germany, and the names of the First World War battles are inscribed on the pedestal. The sculpture used to have a glass helmet evoking those of war pilots, and its wings are decorated with streamlined stars and geometric forms. Although the celebratory intent is undeniable, the pained expression on the figure’s face (deformed by a scream) signals the enormous human cost that Italy paid for its military victory. Thanks to private and public commissions, Wildt’s career prospered in the interwar period, and he had a personal exhibition in the 1922 Venice Biennale. Sarfatti then cemented Wildt’s success by entrusting him to sculpt a bust of Mussolini to celebrate

6.5  Adolfo Wildt, The Victory, 1918–1919

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6.6  Adolfo Wildt, Benito Mussolini, 1923. Reproduced in the cover of a limited edition of Margherita Sarfatti, Dux (Milan: Mondadori, 1934)

the first anniversary of the March on Rome. Copies of this bust, in which Mussolini is depicted as an ancient Roman priest, were exhibited throughout Italy and abroad (for example in the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs of 1925 and in the Cologne Pressa exhibition of 1928). It even adorned the cover of Sarfatti’s hagiographic biography of Mussolini, Dux (1926), becoming an icon of the regime and of its charismatic leader. From 1923 until his sudden death in 1931, Wildt participated in every major artistic exhibition in Italy and abroad, including those of the Novecento group championed by Sarfatti. He also occupied important public posts as a member of juries and directive committees of various regional and national artists’ syndicates. As an acknowledgement of his fame and public service Wildt was inducted into the Accademia d’Italia with other prominent Fascist intellectuals such as Piacentini, Brasini, and the physicist Enrico Fermi.

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Baroquemania Critical responses to Wildt’s work during his lifetime reveal how his sculpture occupied an ambiguous zone between modernism and tradition, and between Italian art and its European (particularly German) counterpart.16 The search for Wildt’s artistic ancestry aimed to make sense of the disparate evocations of tradition in his work, and his contradictory engagement with various styles. Because of Wildt’s working-class origins and his lack of academic training, some critics interpreted his work as embodying the qualities of the vernacular sculpture of Lombardy. Sarfatti, for example, underscored the connection between Wildt and the medieval craftsmen who had built Milan’s Duomo, since, like them, he very often used Candoglia marble.17 The bond between Wildt and Milanese art was emphasised by other critics who interpreted Wildt’s work as a continuation of the scapigliatura, the nineteenthcentury Milanese movement considered a precursor of the Italian avant-garde. Ojetti, for instance, dedicated a long article to the work of Wildt in which he attributed Wildt’s sculptures’ emphasis on chiaroscuro and discontinuous surfaces to their scapigliato origins, as well as his desire to stir the spectator emotionally.18 Whilst these interpretations emphasised Wildt’s rootedness in Lombardy, other critics noted an alien accent in the sculptor’s work, emerging from his connection with German culture. Critics resorted to terms such as ‘Teutonic’, ‘Lutheran’, ‘cerebral’, or ‘abstract’ to articulate what they felt was Wildt’s extraneousness to the tradition of Italian sculpture. The art critic Mario Tinti, for example, characterised Wildt’s sculpture in terms that signal its foreign status in relation to Italian tradition: ‘The mystic plasticism of Wildt is, I would say, almost Lutheran. That is, mainly cerebral rather than emotional as all Italian mystic art is. Namely, it is rather German.’ 19 Others, such as Antonio Maraini (secretary of the Venice Biennale since 1927), juxtaposed Wildt’s work with that of Gustav Klimt, who had a successful exhibition in the 1910 Venice Biennale and in Rome’s 1911 jubilee exhibition.20 For Maraini, Wildt’s and Klimt’s work was tied by ideas of symbolism and the decorative, so he concluded that ‘Wildt is the Klimt of sculpture’.21 These same features, however, deeply disturbed critics like Soffici, a champion of French modernism who was sceptical of rapprochements between Italian and German culture. ‘I will not deny that Wildt has some talent and a remarkable virtuosity as a sculptor’, Soffici began. But he continued: However, I have rarely encountered a group of works that, like his, represent the triumph, or better yet, the apotheosis of bad taste, falsity, and horridness. All the artifice and vulgarity of the most repellent literature, the worst intellectualism and cerebralism evocative of Lyda Borelli, and the most rotten and sepulchral decadentism, are almost enthroned [in Wildt’s work]. So much so that if his name did not bring to mind some Nordic and barbaric atavism, I would not be able to believe that something like this has happened in Italy. Italy, a country of sun, and physical and spiritual clarity, where, it is true, the degeneration of art is now customary, but never before to this extent.22

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Form and formlessness Unlike Wildt’s advocates, Soffici identified Wildt’s technical prowess and preference for overly dramatic and erudite themes with decadence, not artistry. This position is clear in both Soffici’s allusion to femme fatales (the famous actress Lyda Borelli) and his reference to a vocabulary of degeneration introduced by Max Nordau’s 1892 treatise on the matter, translated into Italian in 1893 and soon incorporated in Italy’s cultural debates. 23 Nordau regarded emotionalism, mystic tendencies, and the passion for the Gesamtkunstwerk – all prominent features of Wildt’s work – as symptoms of degeneration.24 Soffici’s mention of Lyda Borelli also indicted the photographer in charge of recording Wildt’s work, Emilio Sommariva, as he was famous, too, for his moody photographs of divas.25 Soffici’s attack was rare for its vitriolic tone.Yet Soffici’s emphasis on the alien quality of Wildt’s work was not new to the body of criticism revolving around it. In fact, the association between Wildt and a Northern – that is, anti-classical – spirit appeared as early as 1912, when a critic described his sculptures as ‘suggesting the medieval allegories of the French Gothic, while their twisted poses and the exuberance of their forms resemble the art of Bernini’.26 In 1739 the French writer Charles de Brosses had used ‘Gothic’ and ‘Baroque’ – both derogatory terms to refer to anti-classical styles – almost synonymously.27 At the turn of the twentieth century, both the Gothic and the Baroque were conceived as characteristically Northern styles, opposed to the serene Italian classicism. To interpret Wildt’s work as occupying the intersection between the Gothic and the Baroque was to signal it as destabilising the boundaries between national styles, a preoccupation that was very much present in Soffici’s acrimonious attack; in brief, Wildt’s Northern classification was symptomatic of the instability of the geopolitical boundaries of Lombardy, which was, until 1859, occupied by the Austro-Hungarian empire.

‘Lord of marble’: Wildt, the Baroque, and the artist-politician28 The frequent comparison between Wildt and Michelangelo signals another aspect of his reception as a modern Baroque sculptor. As the artist of the non-finito, Michelangelo was considered the ancestor of the Impressionist sculpture of Auguste Rodin and Medardo Rosso. Yet, for many German-speaking art historians, Michelangelo was also the sculptor who best expressed the struggle between matter and spirit, and thereby inspired the Baroque – an idea shared by Winckelmann, Nietzsche, Wölfflin, and Riegl too. It is thus not surprising that the critic Giuseppe Cipolla charted the Michelangelesque ancestry of Wildt’s work by referring to it as ‘the triumph of a baroquism, as Michelangelo could have conceived of it’.29 Critics resorted to a variety of terms to describe Wildt’s affiliation with the Baroque, framing it as the main trope to capture his sculptural practice. Most critics mobilised a vocabulary that highlighted what Wölfflin and Riegl described as the main attribute of Baroque sculpture: the contrast between matter and spirit, unyielding marble and the artist’s will. Sarfatti, for instance, evoked the Spanish Baroque to account for what she believed to be Wildt’s dominant feature: the contrast between the sensuality of his treatment of matter and the heightened spiritualism of his subject

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Baroquemania matter.30 Luzzatto described the work of Wildt as ‘a development of the best Baroque, which is not a degeneration of the Classic but the free and enthusiastic outpouring of fantasy’.31 Another art critic argued that Wildt’s Baroqueness was ‘brimming with vital and innovative content’ and that his stylistic ciphers ‘are not empty secentismi but vital and strong novecentismi’.32 Critics, indeed, understood Wildt’s work as modern because of its evocation of Baroque motifs, because he revitalised the history of sculpture with the preoccupations of a quintessentially modern anguish. Such emphasis on the Baroqueness of Wildt’s work was in part a response to a series of visual qualities that distinguished it from that of his contemporaries: extremely polished surfaces, strong contrast of mass and void, tormented expressions, and tense body positions. Though certainly present in the originals, these features were accentuated by the photographs of Wildt’s work that circulated in the press. Wildt, in turn, was extremely invested in this photographic record of his oeuvre.33 The same picture of each work was used repeatedly in catalogues, magazines, newspapers, and books, suggesting Wildt’s inclination towards controlling how his sculptures were perceived via photography. Wildt’s sculptures were photographed by Emilio Sommariva from 1902 to 1920 and by Antonio Paoletti from 1921 until Wildt’s death in 1931; however, photographs by both manifest a strikingly similar syntax that recalls the style of Alinari’s, Brogi’s, and Anderson’s nineteenth-century photographs of Baroque sculpture. Sommariva and Paoletti used a black background that obscured the space around the sculpture. By using gelatine silver, they achieved a crisp and saturated black and white that emphasised the clearly defined shape of the figure. Both employed a frontal light that stressed the contrast between reliefs and cavities, conveying a strong sense of volume. Through these stylistic choices, Sommariva and Paoletti drew attention to the precision of form and dramatic effects produced by Wildt’s technical skill. These photographic conventions – quite different, for example, from Sommariva’s more pictorialist other work – might have been the result of a specific request by Wildt, who, through photography, aimed to communicate a particular vision of his sculptures. Wildt’s contemporary Medardo Rosso also used photography to shape the viewer’s experience of his sculpture, and a comparison between their photographic projects helps further our understanding of the distinctive style underlying Sommariva and Paoletti’s photographs. Often pitched against each other as examples of the opposition between immanence (Rosso) and transcendence (Wildt),34 the two artists came from working-class families and apprenticed with professional sculptors rather than at the academy.35 Both were considered to be outsiders within the canon of Italian sculpture – Wildt by virtue of his Germanic pedigree, Rosso due to his connection with the French Impressionists. Yet whilst Wildt preferred highly polished marble to highlight the form of a sculpture, Rosso chose malleable materials like wax to convey a dissolution of matter. More different still, Rosso also believed that sculpture should reflect rather than resist its environment; the change of setting radically changed meaning and visual import.36 Photography, able to reify these sculptural values, was an integral part of his artistic practice.37 The photographs of Rosso’s work erode the contrasts between shadowed areas and highlights, and dissolve

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6.7  Photo by Emilio Sommariva, The Prisoner

the mass of the statue. Conversely, the photographs of Wildt’s work stressed the sculpture’s solidity. Wildt’s choice of photographic conventions, directly countering Rosso’s style, rendered his work perceptibly and radically anti-Impressionist: instead of opticality, tactility; instead of fragility, permanence; instead of a tendency towards shapelessness, an insistent and contained materiality. Rosalind Krauss and Alex Potts have analysed the development of modern sculpture as a tendency towards the dematerialisation of the object.38 Contesting these narratives while still conceiving his work as modern – not as a return to the past – Wildt used photography not to disembody but to re-materialise sculpture. In addition to their broad stylistic inclinations, the opposition between Wildt and Rosso was also expressly articulated in relation to the Baroque. Impressionism’s emphasis on light and colour, its rejection of clear contours, and attention to the interplay between the object and its environment – all features of Rosso’s sculptures – were widely thought to have their roots in Baroque painting. As Wölfflin pointed out in Principles of Art History (1915), in both there is ‘a triumph of seeming over being’, a very apt description of the photographs of Rosso’s work.39 By contrast, when critics associated Wildt with the Baroque,

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6.8  Photo by Antonio Paoletti, Margherita Sarfatti

they stressed his technical virtuosity, his dramatic subject matter, and the tormented reliefs of his sculptures. As Sarfatti put it, Wildt’s sculptures were ‘held together closely and tightly in a crudely polished and burnished marble: with the cruel precision of every detail’.40 Wildt’s sculptures were considered an image of discipline and control, in opposition to the shapelessness of Rosso’s work. Despite such technical prowess, Wildt’s sculptures seem constantly in tension. In his treatise L’arte del marmo (The Art of Marble, 1921), Wildt argued that the reliefs and depressions of his sculptures express his struggle to control materials and to force them to deliver their ‘dominating feeling’.41 As Nencioni argued in 1898, unlike the innocence of classicism, the Baroque was aware of the tragic element of life and of the pain that suffused it. The tortured forms were the visual equivalent of such knowledge, which cannot produce a harmonious whole.

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6.9  Medardo Rosso, Ecce Puer, 1906

This harrowing interpretation resonates with a dominant view of the Baroque as the style that thematises the unresolved friction between materials and form. Wölfflin, for example, observed that Baroque form struggles to restrain materials that are increasingly out of control: ‘Form is completely annihilated; raw, unformed masses break in, unhewn boulders take the place of cornices, corners are bevelled off. Everything bursts its bounds and chaos triumphs.’ 42 Riegl described the Baroque as a period that explored the contrast between a Northern and a Latin spirit, feeling and will.43 Riegl’s text has not yet been translated into Italian, but his ideas on the contradictory nature of Baroque art had a great impact on Georg Simmel’s writings, which were introduced to the Italian public in the late 1890s.44 For Simmel, the contrast between ‘life’ and ‘form’ is the theme of all art.45 Simmel used the image of the sculptor to explain this point: as the creative impulse of the artist needs the strong opposition of marble to manifest itself, likewise the free flow of life requires a contrasting matter to acquire a form. For Simmel the essence of human experience is the struggle between two competing forces whose contrast

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Baroquemania can never be overcome, but whose art needs to represent together without effacing their irresolvable contrast.46 Wildt’s family lore maintains that Simmel and Wildt met, probably during one of Franz Rose’s visits to Milan.47 I have not been able to retrieve proof of any trip Simmel took to Milan in the 1910s; neither is he directly mentioned in any of Wildt’s writings or interviews, nor to my knowledge does Simmel discuss Wildt’s work in any of his writings. However, it is possible that Wildt became familiar with Simmel’s thought through his contact with German artists and intellectuals. It does not seem coincidental that L’arte del marmo, like the writings of Wölfflin, Riegl, and Simmel, posits a fundamental dualism at the core of sculptural production and of the Baroque. This was a particularly German – rather than Italian – reading of the Baroque, which perhaps explains its notable absence from the theories of critics such as Lionello Venturi and Roberto Longhi, as well as from the discussions in Valori plastici and Dedalo that I addressed in Chapter 4. The idea that sculpture articulated a dynamic and impetuous contrast between two tendencies – matter against form; feeling against will; objectivity against subjectivity – brings me to a crucial feature of Wildt’s work. Wildt’s recurrent association with the Baroque was due to what critics perceived as the tension between matter and spirit in his sculptures, resolved through the sculptor’s exceptional skill and craftsmanship, but always at risk of bursting apart. Such thematisation of mestiere (craftsmanship) as the artist’s control over unruly matter – a contrast that is shown in the photographic conventions used by Sommariva and Paoletti, and in the critical responses it elicited – echoed the prevalent fear in the 1920s of formlessness as the equivalent of political anarchy. As early as the 1910s the Futurists depicted crowds in an ambivalent way, revealing an awareness of their powerful political force as well as their potential to become unruly and dangerous.48 Influenced by the thought of Gustave Le Bon and other theoreticians of crowd behaviour, many feared that society was becoming formless, and that mass democracy would bring disorder and anarchy.49 Through new symbols, rituals, and, most importantly, a pervasive control over all spheres of life, totalitarian leaders promised to rebuild a cohesion in the masses and subjugate potentially disruptive hordes.50 Le Bon had argued that the masses were unable to self-organise (a central tenet of socialist thought) and that it was therefore necessary to have a manipulator of crowds, to lead them. Le Bon suggested that the leader adopt the traits of an actor or a hypnotist, because crowds were considered instinctual and dominated by feelings, and thus easily manipulated through slogans and appeals to emotions. Though these images of the leader were certainly compelling, another one soon predominated: that of the artist. Unlike the actor and the hypnotist, the artist does not merely lead the masses, but forges them anew, impresses in them a new form in order to generate a ‘new man’. In the words of Joseph Goebbels, ‘Politics is an art, maybe the most elevated art of all, and we who give shape to modern German politics, we feel like artists whose task is to form, starting from rough mass, the solid and complete image of a people’.51 Thanks to the formative intervention of the politician, harmony would prevail over disaggregated and uneven crowds to form the body politic, resulting in an

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6.10  Umberto Boccioni, Riot in the Gallery, 1910

artwork, rather than unformed and disorganised matter. The ‘ideological transposition of artistic creativity into political practice’, as Otto Werckmeister argued, acquired particular poignancy in the case of Adolf Hitler, as he famously had been a practising artist.52 Newspaper articles and public speeches by Hitler and other officials of the regime often mentioned this biographical fact when using the trope of the people as passive matter shaped by the creative will of the Fascist leader. In 1926 Mussolini himself underscored the similarities between the politician and the artist in his opening speech to the exhibition of the Novecento group: ‘There is no

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6.11  Adolfo Wildt, Nicola Bonservizi, 1924–1925

doubt that politics is an art’, he argued, because ‘political and artistic creation are both slow processes and instantaneous divination. At a certain point, the artist creates with inspiration, the politician with decision. Both work with matter and spirit. Both pursue an ideal that prods them and transcends them.’ He concluded, ‘To give wise laws to a people, one must also be a little bit like an artist.’ 53 Mussolini’s speech appears to envision a specific artist, and, indeed, Wildt’s own artwork is the only one in the Novecento exhibition that Mussolini directly referenced – Nicola Bonservizi – a portrait of a friend of Mussolini, a Fascist journalist who had been recently murdered in Paris by an anarchist. Mussolini asserted: this sculpture is clearly different from the ones produced in Italy in the past. It has its own unmistakable seal. It is clear that it is the result of a severe interior discipline. It is clear that it is not the result of an easy and mercenary craft, but of a zealous effort that is often painful […] Indeed, in the works exhibited here the following common characteristics are striking: the decision and precision of

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each trait, the sharpness and richness of colour, the solid plasticity of objects and figures.54 Wildt’s sculpture, with its discipline and unavoidable tension, stood for political control exercised with an equally firm hand over the body politic. There are parallels between the descriptions of Wildt’s work in the Fascist press and the recurrent trope of the artist-politician who imposes restrictions over formless, collective mass to achieve an organic and well-formed totality – not coincidentally, Mussolini himself had formative associations with this trope as the son of a blacksmith, a biographical detail frequently underscored in the press. The body politic, like Wildt’s matter (and, perhaps, the matter of a blacksmith), is not totally under the control of the politician’s action: the inevitable unrest is proof of its potential danger, and therefore justifies the violent actions of the artist-politician. In the 1911 jubilee exhibitions the Baroque, too, had assumed a controlling role. However, such a metaphor was less optimistic in Italy’s interwar period: there was less hope than in 1911 that the centrifugal forces threatening unified Italy could be controlled through the simple evocation of a glorious past. This was unlike regionalism, in which, when the threat became class warfare, violence was deemed necessary to rein in dissolving forces. Wildt simultaneously stood for and subverted this image of the dictator as artist. It is important to note the threat implicit in such a trope, though, regardless of the extent to which it is embraced: the arbitrariness of political power when described in terms of artistic practice, which, after all, is the emblem of an almost boundless creativity. Therefore, when the identification between artist and politician – and matter and society – becomes too close, the politician’s rule becomes uncomfortably close to ruthless force.

Eugeni d’Ors and anti-Crocean interpretations of the Baroque Although the reception of Wildt’s work provides important insight into the interpretation of the Baroque in Italian debates of the 1920s and 1930s, no author was as key to shaping the reception of the Baroque as the philosopher (and prominent anti-Fascist intellectual) Benedetto Croce. As mentioned in Chapter 5, Croce decried Malaparte’s and Soffici’s description of the advent of Fascism against liberalism as the equivalent of the Counter-Reformation against the Reformation. He wrote in 1924, in a passage wisely removed from the final version of his book on this topic, ‘The Counter-Reformation, as an epoch and a historic ideal, seems to be gathering, in the current days in Italy, admiration, enthusiasm, and nostalgia; and from the dominant party we frequently hear invocations of the Counter-Reformation’. Croce found these historical echoes extremely worrisome, as for him the Counter-Reformation ‘at most could symbolise conservative action, political ability, discipline, and obedience’. Croce feared that it was not even these tenets that inspired its evocation as a political category, but rather that ‘in the lack of political concepts […] murky spirits and uncouth intellects are now holding on to

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Baroquemania the ideals of the Counter-Reformation’, as they also try to conceal ‘to others and to themselves, that emptiness’.55 Croce’s ongoing meditation on the Baroque era (considered the origin of structural moral and political weaknesses that afflicted Italy and culminated in Fascism) was articulated in his study History of the Baroque Age in Italy.Thought-Poetry and Moral Literature-Life, published in 1929.56 Through his correspondence with the literary scholar Karl Vossler, to whom the book is dedicated, we know that Croce was acquainted with German publications on the Baroque that underscored its vitalism, irrationalism, individualism, and dynamism as a reaction against the classicism of the so-called ‘Latin’ countries.57 Contrary to this theoretisation, Croce believed both the Renaissance and the Reformation to be vital to the emergence of the Baroque (and modernity in general). The former gave intellectual precedence to Italy, the latter to Germany. Though they manifested in different geographic locations, for Croce the Renaissance and the Reformation were not opposing principles; instead, they composed a dialectical, conceptual dyad, equivalent to ‘the ideal and fundamental terms of earth and heaven, man and God, individual and universe, profane spirit and religious spirit’, as he put it.58 Croce rejected a racialist history that attributed one of these principles exclusively to the Latin or the German spirit: although the Renaissance was born in Italy and the Reformation in Germany, they express ‘universal exigences of the human soul’.59 The Reformation was the harbinger of division and dissolution, whilst the Counter-Reformation imposed unity and discipline, ushering along the unification of Italy by preventing the divisions typical of Protestant states.60 The Seicento, as a result, was the point of origin of Italian unified nationhood. Despite his positive assessment of some aspects of the seventeenth century, Croce also maintained that the negative connotations of the term ‘Baroque’ should be preserved. Instead of striving to express a truthful aspect of life or of the world, as authentic art does, Baroque artists only aimed to cause stupor in the audience by representing ‘the depraved, the horrid, the bloody […] ordinary and plebeian life’. As he pointed out in a well-known passage, ‘The Baroque is a form of artistic ugliness, and as such, it has nothing to do with art, it is something different from art, although the Baroque has imitated art’s aspect, and its name, and has introduced itself, or substituted itself in the place of art.’ For Croce ‘the Baroque follows a different law than that of art. It follows the law of wilfulness, laziness, whimsy, and is therefore utilitarian and hedonistic’. Croce then concluded that, unlike authentic art, the Baroque ‘is simply the requirement and enjoyment of something that gives pleasure, against everything, against art itself’.61 Condemnatory and dismissive, echoes of de Chirico’s ‘Seicentomania’ article appear in Croce’s assessment, later coalescing in his verdict on exhibitions of Baroque art, for example the Mostra di Palazzo Pitti. To Croce these displays proved his thesis by dissipating any illusions about the greatness of seventeenth-century painting. Croce argued that such tendency towards ‘non-art’ appears across time and place, and it is, in his famous formula, ‘an aesthetic sin, but also a human sin, universal and perpetual like all human sins’.62 However, Croce insisted that, in service of sound methodology, the term ‘Baroque’ should apply only to a specific artistic tendency that

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Form and formlessness appeared in Europe from the last decades of the sixteenth century through to the end of the seventeenth, rather than to this entire transhistorical aesthetic category. However reasoned, Croce’s diffidence towards the category of the Baroque was untimely: precisely when the intelligentsia – especially in Germany, Spain, France, Italy, and many Latin American countries such as Mexico, Argentina, and Cuba – was finally embracing the vitality of this concept in describing the modern Weltanschauung, Croce put forth a negative interpretation of the period, and called for historical precision in the usage of the term. Whilst recognising his moral and intellectual stature, many young Italians who had come of age under Fascism felt that Croce was out of touch with their preoccupations – a generational disagreement that found ample footing in regard to Croce’s aesthetics. While in prison for his anti-Fascist activities, the art historian Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti asserted that, contrary to Croce’s staunch defence of the autonomy of art, ‘The conditions in which we experienced art have been marked by a deeper, acute and sometimes even tragic connection of the artistic problem with others that inevitably presented themselves with equal energy [namely] ethical, political, ethical-social problems’.63 For these younger Italians, the connection between art and its social context (an anathema for Croce’s philosophy) was the most pressing intellectual issue. Young philosophers, such as those gathered in the Scuola di Milano, and young artists, such as those associated with the magazine Corrente di vita giovanile (Current ofYouth Life), needed other intellectual references to address their demands and engaged in a systematic dialogue among themselves to find them. The intellectual debate over the Baroque, therefore, revealed how younger Italian intellectuals emancipated themselves from Croce’s influence. Exemplifying this process of division, one of the most prominent Italian interwar anti-Crocean philosophical schools, the Scuola di Milano (School of Milan) challenged Croce’s Hegelian philosophy. Antonio Banfi and his students Enzo Paci, Luciano Anceschi, and Dino Formaggio (who would become some of the most important postwar Italian philosophers) introduced existentialism and phenomenology to Italy. Having studied with Wölfflin and Simmel, Banfi questioned art’s autonomy (an idea at the heart of Croce’s system), arguing that art has a ‘correlative relation’ with the historical and practical context in which it emerges, responding to and influencing non-artistic reality.64 It is neither coincidental nor unimportant, considering Banfi’s ideas, that most of those who attended his university lessons were students of literature, art, and music – not philosophers.65 Another central theme of the philosophical analysis of the Scuola di Milano was the influence of the technical and material characteristics of the artwork on its aesthetic import, a rejection of the primacy of idea over matter in Croce’s aesthetics. Formaggio’s first intervention in Corrente di vita giovanile, for example, argued that, if Croce were right, artists would not have any good reason to actually physically make an artwork. The fact that they do so proves that the material realisation of the artwork clarifies their ideas and represents a qualitative shift from intellectual speculation; this also explains the interest that Corrente paid to preparatory drawings, for example publishing repeatedly those by Fontana. Formaggio wrote, ‘Matter does exist for the artist. Today more than ever […] as a deaf “physicality,” unyielding at first, like the weight of sensible things on

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Baroquemania stone, on marble, on colours, on words, on sounds’.66 Echoes of Wildt’s reflections on the unwieldiness of materials to artists’ ideas shows a widespread scepticism about idealist aesthetics among the interwar Italian intelligentsia. The intellectual distance between Croce and a new generation of Italian philosophers was clearly manifested in their divergent interpretations of the Baroque. Anceschi widened this gap through his investigations of alternative theories of the style – such as those developed by the Catalan critic Eugeni d’Ors – conducted in order to question both Croce’s and the return-to-order anti-Baroque stance. D’Ors was, as Gregg Lambert has observed, ‘largely responsible for the dislocation of the Baroque from its historical period’, and his work offered alternative ways of reading the cultural politics of this style by approaching it as the expression of a transcultural and transhistorical worldview rather than of a specific historical period.67 In the early 1930s, Anceschi published several essays on d’Ors’s work in Le arti plastiche, the journal of the Fascist Syndicate of Fine Arts. In the following decade, many of d’Ors’s books were translated into Italian, and in 1945 Anceschi himself published a monograph on him and translated his most famous treatise, Du Baroque (On the Baroque).68 An exponent of the Catalan Noucentiste movement, d’Ors studied in Paris and Heidelberg.69 After the First World War, he became increasingly sympathetic to Fascism and its ambitions to create a pan-European empire: as he affirmed, ‘rather than falling into a generic craftiness, into a weak old age, into a complete impossibility of rhetoric and mimic, into the lack of myth and ritual […] long live the Fascio’.70 D’Ors was troubled by the advent of the Spanish Republic and its defence of regionalisms. He celebrated classicism as the aesthetic equivalent of imperialism, a moral benchmark from which to counter the nihilistic tendencies of the fin de siècle and to reconstruct European culture.71 Backed by such ideologies, d’Ors sided firmly with Francisco Franco, and at the end of Spanish Civil War he became involved in the reorganisation of Spain’s cultural institutions.72 In the mid-1930s, d’Ors became interested in Italian contemporary art that looked back at its Graeco-Latin roots for inspiration. He was particularly struck by Mario Tozzi and Waldemar George’s ‘Appels d’Italie’ room at the 1930 Venice Biennale, an exhibition of artists of the School of Paris who, in the words of the curators, ‘heroically sacrificed the African idols [of the avant-garde] to the principles of the Renaissance’, so that Rome became again a centre of art.73 Having seen the most recent works by artists such as de Chirico, Severini, Tozzi, Massimo Campigli, and Filippo de Pisis, d’Ors announced that ‘Italy has finally come back’ after a long period of self-referential experimentation.74 At Mussolini’s invitation d’Ors curated the Spanish pavilion in the 1938 Venice Biennale, thereby legitimising Franco’s regime in the cultural arena.75 Despite being such a staunch defender of classicism, d’Ors had a lifelong interest in the Baroque. Du Baroque was first published in French in 1935 and was so successful that at least three editions were printed in that same year.76 Du Baroque compiled articles published in various newspapers between 1907 and 1932, as well as an extended version of a conference given in 1931 in the context of a cycle of lectures on ‘“The Baroque”

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Form and formlessness

6.12  Mario Tozzi, Mattutino, 1927

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Baroquemania and the Irreducible Diversity of Taste, according to People and according to Epochs’. During a period of widespread neoclassicism and return-to-order, this colloquium (attended by some of the most prominent Baroque scholars, for example Hans Tietze, Walter Friedländer, and Rudolf Wittkower) brought back to the table the plurality of aesthetic values.77 Following Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return, d’Ors argued that, far from being finite historical periods, the classical and the Baroque are eons – ‘idea-events’, concrete universals recurring cyclically through the ages but subject to contingency and change. A transhistorical constant originating in the chthonic world, the Baroque cyclically reappears to rebut any faith in linear progress. The classical eon imitates the processes of reason through order and clarity. The Baroque eon imitates the organic and vitalist processes of nature via disorder and variation. In d’Ors’s words, ‘classicism is inherently intellectual; it is necessarily normative and authoritarian. But since the Baroque is vitalist, it is freedomloving.’ 78 The classical and the Baroque – ‘a corollary of the rapport between Reason and Life’, a formula similar to Croce’s description of the relation between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation – cannot exist without each other. To define one is inevitably to refer to the other.79 For d’Ors (as for Nietzsche, Wölfflin, and Croce) the classical and the Baroque are unavoidable tendencies in human culture, and appear in both artistic and non-artistic manifestations.80 In epochs as diverse as ‘Alexandrinism’, ‘the Counter Reformation’, and ‘the fin de siècle, therefore, d’Ors could find Baroque features such as ‘duality’, ‘multiplicity of simultaneous intentions’, ‘inner mental fragmentation expressed by opposing forms’, and a ‘tendency towards multipolarity’.81 Croce was d’Ors’s main interlocutor in elaborating his theory of the Baroque. Whilst the Neapolitan philosopher defended the necessity of historicising all manifestations of culture, d’Ors responded by postulating what he proudly called an ‘ahistorical essentialism’.82 Whilst Croce argued that the Baroque was a pathological and perverse deviation of taste, d’Ors responded that it was normal and inevitable. Rather than oppose Croce’s defence of classicism with an equally near-sighted defence of the Baroque, however, d’Ors tried to do justice to both sides. As he recalled, ‘More than once I have been asked if my doctrinarian attacks against the Baroque were sincere. The attention, the sympathy, and even the tenderness with which I have studied Baroque problems justified the question. I have always answered, and with an open heart, that my attacks were a form of defence. I tried to save, fighting against baroquism, the constant temptation that attracted me to it: likewise, vertigo is always an ambivalent, secret love of the abyss.’ 83 Even a convinced neoclassicist cannot be fully anti-Baroque, d’Ors seems to conclude.84 The transformative power of d’Ors’s ideologies on the art criticism of interwar Italian youth cannot be underestimated. To denounce the contradictions of interwar classicism – which for him included ‘Cézanne, the Cubists, Picasso; in Italy, Pittura Metafisica: Carrá, De Chirico, and Morandi’ – for example, Anceschi found it paramount to analyse what he considered its most sophisticated theoretician, d’Ors.85 In Anceschi’s view the main philosophical problem of the interwar period was how to address the rapport between life and reason, which classicism attempts to solve by liberating pure

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Form and formlessness intellect from the irrationality of life. In Du Baroque, contrary to what could be expected from a critic with such strong classicising sympathies, d’Ors does not side with reason without reservation, but is always tempted by life, by the Baroque. He reached an unexpected conclusion, one that was shared with the Scuola di Milano: the contrast between life and reason cannot be won, and this unresolvable friction is a fundamental and indispensable aspect of culture.86 Enlivened by these questions, the philosophers of the Scuola di Milano often collaborated with Corrente di vita giovanile: Anceschi, Formaggio, Paci, and Remo Cantoni were fixtures in most issues of the magazine, founded in 1938 by the seventeen-year-old Giovanni Treccani, son of the industrialist who promoted the publication of the famous encyclopaedia.87 In Corrente’s first issue, the artist Arnaldo Badodi pointed out the discrepancy between the Fascist artist (compelled by the regime to create an art that the audience appreciated) and the public (mystified by novel artistic manifestations).88 Such declaration clashes with a tendency that dominated Italian artistic debates in the interwar period: the demand that artists cater to the taste (and intellectual preparation) of audiences. Rather than the return-to-order, or the Nazi-inspired realism aggressively promoted throughout Europe at the time, Badodi defended ‘deformazione’ (deformation) as that which best ‘represents the emotion of the single artist with regard to reality’.89 Manifesting Badodi’s defence of the individual artist, the art of Corrente aspired to be neither comprehensible by a broad public nor a form of propaganda. Moving its progressive stance on art beyond the confines of its own pages, Corrente organised two art shows in March and December 1939. The first included members of the Novecento generation as well as young artists such as Renato Birolli, Sandro Cherchi, Bruno Cassinari, and Giuseppe Migneco. The second show included only younger artists: Fontana, Renato Guttuso, Mirko and Afro Basaldella, Mario Mafai, Fausto Pirandello, and Giacomo Manzú. These artists would be among the most prominent postwar Italian modernists, rendering this second Corrente show a near blueprint for post-Fascist Italian art. These artists were brought together, as a programmatic article in the journal indicated, by a common interest in ‘realism’. This category, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat has pointed out, became the dominant aesthetic category of postwar Italy but already was prominent in Fascist intellectual debates. As Ben-Ghiat puts it, ‘Realism defined all aspects of youth culture after 1930’, and Corrente in particular ‘encapsulated the transformation of Realism from an official to an opposition aesthetic’.90 By realism these young Italians meant a clear-eyed analysis of reality: in the Corrente’s editors’ words, ‘the condition of our spiritual certainties was a free examination of that “reality” that was being created around us, a “reality” that we had to conquer with our efforts to really feel it as ours, in no uncertain terms’.91 Corrente promoted artworks that moved away from detached description or cold figuration towards an emotional engagement with materials, techniques, and subject matter. This desire to reanimate political and aesthetics debates on realism was reflected in the magazine’s original design and impassioned political content. Although it was not the mouthpiece of any official organisation, the magazine’s first masthead was decorated with

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Baroquemania fasces and a quotation from Mussolini: ‘We want young people to pick up our flame.’ 92 The first issue contained enthusiastic articles in which Treccani expounded upon the ‘historical necessity of Fascism’ as mediator between private and social interest, or praised Fascist youth organisations.93 Despite his initial zeal, four months later Treccani began to censor Fascists who did not accept any criticism of the party and the government.94 Strategically choosing phrases from Mussolini’s speeches and writings in which he urged a form of active intellectual engagement with Fascism, Corrente condemned the passive obedience to the regime.95 In defending these positions the Corrente group expressed the desire to renew a large sector of the young Fascist intelligentsia. Yet, as Treccani himself recalled, his ‘polemical notes’ referred only to the ‘small flaws of the Fascist Party (of the “big” ones I could not or did not know how to talk about)’.96 Indeed, despite the later anti-Fascist activities of many of its participants (and a certain hagiographic reading of the journal itself in postwar Italian scholarship), for a long time Corrente published recognisably Fascist positions.97 Its first issue, for instance, urged recognition of Franco’s regime, albeit while also publishing translations of poets persecuted by Franco’s regime, such as Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Federico García Lorca.98 Another article, too, justified the racial laws against Italian Jews as a form of legitimate defence on the part of the nation against an alien body.99 The notion of critical realism, central to Corrente’s reflection, merged with the notion of the Baroque in the last issue of the Corrente, published in May 1940. Here the art historian Giulio Carlo Argan wrote the only article on seventeenth-century art to be published in the magazine, titled ‘Caravaggio and the Critique of the Seicento’.100 Argan argued that Caravaggio’s realism was not a passive reproduction of the world as it is, but rather revealed a vexed relationship with reality – not taken for granted but rather questioned, problematised, and challenged. Argan pointed out that, thanks to Longhi’s analyses, it was clear that Caravaggio’s realism treated reality as ‘a problem or a question, rather than as an objective datum’.101 We can only speculate as to why Argan’s article was published in Corrente, which rarely included scholarly pieces. Yet there are strong similarities between the way in which Argan defined the notion of realism embodied by Caravaggio and the critical and expressive engagement with reality that Corrente indicated with the term ‘realism’. In both cases there is a deliberate withdrawal from tradition and the treatment of ‘reality as a problem, an internal torment, a moral responsibility’.102 Argan’s call for art as a form of ethical commitment, for creativity as a form of moral responsibility, weaves together Corrente’s critical realism with the Baroque, and offers a key to interpret the reception of Fontana in the 1930s and 1940s among these very same cultural players.

‘Inconstancy is Not incoherence’: Lucio Fontana in the 1930s and 1940s103 Fontana’s reception as an example of the Baroque was a leitmotiv among Italian art historians and critics of the 1950s such as Enrico Crispolti and Argan himself.104 Crispolti,

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Form and formlessness for example, has drawn attention to the relation between Fontana’s work and a growing interest in the neo-Baroque in 1950s discussions of architecture.105 Fontana’s postwar production (particularly his ‘spatial environments’) shares important aspects of Baroque aesthetics: the erasure of the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture; the plurality of materials; and the opening of the picture plane on to three dimensions.106 Fontana himself justified the connection between his work and the Baroque in his 1946 manifesto of Spatialism. The Manifiesto Blanco celebrates seventeenth-century art as a model to challenge obsolete painting and sculpture. In viewing space in a novel way, Fontana and his students argued, ‘the Baroque masters effected a qualitative change […] they enriched the plastic arts with the notion of time. Their figures seem to abandon the picture plane and to continue the represented movements out into space’ – an approach which the Futurists expanded.107 Interested in the representation of movement and the creation of multimedia artworks, the Baroque and Futurism provided a roadmap for a new art in which ‘existence, nature, and matter form a perfect unity’.108 Contemporary art historians, however, are often uncomfortable with the connections between Fontana and the Baroque, describing it as a vague ‘predisposition of the spirit’ or ‘a matter of sympathy’ to mark the distance between his work and that of ‘seicentophiles’ such as those addressed in Chapter 4 or Wildt.109 Crispolti himself, however, has pointed out that the ‘instinctual sympathetic link’ between Fontana and the Baroque was part of a broader historical shift against the hegemony of Croce’s idealist aesthetics and Novecento’s ‘static composition and univocal stylistic needs’ (incidentally a very partial description of this movement).110 It is worthwhile, then, to complement Cripolti’s observations with an analysis of the usage of the term ‘Baroque’ in the pre-Second World War reception of Fontana in Italy and Argentina, as it relates to the issue of realism examined in the previous section. Critics of the 1930s and 1940s, unlike their peers today, had no qualms about appealing to the Baroque to make sense of the vitalist tension and shapelessness of Fontana’s sculptures of the time, which are markedly different from his postwar production.111 This stylistic shift initially stemmed from Fontana’s need to distance himself from his teacher’s influence, despite his enthusiasm for Wildt’s work. This artistic withdrawal can be seen in works such as Black Man (1929–1930), which meticulously rejects Wildt’s choice of material, subject matter, and style. Instead of blindingly white marble, Fontana uses plaster covered in tar; instead of a reinterpretation of the European tradition, Fontana engages explicitly with primitivist tropes; instead of smooth polish, Fontana elects for a rough and rugged surface; instead of affected craftsmanship, Fontana deliberately celebrates spontaneity and artlessness. Fontana explained that with this sculpture ‘the problem of making art instinctively became clear to me. Neither painting nor sculpture, no lines distributed in space but continuity of space in matter. And so no Medardo Rosso, but rather Boccioni’s plastic dynamism.’ 112 The crucial point in this remark is ‘instinctively’: in line with the Corrente group, and despite his multiple public commissions for the Fascist state, Fontana aspired to create an art that was expressively driven rather than a reimagination of the Italian artistic heritage. Futurism’s dynamism and emphasis on instinct offered

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Baroquemania a powerful alternative to Wildt’s self-contained (and self-controlled) works, and to interwar Italian aesthetics in general. During the 1930s and 1940s Fontana developed a distinct, but not unified, language. A notable feature of his work of this time is the plurality of methods, materials, and aesthetics that he engaged with – a plurality that lacks a signature style. For example, in 1934 Fontana produced works as different as Vittoria dell’aria (Victory of the Air), Scultura astratta (Abstract Sculpture), and Donne sul sofa (Women on the Sofa). The first, in blue-andgold-coloured cement and monumental in size, was made for an aeronautical exhibition sponsored by the regime. The female figure is hesitant and fragile despite its opulent colours, a conscious move away from the smooth finish and controlled modelling of Wildt’s sculpture. Linear and minimalistic, Scultura astratta makes use of cement to create clean geometric shapes. Though it was produced in the same year, the opaque surface

6.13  Lucio Fontana, Women on the Sofa, 1934

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Form and formlessness and brittle appearance of Donne sul sofa are in striking contrast with the ambitious Vittoria and the restrained Scultura astratta. As typified by these three sculptures, Fontana seemed to lead a capricious career throughout the 1930s. In this decade alone Fontana exhibited with groups as diverse as the Italian abstractionists and Corrente, as well as in multiple state-sponsored exhibitions, and won important commissions for the Fascist state such as the ceiling for the Shrine of Fascist martyrs (Milan) and a bust of Mussolini.113 As a result of this erratic path, in the 1930s art critics repeatedly expressed their disorientation at the heterogeneity (or what they called incoherence) of Fontana’s production.114 For example, a critic for a Fascist youth magazine wondered why Fontana concurrently exhibited ‘works that were comprehensible to all and that speak of his true abilities’ and works which were ‘facile and extravagant’.115 He struggled to appreciate sculptures like Women on the Sofa, ‘bold clumps of clay and chalk, coloured as sugar sweets, which lend themselves to a thousand interpretations’.116 Even the art critic Gillo Dorfles (in the 1950s one of the most enthusiastic defenders of the Baroque as a key category to understanding contemporary art) was taken aback by Fontana’s ‘boneless and disintegrated deformations’.117 To make sense of Fontana’s contradictory career, critics appealed to two different concepts. On the one hand, several framed Fontana’s work within the category of the Baroque. By the 1930s, and in no small part thanks to d’Ors, this style had acquired a variety of meanings – engagement with materials, primitivism, self-contradiction – that resonated with Fontana’s work at the time. On the other hand, critics associated with Corrente referred to notions of realism, arguing that the plurality of Fontana’s work indicated his refusal to submit to pre-existing schemes and his honest approach to reality.118 Over time these two interpretative threads intermingled in the critical reception of Fontana’s work during the Fascist era. Argan’s aforementioned article, in which he interpreted Caravaggio as a precursor of Corrente’s understanding of realism, is particularly relevant in this respect. In the critical reception of his work Fontana’s Baroqueness came to be understood as a form of committed engagement with reality in all its diversity, but also as an aesthetic praxis compatible with Fontana’s own status as someone who questioned some of the regime’s artistic tenets while accepting its legitimacy – exactly like most members of the Corrente group at the time.119 The critic Enrico Persico, author of the first monograph on Fontana (1936) and an early supporter of the Corrente group, utilised Simmel’s categories to describe Fontana’s work as making ‘masses shudder’ through an ‘internal commotion’.120 In interwar Italian art criticism Fontana’s Baroqueness was located in the struggle that his sculptures seemed to thematise between materials and form. Whilst in Wildt’s work such struggle concluded with the triumph of form, in Fontana’s materials take over. For the critic Raffaello Giolli this was an extremely unusual aesthetic given the interwar public’s interest in controlling form – classicism, Constructivism, even Wildt’s ‘heroic abstractions’. Giolli, like Persico, therefore viewed Fontana through a vitalist lens: as the heir of Baroque sculptors concerned with art as an ‘excited passion, almost a physical orgasm, a touching vibration’ whose works had a ‘restless impetus of life’.121 Other critics observed that Fontana produced a

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Baroquemania ‘sculpture that wanted to bend matter to unaccustomed rhythms, even against nature. Fontana, that is, made us think of Góngora, Borromini, the Baroque.’ 122 Like his seventeenthcentury predecessors, Fontana had broken the closed form of sculpture, including ‘air’ and ‘light’ within it, ‘working to broaden the limits of that prison’.123 Here the Baroque is conceptualised as a transhistorical movement that struggled against classical form and pushed matter to its limits, to the point of formlessness. The references to the Baroque in the critical literature on Fontana became more numerous once he began producing ceramics, terracotta, and maiolicas, which resemble manipulated materials more than completed works.124 In an elegiac review published in 1939 the poet Raffaele Carrieri analysed the works Fontana made after a training period at the Sèvres factory near Paris. Comparing them with traditional porcelain, Carrieri observed that Fontana used garish colours instead of pastel hues, firing ‘incandescent lumps’ instead of the ‘precious, transparent, and smooth’ Sèvres figurines. Carrieri then described Fontana’s ‘demonic’ activity as ‘Baroque trophies’, instead of the Sèvres ‘rococo laces of Arcadia shepherds’.125 Through the identification of such atypical features the Baroque acquired overtones of primitivism (Carrieri described these works as ‘geological maiolicas’): Fontana’s rejection of the Sèvres dainty statuettes was seen as a return to natural forms not mediated by the conventions of the medium. After Fontana returned to Argentina in 1940 his work continued to be read in relation to the Baroque.126 The critic Miguel Alfredo D’Elia, for example, described Fontana’s 6.14  Lucio Fontana, Paulette, 1938

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Form and formlessness terracotta and ceramic sculptures as ‘a bold and multifarious understanding of the Baroque, which reveals itself as a feverish overexcitement’.127 Riccardo Ratti, too, identified a form of ‘subconscious Baroque’ in Fontana’s ceramics, which he found reminiscent of the work of El Greco and seventeenth-century sculptors who sculpted ‘freely, without submitting to other laws than those that dictate that solids are three-dimensional’.128 Julio Rinaldini observed that even in the sculptures that Fontana produced in Argentina – Baroque Chair, for example – one could experience the ‘vibrating expansion of an essential Baroque’.129 Whilst in Wildt’s interwar reception the Baroque stood for control and discipline, in the interpretation of Fontana’s sculptures it signified anarchy and restlessness. Overexcitement, contradictory tendencies, vitalism, dynamism – d’Ors’s views on the Baroque were well known in Spanish-speaking countries and shaped the interpretation of both the style and Fontana’s works. However, Argentine critics were at the time also engaging with another potent interpretation of the Baroque, one that underlined its hybrid nature as symptomatic of Latin American identity.130 Thus, emphasising Fontana’s connection to the Baroque was also a way of reclaiming his Latin American belonging, of challenging Fontana’s identity as a purely Italian sculptor and presenting him as the result of a cultural hybridisation. Though primarily enacted to reassert Latin American cultural identity, the connection between the Baroque and primitivism (which d’Ors emphasised as well), a wilful forgetting of the European cultural tradition, comes to play here, too. Whilst many evoked the Baroque to make sense of the multifariousness of Fontana’s work, critics associated with Corrente explained it through the category of realism. The art critic Duilio Morosini pointed out that the ‘sketch-like plasticism’ of Fontana’s sculptures was not ‘disorder’ but ‘the proof of a free and untroubled attitude with respect to reality’.131 All of Fontana’s apparently disparate oeuvre, according to Corrente’s critics, reveals a realistic form of engagement, unmediated by preconceptions; the differences in materials and styles were justified by his instinctual response to artistic inspiration. This interpretation accounts for Corrente’s attention to Fontana’s preparatory drawings, as they reveal the transformation between an artwork’s idea and its execution (for Croce only the former was relevant).132 In 1940 Corrente organised an exhibition of Fontana’s drawings, although the sculptor had already left for Argentina.133 In the catalogue of this show, Morosini argued that Fontana’s rough and unpolished sculptures expressed his intuitive approach to art. The plural references present in Fontana’s work are not influences but rather ‘means for his work’, which he uses indifferently as problems that needed to be solved in order to carry his artistic research forward.134 Thus references to the Baroque in Fontana’s work were, for Morosini, a concession to the Seicentomania of his time but also ‘a particular solution to formal problems by freely deploying artistic means, exalting matter itself’.135 Though often in accordance with one another, as the aforementioned interactions show, a crucial difference between Fontana and the Corrente group also has to be noted. Unlike many members of the Corrente group, Fontana did not become anti-Fascist. He was described by his friend the Futurist ceramicist Tullio d’Albisola as a ‘sculptural

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Baroquemania

6.15  Duilio Morosini, Lucio Fontana. 20 disegni con una prefazione (Milan: Edizioni di Corrente, 1940)

squadrista’, that is, a member of the Fascist paramilitary squads – a simile that conveys how compatible avant-garde aesthetics and Fascist politics were thought to be in interwar Italy, and how Fontana’s refusal to conform to a single style was seen as evidence of his allegiance to the original revolutionary politics of the regime.136 Although Fontana was not a very vocal Fascist, his personal letters do contain quite favourable views of the regime.137 In an interview given in 1976 Raffaele de Grada, a participant in Corrente, lamented its sanctification as an anti-Fascist movement, observing that the journal reunited some committed anti-Fascists but also others who were mostly ‘incited by the spontaneous necessity of finding a vehicle of expression more free than what the system allowed […] the recovering of expressive freedom’.138 Rather than being a group of consistently militant anti-Fascists, some of Corrente’s associates were opposed not to the regime itself but to the expressive restrictions mandated by the regime. Fontana could be counted among the latter: he questioned the restrictions on artistic expression rather than the repressive

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Form and formlessness policies of Fascism. As Argan observed, Fontana aspired to the ‘dimension of indetermination, of absolute freedom’, not to be an intellectuel engagé.139 The association between Fontana’s work and the Baroque refers to a set of concepts that were also prominent in d’Ors’s politically conservative reading of this style. Some of the features identified by d’Ors as pertaining to the Baroque (its tendency towards contradiction and relation to primitivism) are intertwined with the interpretation of Fontana’s sculpture during the 1930s. In d’Ors’s view the Baroque is, above all, a tendency towards self-contradiction: ‘Whenever we find united in a single gesture several contradictory intentions, the result belongs to the category of the Baroque style. The spirit of the Baroque – to put it in a vulgar way – does not know what it wants. It wants both the pros and the cons […] It mocks the requirements of the principle of contradiction.’ 140 Given the influence of d’Ors’s thought, Fontana’s lack of a recognisable signature style prompted a plurality of critics to evoke the Baroque. For d’Ors, Nazism – in his opinion a positive force in European politics – was a return to the Baroque, an irruption of irrational and vitalist energy in a century that had, until then, been more sympathetic towards classical values: ‘The essential aspect of Hitler’s paganism is the cult of the Wildermann [primitive man]. In every major public Nazi manifestation, the Panic fire of the primitive ages irrupts. If it is true that in the soul of the twentieth century Classical light shows itself again, the Germany that we now have in front of us does not belong any more to the twentieth century.’ 141 Here the Baroque, as in some of the interpretations of Fontana’s maiolicas, is connected to primitivist arguments. To carry this argument further, it could also be pointed out that the lack of coherence in Fontana’s production – his contradictory nature, in brief – was also a feature of Fascist ideology. The ideological makeup of Fascism was paradoxically quite antiideological: to become an expression of the conflicting aspirations of different sectors of Italian society, Fascism adopted a pragmatic stance that was marked more by its opposition to the values of democracy than by a concrete set of proposals.142 Such lack of foundations made it possible to link the Baroque to Fascism. The entwinement of notions of Baroque and critical realism with the politically problematic work of Fontana reveals how, by the 1940s, the concept of the Baroque could indicate a rejection of mainstream classicising values but not necessarily a leftist criticism of the regime. Despite the differing aesthetics of Wildt’s and Fontana’s work, critics employed notions of the Baroque to make sense of them both – after all, both were well-inserted into Fascist systems of art patronage. Further linking the two artists’ reception, both Wildt and Fontana addressed a key feature of the style – the tension between form and matter – though they solved it in opposite ways. Their relative interpretations also constituted a most appropriate metaphor for the artistic climate of the ventennio. Whilst in the reception of Wildt’s sculpture the Baroque implied a comparison between the controlling activity of the politician and the artist, Fontana’s Baroqueness was seen as symptomatic of the ideological ambiguity at the core of frondist criticisms of the regime. Two artists profoundly embedded in the Fascist system of patronage, Wildt’s and Fontana’s Baroqueness thematised the problematic position of art practitioners who challenged the regime’s prevalent aesthetic and cultural positions. The ambiguity of Wildt’s

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6.16  Archivio Farabola, Fontana in the ruins of his studio in Milan, 1946

Form and formlessness and Fontana’s work made during the ventennio, simultaneously accepted and questioned by the Fascist artistic establishment, was solved in a concrete but symbolically poignant way in 1943: both of their studios were destroyed during the Allied bombardments of Milan, resulting in the destruction of much of the work they had done during the Fascist period.143

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Notes 1 Lucio Fontana, ‘The White Manifesto’, in Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 655. 2 Julio Rinaldini, ‘Lucio Fontana o la visión inflamada y dinámica de objeto’, Cabalgata III, no. 16 (February 1948): 16. 3 Elena Pontiggia, Rossana Bossaglia, and Lorella Giudici, Adolfo Wildt e i suoi allievi: Fontana, Melotti, Broggini e gli altri (Milan: Skira, 2000); Luca Massimo Barbero, ‘Wildt un magistero ideale: Fausto Melotti e Lucio Fontana’, in Adolfo Wildt (1868–1931): le dernier symboliste, ed. Paola Zatti and Ophélie Ferlier (Milan: Skira, 2015), 103–111. 4 Stephen Petersen, Space-Age Aesthetics: Lucio Fontana,Yves Klein, and the Postwar European Avant-Garde (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009); Anthony White, Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011); Choghakate Kazarian, ed., Lucio Fontana, rétrospective (Paris: Paris-Musées, 2014); Jaleh Mansoor, Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Marina Pugliese, Barbara Ferriani, and Vincente Todolí, Lucio Fontana. Environments (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2018). 5 Lucio Fontana to Julio Vanzo, 7 November 1927, Lucio Fontana: lettere 1919–1968, ed. Paolo Campiglio and Loredana Parmesani (Milan: Skira, 1999), 200. 6 The title of this section is taken from the article ‘Un ricordo marmoreo di A. Wildt’, Emporium L, no. 299 (November 1919): 279. 7 The scapigliatura (literally ‘dishevelled’, ‘scruffy’) was a group of Lombard painters, poets, and writers who signalled their rejection of bourgeois mores and politics with their choice of a bohemian lifestyle. Although the scapigliati artists lacked a unified programme, they all shared an interest in urban life and a rejection of academic artistic conventions, aiming to depict atmospheric effects by abolishing clear contours. See Roberto Tessari, ed., La Scapigliatura: un’avanguardia artistica nella società preindustriale (Turin: Paravia, 1975); Annie-Paule Quinsac, Scapigliatura (Venice: Marsilio, 2009). 8 ‘Adolfo Wildt’, Giovanni Scheiwiller / Questionari Giovanni, 48, Fondo Scheiwiller, Archivio APICE (Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan). Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 98. 9 Carlo Siviero, ‘In Memoria di Adolfo Wildt. Una lettera autobiografica dello scultore’, Il messaggero (17 March 1931). 10 Adolfo Wildt, ‘Adolfo Wildt parla della sua vita e della sua arte’, Il secolo XX: rivista popolare illustrata (March 1928): 118–120. 11 Joel Snyder, ‘Nineteenth-Century Photography of Sculpture and the Rhetoric of Substitution’, in Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, ed. Geraldine A. Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21–34. 12 Carlo Ludovico Luzzatto, ‘Cronache d’Arte. Disegni plastici di Wildt’, Le fonti, VII–VIII (1925), 180, cited in Paola Mola, ‘Avatar e il Laocoonte’, in Wildt: l’anima e le forme, ed.

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Paola Mola and Fernando Mazzocca (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editore, 2012), 19–51, 34. Heinrich Wölfflin, ‘How One Should Photograph Sculpture [1896, 1897, 1915],’ trans. Geraldine A. Johnson, Art History (July 2012): 2–20, 2. Paola Mola, ‘Adolfo Wildt. Note biografiche e critiche dal 1894 al 1912’, Storia dell’arte 48 (May–August 1983): 139–158. Adolfo Wildt, ‘Adolfo Wildt parla della sua vita e della sua arte’, Il secolo XX (March 1928): 118–122, 121. Fernando Mazzocca, ‘Artista senza pace e senza bellezza: Il dibattito critico su Wildt in vita’, in Adolfo Wildt (1868–1931): le dernier symboliste, ed. Paola Zatti and Ophélie Ferlier (Milan: Skira, 2015), 51–61. Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Adolfo Wildt e l’esposizione alla Galleria Pesaro’, Il popolo d’Italia (10 February 1919). Ugo Ojetti, ‘Lo Scultore Adolfo Wildt’, Dedalo 7, no. 2 (1926): 442–466. Mario Tinti, ‘La Mostra di Belle Arti a Torino’, Nuovo giornale (30 October 1919); cited in Mola, ‘Avatar e il Laocoonte’, 44. Emily Braun, ‘Genio e degenerazione: Klimt in Italia’, in Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele: dall’art nouveau all’espressionismo, ed. Jane Kallir (Milan: Mazzotta, 2001), 31–37. Antonio Maraini, ‘La XIII Biennale Veneziana inaugurata dal Principe ereditario. Primi spunti critici’, La tribuna (5 May 1922). Ardengo Soffici, ‘Gli Italiani all’Esposizione di Venezia’, Il resto del Carlino – la patria (16 June 1922). Max Nordau, Degenerazione: Fin de siècle-misticismo (Milan: Dumolard, 1893). Max Simon Nordau, Degeneration ([1892] New York: H. Fertig, 1968), 142. Giovanna Ginex, Divine: Emilio Sommariva fotografo: opere scelte 1910–1930 (Busto Arsizio: Nomos, 2004). Carlo Bozzi, ‘L’Esposizione Annuale della Società per le Belle Arti’, Il secolo (1 October 1912). Charles de Brosses, Lettres familières sur l’Italie (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1931), 106–107. The title of this section is derived from Guido Ludovico Luzzatto, ‘Adolfo Wildt scultore’, Rassegna nazionale XLI, no. XLV (April 1923): 116–124, 120. Giuseppe Cipolla, ‘Critica Minima. Lo Scultore A. Wildt’, La provincia. Corriere di Cremona (16 February 1914). Margherita Sarfatti, ‘L’Esposizione Nazionale di Brera a Milano’, Il messaggero della domenica (13 October 1918); Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Adolfo Wildt e l’esposizione alla Galleria Pesaro’, Il popolo d’Italia (10 February 1919). Luzzatto, ‘Adolfo Wildt scultore’, 119–120. Gustavo Botta, ‘Omaggio a Wildt’, Cronache latine (12 March 1932). Emphasis in original. Mola, ‘Avatar e il Laocoonte,’ in Wildt: l’anima e le forme, 20. As examples, see Enio Giorgianni, ‘Adolfo Wildt contro Medardo Rosso’, Cimento (16 March 1933); Ugo Ojetti, ‘Lo scultore Adolfo Wildt’, Dedalo 7, no. 2 (1926): 442–466. See also Paola Mola, Scultura e antiscultura alle origini del Novecento: i casiWildt e Medardo Rosso (Macerata: Accademia di belle arti, 1994). Sharon Hecker, ‘Ambivalent Bodies: Medardo Rosso’s Brera Petition’, Burlington Magazine 142, no. 1173 (December 2000): 773–777. Edmond Claris, De l’Impressionisme en Sculpture (Paris: Éditions de ‘La Nouvelle Revue’, 1902), 52; Dorothy M. Kosinski, ‘Vision and Visionaries: The Camera in the Context of Symbolist Aesthetics’, in The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso, ed. Dorothy M. Kosinski (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 2000), 13–23, 20.

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Form and formlessness 37 It is not clear whether Rosso created some of these photographs himself or directed others to take them. See Jane Becker, ‘Medardo Rosso: Photographing Sculpture and Sculpting Photography’, in The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso, ed. Dorothy M. Kosinski (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 2000), 159–175; Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker, eds, Medardo Rosso: Second impressions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Francesca Bacci, ‘Sculpting the Immaterial, Modelling the Light: Presenting Medardo Rosso’s Photographic Oeuvre’, Sculpture Journal 15, no. 2 (December 2006): 223–238; Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, eds, Rosso:The Transient Form (Milan: Skira, 2007); Hecker, A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture. 38 Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking Press, 1977); Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 39 Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. Marie Donald Mackie Hottinger ([1915] New York: Dover, 1950), 21–22. 40 Margherita Sarfatti, ‘L’Esposizione Nazionale di Belle Arti alla R. Accademia di Brera’, Il popolo d’Italia (17 September 1918): 3. 41 Adolfo Wildt, L’arte del marmo ([1921] Milan: Abscondita, 2002), 39. 42 Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon ([1888] London: Collins, 1964), 45. 43 Alois Riegl, The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome, trans. Andrew Hopkins and Arnold Alexander Witte ([1908] Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010). 44 Claudia Portioli, ‘Les chemins de la pensée de G. Simmel en Italie’, Sociologie et Sociétés 44, no. 2 (2012): 263–287. On the impact of Riegl’s thought on the work of Simmel see Frederick J. Schwarz, The Werkbund. Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 226, n. 40–42. 45 Georg Simmel, Michelangelo ([1910] Milan: Abscondita, 2003), 33. 46 Georg Simmel, Rembrandt: un saggio di filosofia dell’arte ([1916] Milan: Abscondita, 2001). 47 Vanni Scheiwiller, ‘Retrospettiva Wildt’, Il mondo (5 April 1970); ‘Adolfo Wildt e la sua scultura’, La sera (29 March 1913), reprinted in Lorella Giudici, ‘Antologia di Scritti’, in Elena Pontiggia, Rossana Bossaglia, and Lorella Giudici, Adolfo Wildt e i suoi allievi: Fontana, Melotti, Broggini e gli altri (Milan: Skira, 2000), 205–213, 209. 48 Mark Antliff, ‘The Fourth Dimension and Futurism: A Politicised Space’, Art Bulletin 82, no. 4 (December 2000): 720–733; Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 49 See Jaap van Ginneken, Crowds, Psychology, and Politics, 1871–1899 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Maria Donzelli, ed., Folla e politica: cultura filosofica, ideologia, scienze sociali in Italia e Francia a fine Ottocento (Naples: Liguori, 1995); Remo Bodei, Destini personali: l’età della colonizzazione delle coscienze (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2002); Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Tiews, eds, Crowds (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). 50 Günter Berghaus, ‘The Ritual Core of Fascist Theatre. An Anthropological Perspective’, in Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925–1945, ed. Günter Berghaus (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996). 51 Joseph Goebbels, Michael: ein deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblättern (Munich: Eher, 1942), 21. English translation in Philippe Lacue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 61–62. 52 O. K. Werckmeister, ‘Hitler the Artist’, Critical Inquiry 23, no. 2 (January 1997): 270–297, 273. See also Rainer Stollmann and Ronald L. Smith, ‘Fascist Politics as a Total Work of Art: Tendencies of the Aesthetisation of Political Life in National Socialism’, New German Critique

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no. 14 (April 1978): 41–60; Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). Benito Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi (Milan: Hoepli, 1934–1939), 279. See also Simonetta FalascaZamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 100. Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi, 279. Benedetto Croce, ‘Controriforma’, La critica 22 (1924): 321–333, 333. Benedetto Croce, Storia dell’età barocca in Italia: pensiero-poesia e letteratura vita morale ([1929] Bari: G. Laterza, 1957). See also Fabio Fernando Rizi, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 99–100; Rosalia Peluso, Lessico Crociano: Barocco (Naples: La Scuola di Pitagora, 2013); Rosalia Peluso, ‘La disputa sul barocco e altri motivi crociani in Benjamin’, Bollettino filosofico 28 (2013), 283–301. A letter from Vossler to Croce, dated Munich 3 September 1925, mentions the work of Fritz Strich, Herbert Cysarz, A. E. Brinkman and Wilhelm Hausenstein. Benedetto Croce and Karl Vossler, Epistolario Croce-Vossler, 1899–1949 (Buenos Aires: G. Kraft, 1956), 238. Croce, Storia dell’età barocca in Italia, 6. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 13ff. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 33. Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Profilo della critica d’arte in Italia (Florence: Edizioni U, 1973), 98. Eugenio Garin, ‘Antonio Banfi e il pensiero moderno’, in Intellettuali italiani del XX secolo (Rome: Editori riuniti, 1974), 215; Gabriele Scaramuzza, Crisi come rinnovamento: scritti sull’estetica della Scuola di Milano (Milan: UNICOPLI, 2000), 18. Luciano Anceschi, Autonomia ed eteronomia dell’arte: sviluppo e teoria di un problema estetico. (Florence: Sansoni, 1936). Dino Formaggio, ‘Arte e tecnica’, Vita giovanile I, no. 3 (28 February 1938). Gregg Lambert, ‘The Baroque Eon: Eugeni d’Ors’, in The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture (London, New York: Continuum, 2004), 31–48, 31. Luciano Anceschi, Eugenio d’Ors e il nuovo classicismo europeo (Milan: Rosa e Ballo, 1945); Eugenio d’Ors, Del Barocco, trans. Luciano Anceschi (Milan: Rosa e Ballo, 1945, and Milan: SE, 1999). Oreste Macrì, ‘Eugenio d’Ors. Profilo storico-critico’, in Studi ispanici (Naples: Liguori, 1996), 97–119, 99. Eugenio d’Ors, ‘Mitos, ritos’, and ‘Facies del Fascio’, Nuevo Glosario (Madrid: Aguilar, 1947), 931 and 976–978. D’Ors also wrote the introduction to a collections of writings by Benito Mussolini: Benito Mussolini, El espíritu de la Revolución Fascista. Antología de los escritos y discursos, recopilada por G. S.Spinetti. Prólogo de Eugenio d’Ors (Bilbao: Editorial Vizcaína, 1938). Maximiliano Fuentes Codera, ‘Eugenio d’Ors y la génesis del discurso del nacionalismo falangista’, in Falange. Las culturas políticas del Fascismo en la España de Franco (1936–1975), ed. Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer (Saragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 2013), 148–164. Paula Barreiro López, ‘Reinterpreting the Past: The Baroque Phantom during Francoism’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 91, no. 5 (May 2014): 715–734. Mario Tozzi and Waldemar George, ‘Sala 23 “Appels d’Italie”’, in XVII Esposizione Biennale Internazionale d’Arte. Catalogo (Venice: Carlo Ferrari, 1930), 92–97. Eugenio d’Ors, ‘Italia vuelve’, La gaceta literaria (May 1930): 8. ‘Padiglione della Spagna’, in XXI Esposizione Biennale Internazionale d’Arte. Catalogo (Venice: Carlo Ferrari, 1938), 266–272, 266; María Isabel Cabrera García, ‘Vanguardia y Fascismo en el arte español, antes y después de la Guerra Civil: encuentros y desencuentros’, Afinidades 5 (Spring 2011): 51–64.

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Form and formlessness 76 Eugenio d’ Ors, Du Baroque (Paris: Gallimard, 1935). Sections have been recently translated into English and published as Eugenio D’Ors, ‘The Debate on the Baroque in Pontigny. Excerpt from “Lo Barroco”’, in Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest, ed. Monika Kaup and Lois Parkinson Zamora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 78–92. To my knowledge this is the only English translation of d’Ors’s text. 77 François Chaubet, Paul Desjardins et les Décades de Pontigny (Paris: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2000); Paul Fierens, ‘À Pontigny: Entretiens sur le Baroque’, Les Nouvelles Littéraires Artistiques et Scientifiques (29 August 1931): 8. 78 D’ Ors, ‘The Debate on the Baroque in Pontigny. Excerpt from “Lo Barroco”’, 82. 79 D’ Ors, Del Barocco, 99. 80 Kaup and Zamora, eds, Baroque New Worlds, 75. 81 D’Ors, Del Barocco, 67, 88. 82 D’Ors, ‘Debate on the Baroque in Pontigny’, 76. 83 Eugenio d’Ors, ‘Confesión de un hijo de otro siglo’, in Confesiones y recuerdos, ed. Alicia GarcíaNavarro (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2000), 15–44, 17. 84 Luciano Anceschi, ‘Rapporto sull’idea del barocco’, in d’Ors, Del Barocco, ix–xxxvi, xxiv. 85 Anceschi, Eugenio d’Ors e il nuovo classicismo europeo, 94. 86 Ibid., 63. 87 Bette L. Talvacchia, ‘Politics Considered as a Category of Culture: The AntiFascist Corrente Group’, Art History 8, no. 3 (September 1985): 336–355; Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 168ff; Adrian Duran, ‘Corrente, Italian Art under Fascism, and the Resistance’, in Painting, Politics, and the New Front of Cold War Italy (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd, 2014), 11–40. 88 ‘Arnaldo Badodi, ‘Pittura e pubblico’, Vita giovanile I, no. 1 (1 January 1938). The title of the magazine Vita giovanile was later changed to Corrente di vita giovanile and finally to Corrente. 89 Ibid. 90 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, ‘The Politics of Realism: Corrente Di Vita Giovanile and the Youth Culture of the 1930s’, Stanford Italian Review VIII, nos 1–2 (1990): 139–164, 145, 164. See also Luisa Mangoni, L’interventismo della cultura. Intellettuali e riviste del Fascismo (Bari: Laterza, 1974). 91 The Editors, Corrente di vita giovanile II, no. 22 (15 December 1939). 92 Antonio Bruni to Vittorio Sereni, 12 September 1938. 1.11. 116, 1,1 Fondazione Corrente (Milan). 93 Ernesto Treccani, ‘Capitale Fascista’, Vita giovanile I, no. 1 (1 January 1938). 94 Ernesto Treccani, ‘I bigotti del Partito’, Vita giovanile I, no. 6 (15 April 1938). Giovannella Desideri, ed., Antologia della rivista Corrente (Naples: Guida, 1979), 24. From this issue onwards the Fasci disappeared from Corrente’s masthead. 95 Ernesto Treccani, ‘Filippiche’, Corrente di vita giovanile II, no. 7 (15 April 1939). 96 Ernesto Treccani, Arte per amore (Milan: Teti, 1973), 27. 97 In his autobiographical writings Treccani referred to the journal as ‘the antiFascist movement of Corrente’. Scritti 1959, 1.2, 7, 15, 5. Fondazione Corrente (Milan). Whilst the term ‘anti-Fascism’ could be applied to the artistic movement that began after the magazine closed, the journal itself was not recognisably anti-Fascist. 98 Antonio Bruni, ‘Il riconoscimento di Franco’, Vita giovanile I, no. 1 (1 January 1938). 99 Claudio Belingardi, ‘Razzismo e universalismo,’ Corrente di vita giovanile I, no, 21 (31 December 1938); Claudio Belingardi, ‘Pratica attuazione del nostro razzismo’, Corrente di vita giovanile II, no. 1 (15 January 1939). 100 Giulio Carlo Argan, ‘Il Caravaggio e la critica del Seicento’, Corrente di vita giovanile III, no. 9 (May 1940). 101 Ibid.

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Baroquemania 1 02 Ibid. 103 Giulio Carlo Argan, ‘Lucio Fontana’, in Cinque scultori d’oggi: Moore, Fontana, Mastroianni, Mirko, Viani, ed. Umbro Apollonio and Giulio Carlo Argan (Turin: Minerva Artistica, 1960), 51. 104 Enrico Crispolti, ‘Carriera “barocca” di Fontana’, Il verri III, no. 3 (June 1959): 101–108. Now in Enrico Crispolti and Lucio Fontana, Carriera barocca di Fontana: taccuino critico 1959–2004 e carteggio, 1958–1967, ed. Paolo Campiglio (Milan: Skira, 2004): 24–30. In addition to the aforementioned one by Argan, other writings that develop a similar argument were Toni Toniato, ‘Lucio Fontana’, Evento 14–15 (30 September 1961): 41–59; Italo Tomassoni, Per una ipotesi barocca (Rome: Ed. dell’Ateneo, 1963). 105 Enrico Crispolti, ‘Spazialismo, futurismo e barocco: appunti su una prospettiva tutta fontaniana’, in Lucio Fontana: metafore barocche, ed. Giorgio Cortenova (Venice: Marsilio, 2002), XLI–XLVII. 1 06 Paola Valenti, Lucio Fontana: in dialogo con lo spazio: opere ambientali e collaborazioni architettoniche, 1946–1968 (Genoa: De Ferrari, 2009), 36. 107 Bernardo Arias, Horacio Casenueve, et al., Manifesto Blanco (Buenos Aires: Escuela de Arte de Altamira, 1946). English translation: Lucio Fontana, ‘Manifiesto Blanco (1946)’, in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’Writings, ed. Peter Selz and Kristine Stiles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 48–51, 48. 108 Fontana, ‘Manifiesto Blanco (1946)’, 50–51. 109 Giorgio Cortenova, ‘Metafore barocche’, in Lucio Fontana: metafore barocche (Venice: Marsilio, 2002), xix; Enrico Crispolti, ‘L’avventura creativa di Fontana nell’arte del XX secolo’, in Lucio Fontana. Catalogo ragionato di sculture, dipinti, ambientazioni (Milan: Skira, 2005), 21. English translation in the original. 110 Enrico Crispolti, ‘L’avventura creativa di Fontana nell’arte del XX secolo’, 21. English translation in the original. 111 One of the earliest analysis of this work in the US context is Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Fontana’s Base Materialism’, Art in America 77, no. 4 (1989): 238–248; 279. Bois famously framed all of Fontana’s production, including his 1930s and 1940s sculptures, within the category of kitsch and as an example of Bataillean ‘scatological impulses’ (243) and a ‘regressive obsession with materiality’ (248). Although extremely influential in the English-speaking scholarship on Fontana, this interpretation utilises categories that are alien to the Italian and Argentine reception of his work. In what follows, I attempt to reconstruct such reception. For the interpretation of Fontana among the October group, see Jacopo Galimberti, ‘Sfavillii escrementizi. Lucio Fontana in “October”’, Predella. Journal of Visual Arts, no. 37 (2015): 191–202. 112 Letter to Giampiero Giani, Albisola, 2 November 1949. Lucio Fontana: lettere 1919–1968, 243. 113 Paolo Campiglio, Lucio Fontana: la scultura architettonica negli anni Trenta (Nuoro: Ilisso, 1995). 114 Giulio Carlo Argan, ‘Su alcuni giovani: Fontana (G.C.A)’, Le arti (March 1939): 187–195, 293. Similar accusations were published in Luigi Pennone, ‘Il “fenomeno” Fontana’, Il secolo XIX (21 February 1937). 115 Riccardo Crippa, ‘Mostre d’Arte’, Libro e Moschetto (20 February 1931): 4. Rassegna Stampa. Fondazione Lucio Fontana (Milano), from now on RS – FLF. 1 16 Ibid. 117 Gillo Dorfles, ‘Mostre milanesi’, L’Italia letteraria VII, no. 51 (15 February 1931): 4. 118 Lorenzo Giusti, ‘La ricezione critica di Fontana su Corrente: 1938–1940’, in Lucio Fontana: attraversando la materia (Busto Arsizio: Silvana, 2006): 69–76; Lorenzo Giusti, ‘Coscienza della crisi e richiamo morale nei critici d’arte di “Corrente”’, in Banfi e l’arte contemporanea, ed. Sileno Salvagnini (Naples: Liguori, 2012), 173–191. 119 The Italian term ‘frondismo’ (frondism), derived from the French civil wars between 1648 and 1653, is often used to refer to forms of opposition that accepted Fascism’s broad tenets. The fronda, as Mario De Micheli has observed, had a dialectical relation with more open forms

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of consensus and opposition. Although both committed Fascists and anti-Fascists of the older generation were sceptical about these young frondisti, the regime generally adopted a policy of tolerance in order to assimilate and defuse forms of criticism. Marina Addis Saba, Gioventú italiana del Littorio. La stampa dei giovani nella guerra Fascista (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1973); Carlo Cartiglia, ‘Il “Fascismo di fronda”: Appunti e ipotesi di lavoro’, Italia contemporanea, 122 (1976): 5–22; Mario De Micheli, Consenso, fronda, opposizione: intellettuali nel ventennio Fascista (Milan: Clup, 1977). Edoardo Persico, Lucio Fontana (Milan: Campo Grafico, 1936), no page. Raffaello Giolli, ‘Esposizioni Milanesi. È Scultura?’, Cronache latine (20 December 1931). RS – FLF. Leonardo Sinisgalli, ‘La quinta Sindacale Lombarda’, L’Italia letteraria X, no. 19 (13 May 1934). Ibid., italics in original. Paolo Campiglio, ‘“Io sono uno scultore e non un ceramista.” La ceramica di Lucio Fontana nella seconda metà degli anni Trenta: uno scritto e alcune ceramiche inedite’, Bollettino del Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche di Faenza LXXX, nos 1–2 (1994): 34–41; Raffaele Bedarida, ‘Fontana Conteso: Le mostre degli ultimi anni Trenta’, in Lucio Fontana: attraversando la materia, ed. Daniele Astrologo Abadal and Raffaele Bedarida (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2006), 12–26. Raffaele Carrieri, ‘Le maioliche geologiche di Lucio Fontana’, L’Illustrazione Italiana LXVI, no. 2 (8 January 1939): 63–64. Andrea Giunta, ‘Crónica de Posguerra: Lucio Fontana en Buenos Aires’, in Lucio Fontana. Obras Maestras de La Colección Lucio Fontana de Milán (Buenos Aires: Fundación Proa, 1999), 72–87. Miguel Alfredo D’Elia, ‘El mundo semifísico de Lucio Fontana’ El Mundo (no month, 1941). RS – FLF. Riccardo E. Ratti, ‘Del ardoroso y muy expresivo lenguaje plástico que anima las producciones del escultor Lucio Fontana’, Histonium VI, no. 65 (October 1944): 33–36. Julio Rinaldini, ‘Lucio Fontana o la visión inflamada y dinámica de objeto’, Cabalgata III, no. 16 (February 1948): 16. RS – FLF. Monika Kaup and Lois Parkinson Zamora, eds, Baroque NewWorlds: Representation,Transculturation, Counterconquest (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), especially section ‘The New World Baroque and the Neobaroque’; Tristan Weddigen, ‘Hispano-Incaic Fusions: Ángel Guido and Latin American Modernity’, Art in Translation 9, no. S1 (2017): 92–120. Duilio Morosini, ‘Lucio Fontana’, Corrente di vita giovanile II, no. 2 (31 January 1939). Leonardo Sinisgalli, ‘Disegni di Fontana’, Corrente di vita giovanile III, no. 2 (31 January 1940). Duilio Morosini, Lucio Fontana. 20 disegni con una prefazione (Milan: Edizioni di Corrente, 1940). Ibid., 13. Ibid., 17. Tullio d’Albisola, Lino Berzoini-Lucio Fontana (Genoa: Galleria Genova, 1939), no page. Lucio Fontana, Lettere di Lucio Fontana a Tullio d’Albisola (1936–1962), ed. Danilo Presotto (Savona: Editrice Liguria, 1987), 59, 68. See Anthony White, ‘Wounded: Lucio Fontana’s Wartime Sculpture in Italy and Argentina’, in Crossing Cultures. Conflict, Migration and Convergence, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Carlton: Miegunyah Press, 2009), 734–738; Emily Braun, ‘The Juggler. Fontana’s Art under Italian Fascism’, in Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold, ed. Iria Candela (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019), 29–39. Interview with Raffaele de Grada, December 1976, in Renata Ghiazza, ‘Per una lettura critica di “Corrente”’ (Undergraduate thesis, Università degli Studi di Milano, 1975), 106. Fondazione Corrente (Milano). Argan, ‘Lucio Fontana’, in Cinque scultori d’oggi, 51–92, 53.

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1 40 Eugenio d’Ors, Del Barocco, 27. Italics in the original. 141 Ibid., 138. This passage was not published in the Spanish version of the book: Lo barroco (Madrid: Aguilar, 1945). 1 42 Emilio Gentile, Le origini dell’ideologia Fascista (1918–1925) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996). 143 Marco Gioannini and Giulio Massobrio, Bombardate l’Italia. Storia della guerra di distruzione aerea 1940–1945 (Milan: Rizzoli, 2007); Sharon Hecker ‘“Servant of Two Masters”: Lucio Fontana’s Sculptures in Milan’s Cinema Arlecchino (1948)’, Oxford Art Journal 35, no. 3 (2012): 337–361.

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Conclusions

The baroque reveals itself to be the sovereign opposite of classicism […] The false appearance of totality is extinguished […] by its very essence classicism was not permitted to behold the lack of freedom, the imperfection, the collapse of the physical, beautiful, nature. But beneath its extravagant pomp, this is precisely what baroque allegory proclaims, with unprecedented emphasis. A deep-rooted intuition of the problematic character of art […] emerges as a reaction to its self-confidence at the time of the Renaissance. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama (1928)

I

n this longue durée chronology from 1898 to 1945 we have witnessed the diverse ways in which Italian artists and architects reimagined the Baroque in order to construct a modern – yet distinctively Italian – visual culture and modern identity. A response to the anxiety provoked by fears of losing one’s local character in the relentless, uniformising march of modernity, I have argued that such Baroquemania allowed Italians to envision an anti-classical impulse that proposed new ways of constructing regional and national aesthetics and identities. Such reimagined modern Baroque was framed as the expression of a homegrown identity that questioned Enlightenment rationalism, universalism, and the belief in the linear progress of history. If modernity is, in its most simple definition, a refusal of the classical (that is, the long-established, traditional, and austere), reframing the Baroque was a privileged route for developing an Italian path to modernity, a path that was not necessarily anti-modernist but that neither fully subscribed to avant-garde values, a path that was not nostalgic of the past but rather aware that classicism had always been – as Walter Benjamin put it in 1928, in a book that challenged Croce’s ideas on the Baroque – a ‘false appearance of totality’.1 What emerges from this story is that the Baroque imaginary was present in key moments of Italian modern history, helping Italians envision their relation to their past as well as their future as a nation. The shame and pride that Italians associated with the Seicento, characterised by humiliating occupation, division, and geopolitical irrelevance, 237

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Baroquemania but also with a celebrated style that shaped European and non-European colonial art, coexisted in the creative reimagination of both the Baroque style and its theoretical discussion. Never fully determined in political terms, the Baroque could be deployed to question the state, as among the Decadentists, or to strengthen its ritual power, as for Armando Brasini. It could be associated with dazzling sensuality, as with seicentophile painters, or with restrained modernism, as with Giuseppe Capponi. It could symbolise difference within unity, as in the 1911 Cinquantenario exhibitions or in the Palazzo Pitti show, or a menacing centrifugal force, as for de Chirico and Sarfatti. It could stand for formal discipline, as in Wildt’s sculpture, or for formlessness, as in Fontana’s.The modern Baroque’s cultural politics shifted as much as its visual reinterpretation. Despite its totalising ambition (expressed by Jorge Luis Borges in the epigraph to this book), any narrative about the Baroque must leave out as much as it includes. Yet a significant fact needs to be addressed. Although it had an important role in the central cultural and artistic debates analysed in the previous pages, and it was illustrated in mass visual culture up until the First World War, the Baroque is surprisingly absent from the mass visual culture produced during the Fascist ventennio. Covers of the most popular illustrated weeklies, such as the Rivista illustrata del popolo d’Italia, the Illustrazione Italiana, or the Domenica del Corriere della sera, very rarely represented artworks, buildings, or artists of the Seicento. The same is true for notebook covers, posters, and postcards. These ephemeral materials helped establish a sense of nationhood on the basis of a shared collective culture, and frequently included simple messages in favour of the regime. They systematically featured the classical, medieval, or Renaissance past of Italy, but they elided its seventeenth-century heritage. Only cinema was tasked with disseminating some ideas of the Baroque among a wider population. In extremely successful interwar movies on Baroque artists such as Salvator Rosa (Un’avventura di Salvator Rosa, Alessandro Blasetti, 1940) and Caravaggio (Caravaggio, il pittore maledetto, Goffredo Alessandrini, 1941), or cloak and dagger films such as The Daughter of the Green Corsair (La figlia del Corsaro verde, Enrico Guazzoni, 1940) and Captain Fracassa (Duilio Coletti, 1940), descriptions of the Seicento echoed the clichés that the scholarship and artistic reinterpretations studied in this book have challenged.2 Instead of focusing on their artistic achievements, Salvator Rosa is portrayed as an outlaw and Caravaggio as a wayward rebel; the seventeenth century as a period of useless duels and pompous honour codes. The multifaceted understanding of the Baroque that other media such as painting, sculpture, and architecture addressed was lacking from interwar cinematic representations of the seventeenth century – as if this most popular of media could not convey the complex layers of meaning that the Baroque had accrued since 1898. The absence of seventeenth-century references in Fascist popular culture is all the more surprising given the almost banal resemblances between the Baroque and totalitarian culture. In 1945, in the wake of the collapse of the regime, the newly appointed head of the British Institute in Rome, the classicist Roger Hinks, wrote, ‘I looked into the Chiesa del Gesù for a few minutes, but was again put off by the totalitarian atmosphere which had repelled me in St. Peter’s’. He concluded, ‘I am out of sympathy with the Baroque: we know altogether too much these days about the ways of absolutism here on

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Conclusions

7.1  Caravaggio, il pittore maledetto (Caravaggio, the Cursed Painter), director Goffredo Alessandrini, 1941

earth to look with complacency upon its encroachments on the life of the spirit’.3 That Baroque art aimed to persuade and emotionally involve audiences through aesthetics was readily discernible in the architecture of Carlo Maderno, Guarino Guarini, and Giacomo della Porta; in the sculpture of Bernini and Stefano Maderno; and in the paintings of Caravaggio and Andrea Pozzo.4 Perceived similarities between religious and political propaganda and between moral manipulation and psychological warfare, and their links to the emergence of modern mass culture, further underscored the totalitarian resonances of the Baroque. It appeared that the proselytising intentions of their patrons and makers, and the way in which they were received by a presumably passive audience, were common to both Baroque and Fascist visual culture as efficient systems of mass persuasion. Given the Baroque’s overt and often successful function in political persuasion, several crucial questions arise: Why was the Baroque not massively disseminated in Italian Fascist propaganda? Why could other pasts be mobilised to construct an Italian and Fascist identity, while the Baroque appeared to resist its circulation through technologies of mass printed reproduction?5 Several factors contributed to this phenomenon. One possible explanation might be that references to the Roman, medieval, or Renaissance periods could be reframed as secular, and, therefore, could more aptly serve the purposes of a regime that considered itself to supersede other forms of spiritual allegiance.6 By contrast the Baroque – despite the multiple meanings it had accrued over the course of almost five decades – was still too easily conflated with Catholicism.

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Baroquemania True, several measures had been taken to ease the tension between Italy’s Fascist state and religious institutions. For example the 1929 Lateran Pacts rendered relations between the Italian state and the Catholic Church friendlier than they had previously been since the Kingdom of Italy annexed Rome in 1870. Still, Fascist authorities aspired to create ‘a new Italian’, part of a disciplined mass that followed its political leader unquestionably, participated in secular rites, and changed patterns of speech, dress, and behaviour to conform to Fascist values.7 Although, in some respects, the ‘new Fascist Italian’ was compatible with the gender and class expectations promoted by the Catholic Church, the regime aspired to have fully committed and faithful citizens. It therefore looked at religious organisations as rivals vying for the Italian soul and conscience.8 For this reason the Baroque, a style so inextricably tied to Counter-Reformation Catholicism, was better avoided in mass propaganda. Another possible reason for its absence in mass culture is that the Baroque resisted popular propagandistic appropriation due to its slipperiness as a concept. A protean and ideologically charged concept, the Baroque had accrued many contradictory meanings since its rediscovery in the late nineteenth century: a signifier of political and artistic decadence, a precursor of experimental art, a symbol of Italianness as well as of Germanity, an icon of totalitarian rule as well as an example of a critical view of such forms of power. The Baroque’s essential ambiguity was out of place in a propaganda system that required unequivocal and clear-cut signifiers of nationhood and political identity. We must consider, too, the tools of propaganda employed during Italy’s Fascist period: the Ministry of Popular Culture ‘fabricated consent’, as Philip Cannistraro has argued, by using a variety of mass media such as the radio, the press, and cinema to mould public opinion and rally the Italians around the Fascist hierarchy.9 Although such an approach was tailored to different sectors of society, its overall aim, in Mussolini’s words, was to ‘bring the masses to the state’, to instil in crowds a cohesion whose absence had allegedly provoked anarchy under liberal democracy.10 The Fascistisation of Italy implied the construction of a population as cohesive as possible. To this end, clear and unambiguous messages were indispensable, and references to the Baroque – with its overtones of creative chaos, sensory stimulation, and lawlessness – would have backfired. A third explanatory framework – and they do not exclude each other but rather add levels of complexity to the lack of seventeenth-century imagery in Fascist printed mass culture – is that the discussion of the Baroque, despite extending beyond the confines of academic art history and taking place in a variety of less-specialised venues, was very much a middle- or even high-brow topic. It is safe to presume that the readers of La voce, Valori plastici, Dedalo, and Corrente were mostly members of the educated bourgeoisie, with disposable incomes that made it possible to acquire relatively expensive periodicals, a liberal arts education to understand scholarly references, and significant interest in the cultural politics of countries outside of Italy.11 The same audiences attended the exhibitions that Ojetti organised, the schools that Fasolo designed, and the Venice and Roman Biennales where Wildt and the ‘seicentophile’ painters exhibited, and the private galleries where

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Conclusions Fontana showed his work; they also lived in apartment buildings such as Giuseppe Capponi’s or Carlo Broggi’s. The Fascist regime, despite being interested in regimenting the entire Italian citizenship, preserved class distinctions in its approach to ideological dissemination. For Giovanni Gentile, the regime’s foremost intellectual, the true ideals of Fascism were comprehensible only to an elite, whilst the masses required ‘simple slogans […] which practically and immediately distinguish friends from enemies, create myths, arouse blind support and put into motion the forces of will and feeling’.12 The iconography of Fascism reinforced this class distinction. As Laura Malvano showed, the regime differentiated between a ‘cultured artistic production’ and ‘mass images’.13 The first addressed a selected audience and was shown in settings that already predetermined its reception as unique artworks with a cultural pedigree, such as new public buildings, exhibition venues, and museums; this is where the reimagined Baroque was on display. ‘Mass images’, by contrast, were highly legible and easily understandable by a broad audience, conveying a clear and elementary message. They repeated a set of iconographic tropes such as the image of Mussolini, allusions to the Roman heritage, and representations of the balilla and the Blackshirts. Whether in a traditional language or in a modernist, experimental one, these forms of printed propaganda required uncontroversial messages and references to an indisputably heroic Italian past. The fact that seventeenth-century imagery was not included in Fascist mass propaganda raises questions about the class politics of modern engagements with the Baroque, as well as of the Fascist rewriting of Italian collective memory. The foremost paradox in the Italian modern Baroquemania is precisely that a style whose ‘Italianness’ was painstakingly discussed was actually not intrinsically Italian at all. By the 1940s, the end of the period addressed in this book, it was clear that many other nations had rightful claims to the Baroque and considered it essential to their own national narrative. Thus a conversation around the Italianness of the Baroque became obsolete once the global nature of the style was addressed, and once Italian artists and intellectuals became aware that their debate – far from being unique – was actually part of an international trend that engaged Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, and German-speaking intellectuals in this exact same period. The multi-layered reception of the Baroque in the period between 1898 and 1945 came to an end with the Second World War. In Italy’s postwar period the Baroque came to be associated mostly with an anti-totalitarian thrust that privileged chaos over order, variety over similarity, and creativity over discipline. This is the meaning of the wave of writings on the Baroque and neo-Baroque developed after the 1950s, mostly applied to design and architecture.14 The mistrust of totalising interpretations in favour of fragmentary ones – which in The Origins of the German Tragic Drama Benjamin adopted as the definition of the Baroque – is the defining trait of this style’s function as an interpretative framework for postwar culture.15 However, as this book has shown, between the fin de siècle and the fall of Fascism, this interpretation of the Baroque was just one of possible meanings. The period and style could also coincide with discipline, with unity within difference, or with order

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Baroquemania against dissolving forces. Not only a privileged site for the reflection on postmodernity – as it has been for authors such as Omar Calabrese, Gilles Deleuze, Christine BuciGlucksmann, and others – the previous pages have revealed a profound sympathy between the Baroque and modernity, especially in its connection with the construction of the nation-state and local identities. Yet the Baroque was too unstable, too unpredictable to maintain such weighty connotations for Italy’s future. It was an integral part of the Italian past, but it could not provide the solid grounding that the nation needed. After the cataclysmic fall of Fascism, historicist appeals to the distant past were no longer needed to build national cohesion. Now, it was the reference to the Resistance – the ‘perfect Resistance’, as Giovanni de Luna has called it – and the anti-Fascist fight for freedom that allowed Italy to create a collective memory.16 The Baroque would be a symbol no longer of an essentialist Italianness but rather of the rebirth after Fascism. Baroque sculpture itself was marshalled in such an anti-Fascist vein when Leoncillo Leonardi modelled his ceramic sculpture Roman Mother Killed by the Germans in via Giulio Cesare (1944) on both Stefano Maderno’s Santa Cecilia (1600) and Bernini’s Ludovica Albertoni (1674) – two examples of Baroque pathos.17 Leonardi’s sculpture was included in the Roman exhibition ‘Art against Barbarity: Roman Artists’, organised in 1944 by the Communist newspaper L’unità.18 For the secretary of the Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti, such a show was a necessary response to the 7.2  Leoncillo Leonardi, Roman Mother Killed by the Germans in via Giulio Cesare, 1944

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Conclusions auto-celebratory exhibitions of Fascism, especially the infamous 1932 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution). Instead of celebrating the March on Rome or the supposed achievements of the regime, an exhibition such as Art against Barbarity would be, in Togliatti’s words, ‘a truthful exhibition of Fascism, where we will show our cities destroyed, our poor villages razed to the ground, where we will write the name of our martyrs and that of the heroes for the struggle for the liberation of Italy from foreign yoke’.19 Art against Barbarity aspired to provide its audiences with the reality (a key word in the interwar period, as the previous chapter has shown) rather than the fiction of the Fascist regime – with truth rather than obfuscation. The show’s location was as powerfully symbolic as the intent behind it: The show was held in the Galleria di Roma, an exhibition space formerly sponsored by the Fascist Syndicate of Artists where many of the most iconic exhibitions of Fascist modernism took place, among them the Second Exhibition of Rational Architecture addressed in Chapter 5. The 1944 exhibition reclaimed this charged space for anti-Fascist purposes, just as Leonardi reclaimed the Baroque for these same ends – and in 1944, too, an exhibition in Rome’s Palazzo Venezia (Mussolini’s former headquarters) of painting of the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, organised by the Allies, reclaimed the Renaissance and Baroque tradition from its nationalistic mobilisation in the interwar period.20 Inspired by Fontana’s formless coloured ceramics, Leonardi’s sculpture was described by the critic Toti Scialoja in terms similar to those discussed in Chapter 6: ‘a dense matter’ that ‘rose to a boil and perilously stopped on the edge’, with ‘plastic congestions’ that make her ‘leavening and contorted in a funeral baroque tenderness’.21 Yet this visual rhetoric now thematised neorealism rather than the frondist realism of the 1930s.22 Depicted in Leonardi’s sculpture is Teresa Gullace, shot by a Nazi soldier while trying to speak with her imprisoned husband. Illustrating the climactic scene of Roberto Rosellini’s iconic neorealist movie Rome Open City (1945), where she is memorably portrayed by Anna Magnani, Gullace’s death profoundly moved the Roman population. Neorealism – an anti-Fascist and militant aesthetic – shared with Fascist realism a desire to depict an unfiltered reality rather than to reinterpret artistic tradition. Yet neorealism rejected nationalistic arguments in favour of class-based identity, an argument that frondists such as Fontana or Corrente’s collaborators would not make while Fascism was in power. After its demise, imagining the Baroque – but also the Roman empire, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Risorgimento – was no longer needed to imagine Italy.

Notes 1 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama ([1928] New York: Verso, 1998), 176. 2 Félix Monguilot Benzal, ‘Luces y sombras: adaptaciones cinematográficas de la vida de Caravaggio’, in La biografía fílmica. Actas del Segundo Congreso Internacional de Historia y Cine (Madrid: T&B editores, 2011): 715–734; Laura Rorato, Caravaggio in Film and Literature: Popular Culture’s Appropriation of a Baroque Genius (London: Routledge, 2017). For cinema of this era see, among others, Vito Zagarrio, Cinema e Fascismo: film, modelli, immaginari (Venice: Marsilio, 2004); Marcia

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Baroquemania Landy, Fascism in Film:The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1931–1943 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 3 Cited in Denise R. Costanzo, ‘Giedion as Guide: Space,Time and Architecture and the Modernist Reception of Baroque Rome’, in The Baroque in Architectural Culture, 1880–1980, ed. Maarten Delbeke, Andrew Leach, and John Macarthur (Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate, 2015), 129–138, 129. 4 Werner Weisbach, Der Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation (Berlin: Paul Cassirer, 1921); José Antonio Maravall, La cultura del barroco: análisis de una estructura histórica (Esplugues de Llobregat: Ariel, 1975). See also Evonne Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 5 See, for example, Marla Susan Stone, ‘A Flexible Rome: Fascism and the Cult of Romanità’, in Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–1945, ed. Catharine Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 205–220; Laura Malvano Bechelloni, ‘Le mythe de la romanité et la politique de l’image dans l’Italie Fasciste’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’Histoire 78 (April–June 2003): 111–112; Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected; Crum and Lazzaro, eds, Donatello among the Blackshirts. 6 Emilio Gentile, Il culto del littorio: la sacralizzazione della politica nell’Italia Fascista (Rome: Laterza, 1993). 7 Spackman, Fascist Virilities; Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle:The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Luca La Rovere, ‘“Rifare gli italiani”: l’esperimento di creazione dell’“uomo nuovo” nel regime Fascista’, Annali di storia dell’educazione e delle istituzioni scolastiche 9 (2002), 51–77. 8 See Pietro Scoppola, La Chiesa e il Fascismo. Documenti e interpretazioni (Bari: Laterza, 1971); Gentile, ‘Il Fascio e la croce’, in Il culto del littorio, 120–129. 9 Philip Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso: Fascismo e mass media (Rome, Bari: Laterza, 1975); David Forgacs, Rethinking Italian Fascism: Capitalism, Populism and Culture (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986). 10 Victoria De Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organisation of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 11 Mario Isnenghi, Intellettuali militanti e intellettuali funzionari: appunti sulla cultura Fascista (Turin: Einaudi, 1979); Luisa Mangoni, L’interventismo della cultura. Intellettuali e riviste del Fascismo (Rome, Bari: Laterza, 1974); Giuseppe Carlo Marino, L’autarchia della cultura. Intellettuali e Fascismo negli anni  trenta (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1983); Angelo D’Orsi, La cultura a Torino tra le due guerre (Turin: Einaudi, 2000); Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 12 Cited in Adrian Lyttleton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, 1919–1929 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 377. 13 Laura Malvano, Fascismo e politica dell’immagine (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1988). 14 Gillo Dorfles, Barocco nell’architettura moderna (Milan: Tamburini, 1951); Italo Tomassoni, Per una ipotesi barocca. (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1963); Omar Calabrese, L’età Neobarocca (Rome: Laterza, 1987). See also Adrian Duran, ‘Baroque Space in Postwar Italian Painting’, in Baroque Tendencies in Contemporary Art, ed. Kelly Ann Wacker (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 28–42; Laura Petican, Arte Povera and the Baroque: Building an International Identity (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011). 15 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. 16 Giovanni de Luna, La Resistenza Perfetta (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2015). 17 Corrado Maltese, Materialismo e critica d’arte. Saggi e polemiche (Rome: Edizioni dell’Incontro, 1956), 175–184.

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Conclusions 18 Duran, Painting, Politics, and the New Front of ColdWar Italy, 30–32; Chiara Perin, ‘“La vera mostra del Fascismo”. Arte contro la barbarie a Roma nel 1944’, special issue Esposizioni/Exhibitions, ed. Francesca Castellani, Francesca Gallo, Vanja Strukelj, Francesca Zanella, and Stefania Zuliani, Ricerche di s/confine. Oggetti e pratiche artistico/culturali 4 (2018): 262–280. 19 Palmiro Togliatti, Per la libertà d’Italia, per la creazione di un vero regime democratico. Discorso pronunciato al Teatro Brancaccio in Roma, 9 luglio 1944 (Rome: Edizioni de L’Unità, 1944). 20 Catalogo della Esposizione di Capolavori della Pittura Europea, XV–XVII (Rome: Governo Militare Alleato, 1944). 21 Toti Scialoja, ‘Arte e barbarie’, Mercurio I, no. 2 (1 October 1944): 154–157, 156. 22 Nicoletta Misler, La via italiana al realismo. La politica culturale artistica del Pci dal 1944 al 1956 (Milan: Mazzotta, 1973); Luciano Caramel, ed., Realismi. Arti figurative, letteratura e cinema in Italia dal 1943 al 1953 (Milan: Electa, 2001); Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco and Claudia Terenzi, eds, Roma 1948–1959. Arte, cronaca e cultura dal neorealismo alla dolce vita, catalogo della mostra (Milan: Skira, 2002).

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Selected bibliography

Archives Archivio Centrale dello Stato (Rome) Archivio Contemporaneo ‘Alessandro Bonsanti’, Gabinetto G. Vieusseux (Florence) Archivio del ‘900, Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (Rovereto) Archivio Lionello Venturi, Università di Roma La Sapienza (Rome) Archivio Marcello Piacentini, Università degli Studi di Firenze (Florence) Archivio Storico Capitolino (Rome) Archivio Storico della Galleria d’Arte Moderna (Rome) Carte di Enrico Nencioni, Biblioteca Marucelliana (Florence) Fondazione Corrente (Milan) Fondazione Lucio Fontana (Milan) Fondazione Primo Conti (Fiesole) Fondazione Roberto Longhi (Florence) Fondo Adolfo Venturi, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (Pisa) Fondo Ardengo Soffici, Archivio di Stato di Firenze (Florence) Fondo Roberto Longhi, Centro di ricerca sulla tradizione manoscritta, Università degli Studi di Pavia (Pavia) Fondo Sommariva, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense (Milan) Fondo Ugo Ojetti, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (Florence) Fondo Vanni Scheiwiller, Archivio APICE, Università degli Studi di Milano (Milan) Umberto Boccioni Papers, The Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles)

Printed sources Adorni, Daniela. L’Italia Crispina: Riforme e Repressione: 1887–1896. Florence: Sansoni, 2002. Affron, Matthew, and Mark Antliff. FascistVisions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Agosti, Giacomo. La nascita della storia dell’arte in Italia: AdolfoVenturi, dal museo all’università, 1880–1940. Venice: Marsilio, 1996. Amico, Fabio. ‘La Mostra della Pittura Italiana del Seicento e del Settecento a Palazzo Pitti nel 1922: documenti, dibattiti e rivisitazioni su due secoli “resuscitati” dell’arte italiana’. Doctoral dissertation, Università degli Studi di Firenze, 2007. Anagnost, Adrian. ‘Limitless Museum: P. M. Bardi’s Aesthetic Reeducation’. Modernism/Modernity 26, no. 4 (2019): 687–725. 246

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Selected bibliography Anceschi, Luciano. Barocco e novecento: con alcune prospettive fenomenologiche. Milan: Rusconi e Paolazzi, 1960. Antliff, Mark. Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. ———. ‘Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity’. The Art Bulletin 84, no. 1 (1 March 2002): 148–169. https://doi.org/10.2307/3177257. ———. Avant-Garde Fascism :The Mobilisation of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Arthurs, Joshua. Excavating Modernity :The Roman Past in Fascist Italy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012. Ascoli, Albert Russell, and Krystyna Clara von Henneberg. Making and Remaking Italy:The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Baxa, Paul. Roads and Ruins: The Symbolic Landscape of Fascist Rome. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. Bedarida, Raffaele. ‘Fontana Conteso: Le mostre degli ultimi anni Trenta’, in Lucio Fontana: attraversando la materia, ed. Daniele Astrologo Abadal and Raffaele Bedarida. Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2006, 12–26. Belmonte, Carmen. ‘Biografia di un dipinto: ‘La battaglia di Dogali’ di Michele Cammarano tra retorica coloniale e sfortuna espositiva’. Studiolo, no. 13 (2016): 284–299, 396–397. Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. ‘Fascism, Writing, and Memory: The Realist Aesthetic in Italy, 1930–1950’. The Journal of Modern History 67, no. 3 (September 1995): 627–665. ———. ‘Italian Fascism and the Aesthetics of the “Third Way”’. Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 2 (1 April 1996): 293–316. ———. Fascist Modernities Italy, 1922–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. ———. Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. New York: Verso, 1998. Benzi, Fabio. Arte in Italia tra le due guerre. Rome: Bollati Boringhieri, 2013. Berenson, Bernard, and Roberto Longhi. Lettere e scartafacci: 1912–1957, ed. Cesare Garboli, Cristina Montagnani, and Giacomo Agosti. Milan: Adelphi, 1993. Berghaus, Günter. The Genesis of Futurism: Marinetti’s Early Career and Writings 1899–1909. Leeds: Society for Italian Studies, 1995. Bernabò, Massimo. Ossessioni bizantine e cultura artistica in Italia: tra D’Annunzio, Fascismo e dopoguerra. Naples: Liguori, 2003. Bernheimer, Charles. Decadent Subjects:The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Billiani, Francesca. Fascist Modernism: The Arts under Dictatorship. London: I. B. Tauris, 2017. Binni, Walter. La poetica del decadentismo. Florence: Sansoni, 1968. Bonito Oliva, Achille, and Maïthé Vallès-Bled. De Chirico et la peinture Italienne de l’entre-deux guerres: du futurisme au retour a l’ordre. Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana, 2003. Bossaglia, Rossana. Il liberty: storia e fortuna del liberty italiano. Florence: Sansoni, 1974. Bouchard, Norma, ed. Risorgimento in Modern Italian Culture: Revisiting the Nineteenth-Century Past in History, Narrative, and Cinema. Cranbury: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. Braun, Emily. ‘Political Rhetoric and Poetic Irony: The Uses of Classicism in the Art of Fascist Italy’, in On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910–1930, ed. Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer A. Mundy. London: The Tate Gallery, 1990, 345–358. ———. Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ———. ‘Italia Barbara: Italian Primitives from Piero to Pasolini.’ Journal of Modern Italian Studies 17, no. 3 (1 June 2012): 259–270.

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Selected bibliography ———. ‘The Juggler. Fontana’s Art under Italian Fascism’, in Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold, ed. Iria Candela. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019, 29–39. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. Baroque Reason:The Aesthetics of Modernity. Translated by Patrick Camellier. London: Sage Publications, 1994. ———. The Madness of Vision: On Baroque Aesthetics. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013. Calabrese, Omar. L’età Neobarocca. Rome: Laterza, 1987. Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987. Calo, Mary Ann. Bernard Berenson and the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994. Canfora, Luciano. Ideologie del classicismo. Turin: Einaudi, 1980. Castronovo, Valerio, Silvia Danesi Squarzina, and Luciano Patetta, eds. Il razionalismo e l’architettura in Italia durante il Fascismo. Milan: Electa, 1996. Cavazza, Stefano. Piccole patrie: feste popolari tra regione e nazione durante il Fascismo. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003. Cederna, Antonio. Mussolini urbanista: lo sventramento di Roma negli anni del consenso. Rome, Bari: Laterza, 1979. Celant, Germano, ed. Post Zang Tumb Tuuum: Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943. Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2018. Ciucci, Giorgio. Gli architetti e il Fascismo: architettura e città, 1922–1944. Turin: G. Einaudi, 1989. Cottini, Luca. ‘D’Annunzio, Bernini, and the Baroque Prelude of Il Piacere’. Forum Italicum 51, no. 2 (August 2017): 1–20. Cowling, Elizabeth, and Jennifer A. Mundy, eds. On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910–1930. London: The Tate Gallery, 1990. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: OnVision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Crispolti, Enrico. Il mito della macchina e altri temi del futurismo. Trapani: Celebes, 1971. Crispolti, Enrico, and Lucio Fontana. Carriera barocca di Fontana: taccuino critico 1959–2004 e carteggio, 1958–1967. Edited by Paolo Campiglio. Milan: Skira, 2004. Crum, Roger J., and Claudia Lazzaro, eds. Donatello among the Blackshirts. History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. D’Angelo, Paolo. L’estetica di Benedetto Croce. Rome: Laterza, 1982. De Lorenzi, Giovanna. Ugo Ojetti critico d’arte: dal ‘Marzocco’ a ‘Dedalo’. Florence: Le lettere, 2004. Del Puppo, Alessandro. ‘Lacerba’ 1913–1915: arte e critica d’arte. Bergamo: Lubrina, 2000. ———. Modernità e nazione: temi di ideologia visiva nell’arte italiana del primo Novecento. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2012. Delbeke, Maarten, Andrew Leach, and John Macarthur, eds. The Baroque in Architectural Culture, 1880–1980. Fernham: Ashgate, 2015. Della Coletta, Cristina. World’s Fairs Italian Style: The Great Exhibitions in Turin and Their Narratives, 1860–1915. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Desmarais, Jane, and David Weir, eds. Decadence and Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Devant le temps: histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2000. Docci, Marina, and Maria Grazia Turco, eds. L’architettura dell’‘altra’ modernità. Rome: Gangemi, 2010. Doordan, Dennis P. Building Modern Italy: Italian Architecture, 1914–1936. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988. Dorfles, Gillo. Barocco nell’architettura moderna. Milan: Libreria editrice politecnica Tamburini, 1951. Drake, Richard. Byzantium for Rome: The Politics of Nostalgia in Umbertian Italy, 1878–1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

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Selected bibliography Echeverría, Bolívar. La modernidad de lo barroco. México, D.F.: Ed. Era, 1998. Egginton, William. How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. ———. The Theater of Truth : The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Engel, Ute. Stil und Nation: Barockforschung und deutsche Kunstgeschichte (ca. 1830 bis 1933). Paderborn: Fink, 2013. Etlin, Richard A. Modernism in Italian Architecture, 1890–1940. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. ———. ‘Nationalism in Modern Italian Architecture 1900–1940’, in Nationalism in the Visual Arts, ed. Richard A. EtlinHanover and London: National Gallery of Art, Washington University Press, 1991, 88–109. ———. ‘St. Peter’s in the Modern Era: The Paradoxical Colossus’, in St. Peter’s in the Vatican, ed. William Tronzo. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 270–304. Fagone, Vittorio. L’arte all’ordine del giorno: figure e idee in Italia da Carrà a Birolli. Milan: Feltrinelli, 2001. Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta. Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Fergonzi, Flavio, and Paolo Fossati, eds. La scultura monumentale negli anni del Fascismo: Arturo Martini e il monumento al Duca d’Aosta. Turin: Allemandi, 1992. ———. Filologia del 900: Modigliani, Sironi, Morandi, Martini. Milan: Electa, 2013. Ferlier, Ophélie, and Paola Zatti, eds. AdolfoWildt (1868–1931): le dernier symboliste. Paris: Skira, 2015. Fogu, Claudio. The Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Fontana, Lucio. Lucio Fontana: lettere 1919–1968. Edited by Paolo Campiglio and Loredana Parmesani. Milan: Skira, 1999. Forgacs, David. Rethinking Italian Fascism: Capitalism, Populism and Culture. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986. Fossati, Paolo. Lucio Fontana. Concetti spaziali. Turin: Einaudi, 1970. ———. Valori plastici, 1918–22. Turin: G. Einaudi, 1981. ———. ‘Pittura e scultura tra le due guerre’, in Storia dell’arte italiana. Parte seconda: dal Medioevo al Novecento.Volume terzo: il Novecento. Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1982, 175–259. ———. Autoritratti, specchi, palestre: figure nella pittura italiana del Novecento. Milan: B. Mondadori, 1998. Fossati, Paolo, Patrizia Rosazza Ferraris, and Livia Velani. Valori plastici. Milan: Skira, 1998. Fraixe, Catherine, Christophe Poupault, and Lucia Piccioni. Vers une Europe latine: acteurs et enjeux des échanges culturels entre la France et l’Italie Fasciste. Bern: Peter Lang, 2014. Fratini, Francesca Romana, ed. Torino 1902. Polemiche in Italia sull’Arte Nuova. Turin: Martano, 1971. Galimberti, Jacopo. ‘Lucio Fontana’s Dialectic’. Art History 36, no. 4 (Settembre 2013): 883–885. ———. ‘Sfavillii escrementizi. Lucio Fontana in “October”’. Predella. Journal of Visual Arts, no. 37 (2015): 191–202. Gentile, Emilio. Il culto del littorio: la sacralizzazione della politica nell’Italia Fascista. Rome: Laterza, 1993. ———. La Grande Italia. Ascesa e declino del mito della nazione nel ventesimo secolo. Milan: Mondadori, 1997. ———. Fascismo di pietra. Rome: Laterza, 2007. Getto, Giovanni. Il Barocco letterario in Italia: Barocco in prosa e in poesia, la polemica sul Barocco. Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2000. Ghirardo, Diane. ‘Architects, Exhibitions, and the Politics of Culture in Fascist Italy’. Journal of Architectural Education 45, no. 2 (1992): 67–75. Goyer, Nicolas, and Walter Moser, eds. Résurgences baroques. Brussels: Lettre volée, 2001. Greenhalgh, Paul. Ephemeral Vistas: The ‘Expositions Universelles’, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 185 –1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Harbison, Robert. Reflections on Baroque. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

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Selected bibliography Haskell, Francis. Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976. ———. The Ephemeral Museum: Art Exhibitions and Their Significance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Hecker, Sharon. ‘“Servant of Two Masters”: Lucio Fontana’s Sculptures in Milan’s Cinema Arlecchino (1948)’. Oxford Art Journal 35, no. 3 (December 2012): 337–361. ———. A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. Hills, Helen, ed. Rethinking the Baroque. Burlington: Ashgate, 2011. Holly, Michael Ann. The Melancholy Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Iamurri, Laura. ‘Berenson, la pittura moderna e la nuova critica italiana’. Prospettiva, no. 87/88 (1997): 69–90. ———. Lionello Venturi e la modernità dell’impressionismo. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2011. Isnenghi, Mario. Intellettuali militanti e intellettuali funzionari: appunti sulla cultura Fascista. Turin: Einaudi, 1979. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes:The Denigration ofVision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Kallis, Aristotle. The Third Rome, 1922–1943: The Making of the Fascist Capital. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Kaup, Monika. Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Kaup, Monika, and Lois Parkinson Zamora, eds. Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Kostof, Spiro. The Third Rome, 1870–1950:Traffic and Glory. Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1973. Kurz, Otto. ‘Barocco. Storia di un concetto’, in Barocco europeo e barocco veneziano, ed.Vittore Branca. Florence: Sansoni, 1962, 15–33. Lacagnina, Davide, ed., Immagini e forme del potere: arte, critica e istituzioni in Italia tra le due guerre. Palermo: Edizioni di passaggio, 2011. Lahiji, Nadir. Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Lambert, Gregg. On the (New) Baroque. Aurora: Davies Group, 2008. Lasansky, D. Medina. The Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. Laurano, Patrizia. Consenso e politica di massa: l’uso del mito garibaldino nella costruzione della nazione. Acireale: Bonanno, 2009. Leto, Concetta. Attraverso il Novecento: polemiche e equivoci sul barocco in Italia. Florence: Le lettere, 1995. Levy, Evonne. Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. ———. Baroque and the Political Language of Formalism (1845–1945): Burckhardt, Wölfflin, Gurlitt, Brinckmann, Sedlmayr. Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2015. Longhi, Roberto, and Giuseppe Prezzolini. Roberto Longhi, Giuseppe Prezzolini. Lettere, 1909–1927, ed. Maria Cristina Bandera Viani and Elisabetta Fadda. Parma: Monte Università Parma, 2011. Macchioni Jodi, Rodolfo. Barocco e manierismo nel gusto otto-novecentesco. Bari: Adriatica, 1973. Malvano, Laura. Fascismo e politica dell’immagine. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1988. Mangoni, Luisa. L’interventismo della cultura. Intellettuali e riviste del Fascismo. Bari: Laterza, 1974. ———. Una crisi fine secolo: la cultura italiana e la Francia fra Otto e Novecento. Turin: Einaudi, 1985. Mansoor, Jaleh. Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Marangoni, Matteo. Carteggi (1909–1958), ed. Luca Barreca. Palermo: Editrice Mediterranea, 2006. Maravall, José Antonio. La cultura del barroco: análisis de una estructura histórica. Esplugues de Llobregat: Ariel, 1975.

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Selected bibliography Marchesini, Manuela. Scrittori in funzione d’altro: Longhi, Contini, Gadda. Modena: Mucchi, 2005. Mascolo, Marco, and Francesco Torchiani. Roberto Longhi. Percorsi tra le due guerre. Milan: Officina Libraria, 2020. Massari, Stefania, and Stefania Baldinotti. Il fatale Millenovecentoundici: le esposizioni di Roma, Torino, Firenze. Rome: Palombi, 2012. Mazzanti, Anna. Simbolismo italiano fra arte e critica: Mario de Maria e Angelo Conti. Florence: Le lettere, 2007. Mazzanti, Anna, Lucia Mannini, and Valentina Gensini, eds. Novecento sedotto: il Fascino del Seicento tra le due guerre, exh. cat. Florence: Polistampa, 2010. Mazzocca, Fernando. ‘La mostra fiorentina el 1922 e la polemica sul Seicento’. Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, classe di Lettere e Filosofia, III, V, no. 2 (1979): 837–901. ———. Liberty: uno stile per l’Italia moderna. Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana, 2013. McKever, Rosalind. ‘Futurism and the Past: Temporalities, Avant-Gardism and Tradition in Italian Art and Its Histories 1909–1919’. Doctoral dissertation, Kingston University, 2012. ———. ‘On the Uses of Origins for Futurism’. Art History 39, no. 3 (1 June 2016): 512–539. Merjian, Ara H. Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Modernism, Paris. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Messina, Maria Grazia. ‘In Italia l’arte ha da essere italiana?, Pittura di storia e questione nazionale’, in La chioma della vittoria: scritti sull’identità degli italiani dall’Unità alla seconda Repubblica, ed. Sergio BertelliFlorence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1997, 100–132. ———. ‘Valori plastici. Il confronto con la Francia e la questione dell’arcaismo’, in Il futuro alle spalle. Italia Francia – L’arte tra le due guerre, ed. Federica Pirani. Rome: Edizioni De Luca, 1998, 19–35. Michaud, Éric. Les invasions barbares: une généalogie de l’histoire de l’art. Paris: Gallimard, 2015. Mirabile, Andrea. Scrivere la pittura: la ‘funzione Longhi’ nella letteratura italiana. Ravenna: Longo, 2009. Mola, Paola. Scultura e antiscultura alle origini del Novecento: i casi Wildt e Medardo Rosso. Macerata: Accademia di belle arti, 1994. Mola, Paola, and Fernando Mazzocca, eds. Wildt: l’anima e le forme. Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editore, 2012. Mondello, Elisabetta. Roma futurista: i periodici e i luoghi dell’avanguardia nella Roma degli anni venti. Rome: Franco Angeli, 1990. Moser, Walter, Angela Ndalianis, and Peter Krieger, eds. Neo-Baroques: From Latin America to the Hollywood Blockbuster. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Mozzoni, Loretta, and Stefano Santini, eds. Tradizioni e regionalismi: aspetti dell’eclettismo in Italia. Naples: Liguori, 2000. Ndalianis, Angela. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Nelis, Jan. From Ancient to Modern:The Myth of Romanità during the Ventennio Fascista:The Written Imprint of Mussolini’s Cult of the ‘Third Rome’. Rome: Belgisch Historisch Instituut te Rome, 2011. Newman, Jane O. Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. Nezzo, Marta. Ugo Ojetti – critica, azione, ideologia: dalla Biennali d’arte antica al Premio Cremona. Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2016. Nicoloso, Paolo. Mussolini architetto: propaganda e paesaggio urbano nell’Italia Fascista. Turin: Einaudi, 2008. ———. Architetture per un’identità italiana: progetti e opere per fare gli italiani Fascisti. Udine: P. Gaspari, 2012. Painter, Borden W. Mussolini’s Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Passini, Michela. La fabrique de l’art national: le nationalisme et les origines de l’histoire de l’art en France et en Allemagne, 1870–1933. Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2012. Patriarca, Silvana, and Lucy Riall, eds. The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in NineteenthCentury Italy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

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Selected bibliography Pavoni, Rosanna, ed. Reviving the Renaissance:The Use and Abuse of the Past in Nineteenth-Century Italian Art and Decoration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Payne, Alina. ‘Portable Ruins: The Pergamon Altar, Heinrich Wölfflin, and German Art History at the Fin de Siècle’. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 53/54 (2008): 168–189. ———. From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Petican, Laura. Arte Povera and the Baroque: Building an International Identity. Bern: Peter Lang, 2011. Petraccone, Claudia. Le Due Italie: la questione meridionale tra realtà e rappresentazione. Bari: Laterza, 2005. Picone, Petrusa, Mariantonietta. Le grandi esposizioni in Italia, 1861–1911: la competizione culturale con l’Europa e la ricerca dello stile nazionale. Naples: Liguori, 1990. Pieri, Giuliana. The Influence of Pre-Raphaelitism on Fin de Siècle Italy: Art, Beauty and Culture. London: Maney Publishing for the Modern Humanities Reseach Association, 2007. Pireddu, Nicoletta. Antropologi alla corte della bellezza: decadenza ed economia simbolica nell’Europa fin de siècle. Verona: Fiorini, 2002. Poggi, Christine. In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage. New Haven:Yale University Press, 1992. ———. Inventing Futurism:The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Policicchio, Giada. ‘La mostra della pittura italiana del Seicento e del Settecento. Rilettura e riscoperta di uno stile, il Barocco’, in Mostre a Firenze 1911–1942: nuove indagini per un itinerario tra arte e cultura, ed. Cristiano Giometti. Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2019, 41–57. Pontiggia, Elena, ed. L’idea del classico, 1916–1932: temi classici nell’arte italiana degli anni Venti. Milan: Fabbri, 1992. ———. Modernità e classicità: il ritorno all’ordine in Europa, dal primo dopoguerra agli anni Trenta. Milan: B. Mondadori, 2008. Pontiggia, Elena, Rossana Bossaglia, and Lorella Giudici. Adolfo Wildt e i suoi allievi: Fontana, Melotti, Broggini e gli altri. Milan: Skira, 2000. Pontiggia, Elena, Nicoletta Colombo, and Claudia Gian Ferrari, eds. Il ‘Novecento’ milanese: da Sironi ad Arturo Martini. Milan: Mazzotta, 2003. Potts, Alex. The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Praz, Mario. La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica. Florence: Sansoni, 1966. Procida, Elisabetta, ed. La sede storica dell’INAIL a Roma. Rome: INAIL, 2009. Puccini, Sandra. L’itala gente dalle molte vite: Lamberto Loria e la Mostra di Etnografia italiana del 1911. Rome: Meltemi, 2005. Pugliese, Marina, Barbara Ferriani, and Vincente Todolí. Lucio Fontana. Environments. Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2018. Puppo, Alessandro Del. Egemonia e Consenso. Ideologie Visive nell’arte italiana del Novecento. Milan: Quodlibet, 2019. Ragghianti, Carlo Ludovico. ‘Influenza di Wölfflin e di Berenson sulla critica d’arte italiana’, in Letteratura italiana. I critici. Storia monografica della filologia e della critica moderna in Italia, ed. Gianni Grana. Milan: Marzorati, 1973, 339–346. ———. Profilo della critica d’arte in Italia. Florence: Edizioni U, 1948. Raimondi, Ezio. Barocco moderno: Roberto Longhi e Carlo Emilio Gadda. Milan: B. Mondadori, 2003. ———. Ombre e figure: Longhi, Arcangeli e la critica d’arte. Bologna: Il mulino, 2010. Rampley, Matthew. The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847–1918. University Park: Penn State Press, 2013. Rifkind, David. The Battle for Modernism: ‘Quadrante’ and the Politicisation of Architectural Discourse in Fascist Italy. Vicenza: Marsilio, 2012.

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Selected bibliography Rodriguez, Jean-François. La réception de l’impressionnisme à Florence en 1910: Prezzolini et Soffici maîtres d’oeuvre de la ‘Prima esposizione italiana dell’impressionismo francese e delle scolture di Medardo Rosso’. Venice: Istituto veneto di scienze lettere ed arti, 1994. Romeo, Rosario. ‘La Germania e la vita intellettuale italiana dall’Unità alla Prima guerra mondiale’, in L’Italia unita e la prima guerra mondiale. Bari: Laterza, 1978, 109–141. Rossi Kirk, Terry. ‘The Politicisation of the Landscape of Roma Capitale and the Symbolic Role of the Palazzo Di Giustizia’. Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée 109, no. 1 (1997): 89–114. Rovati, Federica. Carrà tra Futurismo e Metafisica. Milan: Scalpendi, 2011. Rusconi, Paolo, and Silvia Bignami, eds. Gli anni Trenta a Milano: tra architetture, immagini e opere d’arte. Milan: Mimesis, 2014. Sabatino, Michelangelo. Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and theVernacular Tradition in Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. Sabbata, Massimo De. Mostre d’arte a Milano negli anni venti. Dalle origini del Novecento alle prime mostre sindacali (1920–1929). Turin: Allemandi, 2012. Saisselin, Rémy Gilbert. The Enlightenment against the Baroque: Economics and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Salaris, Claudia. La Roma delle avanguardie: dal futurismo all’underground. Rome: Editori riuniti, 1999. Salinari, Carlo. Miti e coscienza del Decadentismo Italiano. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960. Salvagnini, Sileno. Il sistema delle arti in Italia 1919–1943. Bologna: Minerva, 2000. Schnapp, Jeffrey T., and Matthew Tiews, eds. Crowds. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Simonato, Lucia. Bernini scultore: il difficile dialogo con la modernità. Milan: Electa, 2018. Sormani, Elsa. Bizantini e decadenti nell’Italia umbertina. Bari: Laterza, 1975. Spackman, Barbara. Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. ———. Fascist Virilities Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Stevenson, Jane. Baroque between the Wars: Alternative Style in the Arts, 1918–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Stone, Marla Susan. The Patron State. Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Storchi, Simona. Valori plastici 1918–1922: Le inquietudini del nuovo classico. Reading: University of Reading, 2006. Storr, Robert. Modern Art despite Modernism. New York: Abrams, 2000. Tomasella, Giuliana. Avanguardia in crisi nel dibattito artistico fra le due guerre. Padua: CLEUP, 1995. ———. ‘Romanità e germanesimo’, in Sotto la superficie visibile: scritti in onore di Franco Bernabei, ed. Marta Nezzo and Giuliana Tomasella. Treviso: Canova, 2013, 457–471. Traversaro, Chiara. ‘Which “Classicism”? Beyond Brushwork and Form to Situate Armando Spadini in the Context of the 1920s’. BA thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, 2019. Trione, Vincenzo. Dentro le cose: Ardengo Soffici critico d’arte. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001. Valeri, Stefano. Adolfo Venturi e gli studi sull’arte. Rome: Bagatto libri, 2006. Weir, David. Decadence and the Making of Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Wellek, René. ‘The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship [1946]’, in Concepts of Criticism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963, 69–127. White, Anthony. Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011. Wittman, Laura. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Zamora, Lois Parkinson. The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

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Index

abstractionism 223 Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy) (Worringer) 111 academicism 151, 152 see also anti-academicism Accademia d’Italia 177, 203 Albertine Statute 59–60 Album dell’illustrazione popolare (magazine) 76 Alessandrini, Goffredo 238, 239 Alexandrinism 218 Alinari (photographic firm) 45, 47, 206 Altar of the Fatherland 178 ambientismo (contextualism) 164, 165, 172, 178–179 Amico, Fabio 139 anarchism 212, 225 Anceschi, Luciano 215, 216, 218–219 Ancien Régime 190 Anderson (photographic firm) 45, 46–47, 206 Angeli, Diego 38, 40 anti-academicism 168, 170, 189, 229n7 see also academicism anti-Austrian sentiment 2, 124, 138–139 see also Austria anti-avante-garde 140, 145 see also avante-garde anti-classicism 8, 10, 134, 143, 170, 237 see also classicism anti-clericalism 29, 41, 59–60, 76, 168 see also Catholic Church anti-Crocean interpretations of the Baroque 213–220 see also Croce, Benedetto anti-Fascism 215, 220, 226–227, 233n97, 242–243 see also Fascism

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Antliff, Mark 86n61, 118n75, 120n111, 154n24, 231n48 Apollinaire, Guillaume 109, 120n114 Apollo and Daphne (Bernini) 38, 45, 46 architecture Architecture Exhibition, in Rome 81 Architettura e arti decorative (Architecture and Decorative Arts) (journal) 164, 168 Associazione Artistica fra i Cultori di Architettura (Artistic Association of the Appreciators of Architecture) 164 Boccioni’s sculpture and Baroque architecture 104–109 L’urbe massima: l’architettura e la decorazione di Armando Brasini (The Greatest City: The Architecture and Decoration of Armando Brasini) (Orano) 170–171 Mansart-style 64 ‘On the Future Style of Italian Architecture’ (Boito) 80 Regia Scuola Superiore di Architettura 164, 192n11 Second Exhibition of Rational Architecture 160, 189, 243 architecture, of interwar Rome 160–191 Brasini, as baroquephile 177–184 Capponi and rationalist Baroque 184–190 modern vernacular 163–169 urban projects in the early days of Fascism 169–177 Archivio storico dell’arte (Historical Archive of Art) (aka L’Arte) (journal) 28, 53n102, 91, 104 Argan, Giulio Carlo 220, 223, 227 ‘Art against Barbarity: Roman Artists’ (exhibition) 242–243

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Index L’arte (The Art) (journal) 28, 53n102, 91, 104 L’arte del marmo (The Art of Marble) (Wildt) 208, 210 Le arti plastiche (journal) 216 Art Nouveu 66–69, 152 Austria 11, 12–13, 81, 90, 205 anti-Austrian sentiment 2, 124, 138–139 avante-garde 132–133, 149, 153, 177, 189, 198, 226 anti-avante-garde 140, 145 Baroque and the 94–96 see also Futurism Un’avventura di Salvator Rosa (Blasetti) 238 Bacchelli, Mario 130–131, 134–135 Bacchus (Caravaggio) 88 Bacci, Baccio Maria 11, 125, 138, 144–145 Balla, Giacomo 96, 103 Banfi, Antonio 215 Bardi, Pier Maria 160–161, 171, 183, 189 barocchetto 74 Barocchismo 31–36, 51n64, 66, 96 Barocco 5 Baroque ‘“The Baroque” and the Irreducible Diversity of Taste, according to People and according to Epochs’ (lecture series) 216, 218 The Baroque Chair (Fontana) 197–199, 225 Baroquemania 3 Baroque Museum in Vienna 11, 138–139 ‘The Baroque’s Revenge’ 56, 65 Baroque tempest 190–191 criticism, tropes of 135, 174, 205 decay, vocabulary of 19, 67, 111, 133, 205 definitions of 5–10, 34, 51n67, 184, 198–199, 223, 240, 241–242 English 75 eon of 218 negative connotations of the term 214–215 The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome (Riegl) 4, 51n43 Piedmontese 63 reassessments of 10–14, 51n56, 67 rediscoveries of Baroque artists 18 Roman 9–10, 78–79 Spanish 86n74, 127, 205–206 see also decadence Baroque Classicism. See Classical Baroque baroquism 96, 108, 218 ‘Baroquism’ (Nencioni) 10 Baudelaire, Charles 8–9, 95, 109

Bazzani, Cesare 69, 75 Beaux-Arts style 77, 168, 184 Ben-Giat, Ruth 219 Benito Mussolini (Wildt) 203 Benjamin, Walter 5, 13, 237, 241 Benzi, Fabio 147 Berenson, Bernard 91–92 Bernini, Gianlorenzo 11–12, 105, 141, 171, 174, 202, 239 1911 jubilee, references to during 66, 75–76, 77, 81 Apollo and Daphne 38, 45, 46 Bernini (Fraschetti) 44–48, 53n109, 92 Berninian celebrations of 1898, 10, 18, 36–44, 52n86 Bernini in His Studio (Jacovacci) 47 ‘Commemorazione Centenaria al Campidoglio di Gian Lorenzo Bernini’ (Paolucci) 37, 38, 40 ‘Commemorazione di Gian Lorenzo Bernini’ (Galli) 38, 39 David 29, 41, 47 Ecstasy of Saint Teresa 46, 197 Esposizione Berniniana (Berninian Exhibition) 41–44, 45 The Extasis of Saint Teresa of Bernini (Borrani) 30 fin de siècle, references during 17–19, 23, 31, 34 Ludovica Albertoni 242 Onoranze Centenarie al Bernini (Piancastelli) 44 Sant’Andrea al Quirinale 188 Vision of Constantine 46 The Betrothed (Manzoni) 6–8 Bianchi, Mosé 7, 8 Biblioteca d’arte illustrata (Library of Illustrated Art) (book series) 130, 131 The Birth of Venus (Tito) 136 Black Man (Fontana) 221 Boccioni, Umberto 94, 99–103, 104–109, 110, 116n43, 211, 221 Bois, Yve-Alain 234n111 Bonnat, Léon 127–128 Bontempelli, Massimo 131, 132–133 Borges, Jorge Luis 1, 126 Borromini, Francesco 12, 66, 165, 166, 182 Bossaglia, Rossana 123 bourgeoisie 60–61, 72, 74, 75, 122 see also upper class Bragaglia, Anton Giulio 177

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Index Brasini, Armando 74, 160, 163, 169–177, 189, 193n35, 195n80, 238 as baroquephile 177–184 Convento del Buon Pastore (Convent of the Good Shepherd) 161, 180–184, 195n69 INAIL 161, 177–180, 184 L’urbe massima: l’architettura e la decorazione di Armando Brasini (The Greatest City: The Architecture and Decoration of Armando Brasini) (Orano) 170–171 ‘Modello della Mole Littoria, più grande di S. Pietro,’ 176 Sistemazione del Campo Marzio: La Via Imperiale, il Foro Mussolini 173 Braun, Emily 14n3, 117n65, 153n4, 159n129, 230n20, 235n137 Brice, Catherine 79–80 Briganti, Giuliano 143 British Institute in Rome 238–239 Broggi, Carlo 168, 169, 186 Brogi (photographic firm) 45, 47, 206 Broglio, Mario 127, 131, 133, 134, 141 The Burlington Magazine (magazine) 152 Byzantium 19–21, 33 Cagnaccio di San Pietro 143 Calzecchi Onesti, Carlo 66–67 Camera Work (magazine) 97 Campigli, Massimo 143 Cannistraro, Philip 240 capitalism 58–61 romantic anti-capitalism 26 see also industries; labor Capitoline Hill 38, 41 Capponi, Giuseppe 161, 162, 163, 164, 178, 184–190, 238 Captain Fracassa (Coletti) 238 Caravaggio 81, 92–94, 110–111, 122, 125–127, 131, 134, 139–141, 152–153 Bacchus 88 Caravaggio, il pittore maledetto (Caravaggio, the Cursed Painter) (Alessandrini) 238, 239 ‘Caravaggio and the Critique of the Seicento’ (Argan) 220 David with the Head of Goliath 29 Firenze. Mostra Della Pittura Italiana del Sei e Settecento a Palazzo Pitti. Cappella. Sala del Caravaggio (Cipriani) 140 realism of 220, 223 Rest on the Flight into Egypt 144–145 Carena, Felice 143

Carrà, Carlo 97, 99, 101, 103–104, 131, 132, 146 Carracci brothers 29, 31, 44, 45, 110, 139 ‘Cartoline Patriottiche. Serie Roma. 12 cartoline in Quatricromia’ (Nerbini) Casabella (journal) 163–164 Casa d’Arte Bragaglia gallery 147 Casa Editrice Nerbini (publishing house) 2 Casorati, Felice 141, 142 Catalan Noucentiste movement 216 Catholic Church 38, 81, 166, 175, 183–184, 239–240 anti-clericalism 29, 41, 59–60, 76, 168 Convento del Buon Pastore 161, 180–184, 195n69 Counter-Reformation 6, 11–12, 61, 66, 81, 132, 175, 213–214, 218, 240 Papal States 60 Cavazza, Stefano 70–71 Cecchi, Emilio 150, 155n50 Cecconi, Angelo 93, 94, 138, 141 Chapel of the Holy Shroud 59–60 The Charioteer (Fontana) 199 chiaroscuro 8, 76, 93, 98, 161, 200 Christine, Queen of Sweden 76 Church of Sant’Agnese (Borromini) 182–183 Church of Sant’Ignazio (Maderno) 46, 165, 166, 180 cinema 238, 239 Cinquantenario (fiftieth anniversary of unification), celebrations of the. See Jubilee of the Fatherland Cinquecento (15th century) 29 Venetian 143 Cipriani, Nicolò 139, 140 class bohemian lifestyle 229n7 bourgeoisie 60–61, 72, 74, 75, 122 class warfare 213 distinction of 241 identity, class-based 243 middle class 130, 168, 185–189, 240–241 rural poor 58, 71–73 upper class 34, 161, 241 see also working class Classical Baroque 11, 122–153 Italianness of, debate over 124–129 Palazzo Pitti, Exhibition at 11, 124, 127, 130, 134–141, 144, 147, 214, 238 seicentophiles, first passionate 141–153 Valori plastici, debate over Baroque in 129–135

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Index classicism 35, 65, 148–149, 185, 190, 214, 216, 218–219, 234 anti-classicism 8, 10, 134, 143, 170, 237 Classic, distinction from Baroque 9–10 Classical Art (Wölfflin) 9–10, 92 Classical eon 218 neoclassicism 26, 149–151, 218 new classicism 145 primitive classicism 143 reactionary 164 see also Classical Baroque Collegio Romano (Roman College) (Amannati) 166–167 colonialism 4, 6–7, 13, 22, 82, 113 Dogali, battle of 22, 62 jubilee exhibitions and 55, 57–58, 62, 71–73, 86n74 Libya, occupation of 11, 62, 71–72, 82 see also imperialism colour 94, 97, 127, 141–142, 145–147, 152 Column of Marcus Aurelius 172 ‘Commemorazione Centenaria al Campidoglio di Gian Lorenzo Bernini’ (Paolucci) 37, 38, 40 ‘Commemorazione di Gian Lorenzo Bernini’ (Galli) 38, 39 Communist Party 242–243 Congregazione di Nostra Signora della Carità del Buon Pastore di Angers 180–184 connoisseurship 28 see also Longhi, Roberto Contini Bonacossi, Alessandro 113–114, 141 Convento del Buon Pastore (Convent of the Good Shepherd) (Brasini) 161, 180–184, 195n69 Cornaro chapel 30 Correggio 105, 143 Corrente di vita giovanile (Current of Youth Life) (magazine) 215–216, 219–220, 221, 223, 225–226, 233n97, 240–241, 243 Corriere della sera (newspaper) 133 Cortona, Pietro da 52n67, 152, 188 cosmopolitanism, versus nationalism 110–114 Council of Trento 6 Counter-Reformation 6, 11–12, 61, 66, 81, 132, 175, 213–214, 218, 240 Crespi, Giuseppe Maria 134, 135, 152 criminology 92–93, 134 Crispolti, Enrico 220–221 critical realism 219–220, 227

Croce, Benedetto 12–13, 31, 33, 91–92, 94–95, 111, 221, 232n57, 237 anti-Crocean interpretations of the Baroque 213–220 History of the Baroque Era in Italy 175, 214 Cronaca Bizantina (Byzantine Chronicle) (journal) 19–21, 33 The Crucifixion (Bonnat) 128 Crystal Palace exhibition 61 Cubism 11, 88, 89–90, 97–102, 104, 106, 132, 140 Cubism and Beyond (Soffici) 97 cultural hybridization 225 culturalism 160, 163, 183, 189 cultured artistic production 241 Dadaism 132, 147 d’Albisola, Tullio 225–226 Danesi (photographic firm) 45, 47, 53n109 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 10, 19–26, 37, 49n16, 50n27, 95, 132 Pleasure 22–25, 26, 33–34 Das Problem der Form (von Hildebrand) 92 Däubler, Theodor 127 The Daughter of the Green Corsair (La figlia del Corsaro verde) (Guazzoni) 238 David (Bernini) 29, 41, 47 David with the Head of Goliath (Caravaggio) 29 decadence, of Baroque 5–10, 70, 112 in Classical Baroque 127, 133–134, 141 in fin de siècle 29, 44 in interwar architecture 161, 175, 190 in sculpture, during Fascism 204–205, 240 Decadentism 10, 19–26, 36–37, 47–48, 90, 92, 109, 184, 238 Pleasure (D’Annunzio) 22–25, 26, 33–34 decay, vocabulary of, describing Baroque 19, 67, 111, 133, 205 de Chirico, Giorgio 11–12, 122, 124, 146, 149–150, 152, 238 ‘Pictorial Classicism,’ 127 Self-Portrait in Black 123 Still Life with Salami 150 see also ‘Seicentomania’ Decomposition of the Planes of a Sugar Bowl and a Bottle (Soffici) 97, 98, 101, 118n79 Dedalo (journal) 124, 130, 139, 240–241 deformazione (deformation) 219 Delacroix, Eugène 110 ‘Delacroix et l’art moderne’ (Focillon) 1 Delaunay, Robert 97, 100

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Index D’Elia, Miguel Alfredo 224–225 Della Colletta, Cristina 67, 80 della Porta, Giacomo 166, 239 del Puppo, Alessandro 108 de Maria, Mario 24–25 De Micheli, Mario 234n119 destruction 150, 176–177 of historic buildings 25–26, 82, 164, 169–170, 172–174 Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (Wagner) 38, 40 Dinamica (magazine) 104 diradamento (thinning out) 164 Discourses (Reynolds) 92 Dogali, battle of 22, 62 Domenica del Corriere della sera (magazine) 238 Domus (journal) 163–164, 186 Donne sul sofa (Women on the Sofa) (Fontana) 222–223 Doria-Pamphili collection 28 d’Ors, Eugeni 12, 13, 216–219, 225, 227, 232n70, 233n76 Du Baroque (On the Baroque) (d’Ors) 216, 219, 236n141 Du ‘Cubisme’ (Gleizes and Metzinger) 99 Duran, Adrian 244n14, 245n18 Dux (Sarfatti) 203 dynamism 90, 96, 108, 110–111, 214, 221–222, 225 Pittura e scultura futuriste: dinamismo plastico (Futurist Painting and Sculpture: Plastic Dynamism) (Boccioni) 94, 103, 112–113, 116n43 Sintesi del dinamismo umano (Synthesis of Human Dynamism) (Boccioni) 105, 107 see also Futurism Ecce Puer (Rosso) 209 eclecticism 77, 85n54 Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (Bernini) 46, 197 Eiffel Tower (Delaunay) 97, 100 Elasticity (Boccioni) 99, 100 England Baroque in 75 St Paul’s Cathedral, in London 75 eons (idea-events) 218 Eritrea 62, 73 Esposizione Berniniana (Berninian Exhibition) 41–44, 45 eternal return 218 Ethnographic pavilion, in Rome 61, 72–73, 86n59

Etlin, Richard 164 existentialism 215 Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Paris 58–59, 78, 84n30 The Extasis of Saint Teresa of Bernini (Borrani) 30 Fanchiotti, Cesare 38, 40 Fascism 11–13, 41, 124, 131, 133–134, 151–153, 159n129, 238–243 anti-Fascism 215, 220, 226–227, 233n97, 242–243 Fascist Syndicate of Artists 243 Fascist Syndicate of Fine Arts 216 Fascist Syndicate of Italian Architects 164 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution) 243 ‘Novecento Sedotto. Il Fascino del Seicento tra le due Guerre. Da Velásquez a Annigoni’ (Museo Pietro Annigoni-Villa Bardini, Florence) 143–144 post-Fascism 219 Shrine of Fascist martyrs 223 urban projects in the early days of 169–177 violence of 132 see also architecture, of interwar Rome; sculpture, during Fascism Fasolo, Vincenzo 160, 161, 162, 163, 164–168 feminism 141 femme fatales 22–23, 204–205 Fenoglio, Pietro 62–63, 66 Fenoglio-Lafleur House 67, 68 Ferrari, Ettore 17–19, 36–38, 41, 86n67 Ferres de Capdevila, Maria 22–23, 26 see also Pleasure (D’Annunzio) Le Figaro (newspaper) 95 fin de siècle 8, 17–48, 95, 218 Berninian celebrations of 1898, 36–44 D’Annunzio 19–26 Fraschetti 44–48 Nencioni 31–36 Venturi 26–31 Fiorentina Primaverile (Florence Spring Exhibition, 1922) 124, 143–147, 149–150, 158n113 Firenze. Mostra Della Pittura Italiana del Sei e Settecento a Palazzo Pitti. Cappella. Sala del Caravaggio (Cipriani) 140 First Exhibition of Futurist Painting, in Rome 88, 89–90 First World War 94, 113, 138–139, 141, 166, 171, 202

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Index Flaminio area 188 Florence 31–36 Fiorentina Primaverile (Florence Spring Exhibition, 1922) 124, 143–147, 149–150, 158n113 jubilee exhibition in 55 Mostra della Pittura Italiana del Sei e Settecento (Exhibition of Italian Art of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries) 11, 124, 127, 130, 134–141, 144, 147, 214, 238 The Flowers of Evil (Gautier) 8–9 Folgore, Luciano 103 Fontana, Lucio 12, 215, 219, 220–229, 234n111, 238, 243 Black Man 221 The Charioteer 199 Donne sul sofa (Women on the Sofa) 222–223 Lucio Fontana. 20 disegni con una prefazione (Morosini) 226 Manifiesto Blanco (White Manifesto) 197–199, 221 Mussolini, bust of 223 Paulette 224 Scultura astratta (Abstract Sculpture) 222–223 Vittoria dell’aria (Victory of the Air) 222–223 forgery 129 form 9–10, 92, 99, 112, 209–213, 223–224, 227, 238 uprising of 67 see also formlessness; sculpture, during Fascism Formaggio, Dino 215–216, 219 formlessness 210–213, 224, 238, 243 see also sculpture, during Fascism Foro Mussolini 172, 173 Fountain of the Four Rivers 38, 40 Fountain of the Tritone 23 Franco, Francisco 216, 220 Fraschetti, Domenico 44 Fraschetti, Stanislao 10, 44–48, 53n102, 53n109, 54n115, 92 French Academy of Rome 26 frondismo (frondism) 227, 234n119, 243 Fry, Roger 92, 152 Futurism 11, 88–114, 132–133, 136, 144, 153, 210, 221–222, 225–226 avante-garde, Baroque and the 94–96 Boccioni’s sculptures 104–109 cosmopolitanism, versus nationalism 110–114 First Exhibition of Futurist Painting 88, 89–90

‘Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto’ (Boccioni) 96 ‘L’anti-tradition futuriste’ (Apollinaire) 120n114 Longhi, background of 91–92 Longhi, Futurist painters and 96–104 ‘Manifesto of Futurism’ (Marinetti) 95 ‘I pittori futuristi’ (‘The Futurist Painters’) (Longhi) 88, 97–99, 101–104, 105, 106, 112 Pittura e scultura futuriste: dinamismo plastico (Futurist Painting and Sculpture: Plastic Dynamism) (Boccioni) 94, 103, 112–113, 116n43 ‘Primi principi di una estetica futurista’ (‘First Principles of a Futurist Aesthetic’) (Soffici) 108 rediscovering Baroque painting 92–94 Roma Futurista (journal) 147 Scultura Futurista Boccioni (Futurist Sculpture Boccioni) (Longhi) 88, 104–109, 111 ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’ (Marinetti) 95 see also dynamism Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, in Paris 96 Galleria Borghese 23, 28, 29, 38 see also Villa Borghese Galleria di Roma 160, 243 The Gallery in Milan (Carrá) 101–102 Galli, G. 38, 39 Gautier, Théophile 8–9, 95 gender 240 universal male suffrage 58, 61 see also women General Italian Exhibition of Sacred Art and International Exhibition of Electricity 59–60 Gentile, Giovanni 166, 241 Germany 12–13, 65, 138, 201, 214 anti-Germanic sentiment 11, 111 Germanity versus Latinity 90, 111–113, 240 see also Wildt, Adolfo Gesamtkunstwerk 205 Giovannoni, Gustavo 164, 172, 180 globalisation 58–61 Gothic style 80–81, 205 Gozzano, Guido 66–67, 82 Gruppo 7, 184–185 Guardi, Francesco 129, 139

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Guarini, Guarino 60, 66, 67, 239 Guazzaroni, Angelo 69 Guazzoni, Enrico 238 Gullace, Teresa 243 Gurlitt, Cornelius 12, 79 ‘Gusto internazionale’ (Venturi, Lionello) 120n116 Guttuso, Renato 219 Hals, Franz 8, 171 Haskell, Francis 135, 138 Hayez, Francesco 6, 8 Head of a Woman (Picasso) 150 Hébert, Ernest 26, 27 Hecker, Sharon 117n63, 230n35, 231n37, 236n173 Hermaphrodite (in Villa Borghese) 141 Historia universal de la infamia (Borges) 1 historical buildings, demolition of 25–26, 82, 164, 169–170, 172–174 historicism 8, 160, 161, 168, 184, 242 History of Italian Art (Venturi) 28 History of the Baroque Era in Italy (Croce) 175, 214 Hitler, Adolf 211, 227 Human All Too Human (Nietzsche) 9 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 22, 49n16 Iamurri, Laura 28 idealism 91, 111, 216, 221 identity class-based 243 modern 122 identity, national 3–4, 7, 11, 14, 90, 129, 237, 240, 243 in 1911 jubilee 79–82 collective memory 241–242 in interwar architecture 163, 165, 184 national culture 58–61 proto-national identity 37 see also Jubilee of the Fatherland; nationalism identity, regional 69–77, 242 see also regionalism Il giornale d’Italia (newspaper) 61 illness and mental affliction, tropes of 135 see also decay Illustrazione Italiana (magazine) 238 L’illustrazione Italiana (journal) 21, 37, 40 Il secolo illustrato della domenica (magazine) 39, 43 Il Selvaggio (The Wild One) (journal) 190–191

imperialism 57–58, 63, 69, 82, 216 see also colonialism Impressionism 110, 112, 145, 147, 199, 205, 206–207 Indignant Rome (Hébert) 27 individualism 33, 190, 214 industries 58 International Exhibition of the Industries and Labour, in Turin 61–65 see also capitalism; labor Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique (J.-A.-D.) 110, 126, 128 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art, in Turin 66 internationalism 11, 122, 163, 171, 189, 198 international modernism 182 Istituto Nazionale per la Assicurazione contro gli Infortuni sul Lavoro (INAIL) (National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work) (Brasini) 161, 177–180, 184 Italianness 139, 140, 171, 240, 241 of Baroque, debate over 124–129 see also Baroque Jacovacci, Francesco 41, 47 Jesuits 6, 165, 166 Jews, racial laws against 220 Jubilee of the Fatherland 10–11, 55–82, 168, 204, 213, 238 history of universal exhibitions 58–61 industry, in Turin 61–65 Liberty style 65–69 neo-baroque, as the style of consensus 77–82 regionalism, in Rome 69–77 Juvarra, Filippo 11, 60, 62–65, 66, 67–69, 78, 81 Kaiser Friedrich Museum 138 Kallis, Aristotle 164 Kaup, Monika 32 ‘Keine Malerei. Arte Boreale?’ (‘No Painting, Northern Art?’) (Longhi) 94, 111–112 ‘Kermesse Orientale’ 62, 84n31 Kirk, Terry 81 kitsch 42, 234n111 Klimt, Gustav 147, 204 labor strikes by industrial and agricultural workers 61 see also capitalism; industries

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Index Lacerba (journal) 120n114, 132 Lambert, Gregg 216 Lasansky, Medina 174–175 Lateran Pacts 175, 240 Latin America 13, 225 see also Fontana, Lucio Latinity, versus Germanity 90, 111–113 Leonardi, Leoncillo 242, 243 ‘Let Us Admire the Seicento!’ (Settimelli) 95, 96 The Levee (Bacci) 144–145 Levy, Evonne 16n26, 53n103, 83n18, 244n4 liberalism 132, 184, 213, 240 Liberty style 65–69, 76 Libya, occupation of 11, 62, 71–72, 82 Liceo Terenzio Mamiani (Fasolo) 161, 162, 164–168 Liceo Visconti 166–167 Lombard style 80, 204, 205, 229n7 Lombroso, Cesare 92 Longanesi, Leo 190–191 Longhi, Roberto 11, 116n43, 118n79, 120n119, 121n133, 138, 220 background of 91–92 Fondazione Roberto Longhi 89 Futurist painters and 96–104 see also Futurism Löwy, Malcolm 26 Lucio Fontana. 20 disegni con una prefazione (Morosini) 226 Ludovica Albertoni (Bernini) 242 Luzzato, Carlo Ludovico 200, 206 Maccari, Mino 190–191 macchiaioli 30, 134, 144 Maderno, Carlo 12, 23, 46, 152, 239 Maderno, Stefano 239, 242 Malaparte, Curzio 131, 132, 152, 213 see also Suckert, Kurt Erich Malvano, Laura 241 Mancini, Antonio 147–149 Manet, Édouard 81, 110, 149 ‘Manifesto of Futurism’ (Marinetti) 95 ‘Manifesto of Symbolism’ (Moréas) 95 Manifiesto Blanco (White Manifesto) (Fontana) 197–199, 221 mannerism 166 Mansart-style architecture 64 The Man who Smiles. Portrait of Enrico Nencioni (Boldini) 32

Manzoni, Alessandro 6–8 Maraini, Antonio 137, 151, 152, 204 Marangoni, Matteo 124–125, 127, 128–129, 130, 138, 144, 145 Marc’Aurelio (journal) 179 March on Rome 132, 175, 243 Margherita Sarfatti (Wildt, photo by Paoletti) 208 Marinetti, F. T. 95, 103, 105 Marino, Giambattista 70, 108, 109 Martyrdom of Saint Mauritius (Socrate) 151 Maschera del dolore – Autoritratto (Mask of Pain – Self-Portrait) (Wildt) 201–202 matter 209–213, 215–216, 223–224, 227, 243 ‘Mattia Preti (critica figurativa pura)’ (‘Mattia Preti (Pure Figurative Criticism)’) (Longhi) 93–94 Mattioli Rossi, Laura 117n65, 119n95, 119n100 Mattutino (Tozzi) 217 Mazzocca, Fernando 51n56, 122 mediterraneità (Mediterraneity) 184–185 men universal male suffrage 58, 61 Merjian, Ara H. 153n1 mestiere (craftsmanship) 210 Metafisica movement 122, 132, 140, 152 Metzinger, Jean 99, 101 Michaud, Éric 111–112 Michelangelo 1, 3, 75–76, 105, 127, 205 middle class 130, 168, 185–189, 240–241 Milan 136 Allied bombardments of 228, 229 Milan International Fair 66 see also Fontana, Lucio; Wildt, Adolfo Milizia, Francesco 5–6 Ministry of Colonies 62 Ministry of Education 41 Ministry of Foreign Affairs 62 Ministry of Popular Culture 240 Ministry of the Navy (Magni) 188 ‘Modello della Mole Littoria, più grande di S. Pietro’ (Brasini) 176 modern art 94, 98–99, 147 Art Nouveau 66–69, 152 despite modernism 123 history of 111–114 modern counter-avante-garde 123, 165 see also anti-avante-garde; Classical Baroque modernism 11, 110, 149, 164, 207 claim to originality 199 early modern 5

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Index Fascist 243 French 204 international 182 modern classicism 143, 152 modernist architects 160 postmodernism 181–182, 242 postwar 198, 219 see also architecture, of interwar Rome; sculpture, during Fascism modernity 10–14, 237, 242 during 1911 jubilee, ideas of, 57, 65–66 in Classical Baroque 123–124, 132, 153 crisis of 3, 32, 36 definitions of 165, 170, 183–184 during fin de siècle, ideas of 26, 35 in Futurism, ideas of 90–91, 103, 108, 113 identity, modern 122 negative similarities to Baroque 31, 33 proto-modernity 4 vernacular, modern 163–169 violent modernisation 26 modernity, alternative. See architecture, of interwar Rome Mole Littoria 175, 176 Molli, Stefano 62–63, 66 monumentalisation 172 Morandi, Giorgio 146 Morosini, Duilio 225, 226 Mostra della Pittura Italiana del Sei e Settecento (Exhibition of Italian Art of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries) 11, 124, 127, 130, 134–141, 144, 147, 214, 238 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution) 243 Muñoz, Antonio 54n115 Museum of Italian Ethnography 72, 73 Mussolini, Benito 124, 132, 149, 159n129, 232n70, 240–241 Benito Mussolini (Wildt) 203 bust of (Fontana) 223 Dux (Sarfatti) 203 Fascist architecture and 160–161, 163, 166, 177, 180, 189–190 Fascist sculpture and 211–213, 216, 220 Foro Mussolini 172, 173 Sistemazione del Campo Marzio: La Via Imperiale, il Foro Mussolini (Brasini) 173 urbanism of 170, 171–177 Muti, Elena 22–23, 26 see also Pleasure (D’Annunzio)

Nathan, Ernesto 55 nationalism 141, 149, 164, 243 versus cosmopolitanism 110–114 culture, national 28, 58–61 patriotic postcards 1–3, 4, 14n2 see also identity, national naturalism 127, 132, 151–152 Nazism 227, 243 Nencioni, Enrico 10, 31–36, 37, 51n56, 51n64, 66, 208–209 neo-Baroque 10–13, 56–58, 61–65, 67–69, 74–77, 114, 124, 221, 241 seicentophiles, first passionate 141–153 as the style of consensus 77–82, 86n74 see also architecture, of interwar Rome; sculpture, during Fascism neoclassicism 26, 149–151, 218 Nezzo, Marta 121n133, 155n51, 156n89 Nicola Bonservizi (Wildt) 212 Nietzsche, Friedrich 8, 9, 50n27, 205, 218 Noi (journal) 147 non-finito 205 Northern art 111–113, 121n133, 128–129, 204–205, 209 see also anti-classicism Novecento (20th century) 133–134, 219, 221 novecentismo 206 Novecento Italiano 152, 159n129, 203, 211–213 ‘Novecento Sedotto. Il Fascino del Seicento tra le due Guerre. Da Velásquez a Annigoni’ (Museo Pietro Annigoni-Villa Bardini, Florence) 143–144 The Nun of Monza with a Portrait of Her Lover Egidio (Bianchi) 7, 8 Ojetti, Ugo 41, 80–81, 103, 127 on Classical Baroque 122, 129–130, 133, 146 on interwar architecture 164, 171, 174, 178 Palazzo Pitti, Exhibition at 11, 124, 127, 130, 134–141, 144, 147, 214, 238 Olympia (Manet) 149 Onoranze Centenarie al Bernini (Piancastelli) 44 ‘On the Future Style of Italian Architecture’ (Boito) 80 Oppo, Cipriano Efisio 131, 143, 146, 148–150, 151, 155n50 Orano, Paolo 170–171 originality, technique of 199 The Origin of the German Tragic Drama (Benjamin) 237, 241

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The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome (Riegl) 4, 51n43 Paci, Enzo 215, 219 Palace of Festivities 77 ‘The Palace of Festivities at the Turin Exhibition after the Inauguration’ (Abbo) 57 Palace of Justice (Calderini) 168 Palace of Propaganda Fide (Borromini) 166 palazzina (‘little palace’) 185 Palazzina Nervi Nebbiosi (Capponi) 162, 184–189 Palazzo Chigi 172 Palazzo Colonna 178 Palazzo delle Esposizioni 26 Palazzo del Quirinale 178 Palazzo Farnese 23 Palazzo Madama 63 Palazzo Montecitorio 172 Palazzo Pitti 11, 124, 127, 130, 134–141, 144, 147, 214, 238 Palazzo Spada 168 Palazzo Vecchio 55 Palazzo Venezia 243 Palazzo Zuccari 23, 24, 110 Paoletti, Antonio 206, 208, 210 Paolucci, Dante 37, 38, 40 Papini, Roberto 130, 150, 161, 163, 168, 170, 189 Parco del Valentino 61 Parioli neighbourhood 180–181 Paris, France Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Paris 58–59, 78, 84n30, 171 Galerie Bernheim-Jeune 96 Passini, Michela 111–112 Patrizi, Mariano Luigi 92 Paulette (Fontana) 224 Pavolini, Corrado 141, 174 Payne, Alina 181 ‘Per la storia dell’arte’ (‘For the history of art’) (Venturi) 28, 29, 51n43 La peste a Roma nel 1600 (The Plague in Rome in 1600) (de Maria) 25 phenomenology 215 photography 54n113, 75, 139, 140, 231n17 of Berninian exhibits 41–42 Fraschetti, Stanislao 10, 44–48, 53n102, 53n109, 54n115, 92 Paoletti, Antonio 206, 208, 210

photographic firms 45, 46–47, 53n109, 206 rhetoric of substitution 200–201 Sommariva, Emilio 205, 206, 207, 210 Piacentini, Marcello 69–70, 73, 75, 77–79, 81, 189, 190 Piacentini, Pio 164 Piancastelli, Giovanni 41, 44 Piazza Barberini 23 Piazza Colonna 172, 175–177 Piazza di Spagna 23 Piazza Mazzini 168 Piazza Navona 38, 40, 41 Piazza Venezia 171, 178 Picasso, Pablo 97, 150 ‘Pictorial Classicism’ (de Chirico) 127 ‘I pittori futuristi’ (‘The Futurist Painters’) (Longhi) 88, 97–99, 101–104, 105, 106, 112 Pittura e scultura futuriste: dinamismo plastico (Futurist Painting and Sculpture: Plastic Dynamism) (Boccioni) 94, 103, 112–113, 116n43 Pittura Metafisica 122, 132, 140, 152 Pius IX 2–3, 60, 183 Pius VII 2, 3 Pleasure (D’Annunzio) 22–25, 26, 33–34 plurality 29, 66, 77, 218, 221–223, 227 Poesia (magazine) 95 politics, as art 210–213 see also Fascism Ponte Flaminio (Ponte del Risorgimento) 70 portability, of art 4, 15n7 Portrait of Matteo Marangoni (Bacci) 125 Portrait of Silvana Cenni (Casorati) 141, 142 positivism 28, 111 postcards 42, 44, 63, 64, 65 patriotic 1–3, 4, 14n2 postmodernism 181–182, 242 Potts, Alex 207 Pozzo, Andrea 180, 239 Pre-Raphaelitism 21, 23, 31 Preti, Mattia 70, 93–94, 111, 122 Previati, Gaetano 95, 96 Prezzolini, Giuseppe 79, 91, 97, 103 ‘Primi principi di una estetica futurista’ (‘First Principles of a Futurist Aesthetic’) (Soffici) 108–109 primitivism 122, 128–129, 143, 221, 224, 225, 227 primitive classicism 143

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Principles of Art History (Wölfflin) 9–10, 51n43, 207 The Prisoner (Wildt, photo by Sommariva) 207 propaganda 59–61, 66, 71, 81, 94, 166, 239–241 Quadrante (journal) 163–164, 183 Quartiere della Vittoria 167–168 Quartiere Mazzini-Prati 70 Quatrocchi, Luca 67 Quattrocento (14th century) 29, 129, 131, 133, 143, 152 race 13, 90 history, racialist 214 imperialism 57–58, 63, 69, 82, 216 Jews, racial laws against 220 ‘Northern’ art 111–113, 121n133, 128–129, 204–205, 209 see also colonialism Raimondi, Giuseppe 122, 126–127, 128–129, 130, 144 realism 93, 152, 221, 223, 225 critical 219–220, 227 frondist 227, 234n119, 243 neorealism 243 Regia Scuola Superiore di Architettura 164, 192n11 regionalism 68, 77, 79, 139, 164, 190, 213 identity, regional 69–77, 242 Rego, Moraes 64 Rembrandt 24–25, 93, 126 Renaissance 1, 3, 6, 12–13, 151, 237 fin de siècle, references during 23, 28–29, 33 Flemish 143 Futurism, references during 89–90, 101, 113 Renaissance and Baroque (Wölfflin) 9–10, 11–12, 25, 51n43, 88–89 see also classicism Resistance, perfect 242 Rest on the Flight into Egypt (Caravaggio) 144–145 retrospective art 138 return-to-order 123, 126, 129, 140–141, 143, 146, 152, 216 eternal return 218 return to humanity 140 return to the classic 145 see also Classical Baroque Rhythm of Objects (Carrà) 97, 99, 101

Ribera, Jusepe 126, 139 Ricci, Corrado 38, 103 Riegl, Alois 4–5, 12, 47, 51n43, 79, 163, 205, 209 Rifkind, David 191n1, 196n89 Rione Prati 167–168, 192n23 Riot in the Gallery (Boccioni) 211 Risorgimento 1–3, 18, 163, 168 see also Jubilee of the Fatherland Rivista illustrata del popolo d’Italia (magazine) 238 Roberto Longhi (Bartoli Natinguerra) 89 Rococo 75 Rodin, Auguste 105, 205 Rokeby Venus (Velázquez) 141 Roma Barocca (Muñoz) 54n115 Romanticism 6, 12, 19, 33, 150 Rome 3, 11, 14n2, 19, 22–26, 34, 136, 138 Baroque, Roman 9–10, 78–79 Berninian celebrations of 1898 in 36–44 First Exhibition of Futurist Painting 88, 89–90 French Academy of Rome 26 Galleria di Roma 160, 243 Inquisition, Roman 18 jubilee exhibition in 55–58, 60, 68–79, 80–81, 86n67 March on 132, 175, 243 Roma Futurista (journal) 147 Roman Biennale 144, 147–151 Roman Mother Killed by the Germans in via Giulio Cesare (Leonardi) 242, 243 Rome Open City (Rosselini) 243 Secession, Roman 147 Silver Age 21 see also architecture, of interwar Rome La ronda (journal) 124, 126, 127, 134–135, 147 Rosso, Medardo 95–96, 105, 205, 206–208, 209, 221, 231n37 Rubens, Peter Paul 94, 108, 110–111 rural poor 58, 71–73 Sackville Gallery 96 Saint John Nepomucene Confessing the Queen of Bohemia (Crespi) 134, 135, 152 Salvadori, Giacomo 62–63, 66 Santa Cecilia (Maderno) 242 Santa Lucia (Wildt) 197 Santa Maria della Pace (da Cortona) 188 Sant’Andrea al Quirinale (Bernini) 188 Sant’Ignazio Square (Raguzzini) 188 Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza 166, 182–183

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Index Sarfatti, Margherita 133–134, 143, 149–152, 161, 189, 193n35, 202–206, 238 Dux 203 Margherita Sarfatti (Wildt, photo by Paoletti) 208 Roberto, son of 171, 193n35 Savinio, Alberto 127, 147, 152 Savoy family 55, 56, 60, 63, 66 scapigliatura 199, 204, 229n7 Scialoja, Toti 243 Sciltian, Gregorio 114, 141, 143, 144 sculpture, during Fascism 197–229 anti-Crocean interpretations of the Baroque 213–220 Fontana, Lucio 220–229 see also Wildt, Adolfo Scultura astratta (Abstract Sculpture) (Fontana) 222–223 Scultura Futurista Boccioni (Futurist Sculpture Boccioni) (Longhi) 88, 104–109, 111 Scuola di Milano (School of Milan) 215–220 Second Exhibition of Rational Architecture 160, 189, 243 Second World War 228, 229, 241, 243 Segantini, Giovanni 95, 96 Seicento (17th century) 5, 44, 47–48, 70, 75–76, 80–81, 125, 150 Secentismo (17th-century style) 5, 34–36, 94, 165, 170 Seicentomania 150, 152, 225 seicentophiles, first passionate 141–153 see also Classical Baroque; fin de siècle; Futurism ‘Seicentomania’ (de Chirico) 127–129, 141, 147, 214 debate over 129–135 Self-Portrait (Mancini) 148 Self-Portrait in Black (de Chirico) 123 Settecento (18th century) 139 Mostra della Pittura Italiana del Sei e Settecento (Exhibition of Italian Art of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries) 11, 124, 127, 130, 134–141, 144, 147, 214, 238 Settimelli, Emilio 95, 96, 109 Simmel, Georg 5, 209–210, 215, 223 Simonato, Lucia 14n1, 18, 48n4, 52n80, 53n93 Sintesi del dinamismo umano (Synthesis of Human Dynamism) (Boccioni) 105, 107 Sistemazione del Campo Marzio: La Via Imperiale, il Foro Mussolini (Brasini) 173

The Sleeping Girl (Oppo) 149 Sleeping Venus (Socrate) 141, 143, 144, 149 Società degli Amatori e Cultori (Society of Connoisseurs and Art Lovers) 103, 118n87 Socrate, Carlo 11, 114, 141, 143–144, 146, 149, 151 Soffici, Ardengo 96–97, 103–104, 118n79, 120n114, 122, 140, 175, 204–205 Cubism and Beyond 97 Decomposition of the Planes of a Sugar Bowl and a Bottle 97, 98, 101, 118n79 ‘Primi principi di una estetica futurista’ (‘First Principles of a Futurist Aesthetic’) 108–109 Sommariva, Emilio 205, 206, 207, 210 Souvenir of Le Havre (Picasso) 97 Spadini, Armando 11, 143 Spadinimania 146–147 Spanish Baroque 86n74, 127, 205–206 Sperelli-Fieschi d’Ugenta, Andrea 22–25, 26, 62 see also Pleasure (D’Annunzio) Sprovieri, Giuseppe 104, 113 squadrista 226 Still life (Sciltian) 144 Still life (Spadini) 146 Still Life with Salami (de Chirico) 150 Storchi, Simona 131 St Paul’s Cathedral, in London 75 St Peter’s Basilica 1, 26, 29, 77, 168, 178 Suckert, Kurt Erich 133 as Curzio Malaparte 131, 132, 152, 213 Summers, Charles Francis 41, 52n91 sventramenti 176–177 Symbolism 12, 35, 92, 95, 204 syndicalism, revolutionary 175 Tavolo degli Orrori (Table of Horrors) (Bardi) 160, 171 Teatro Costanzi 96, 97, 103–104 ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’ (Marinetti) 95 Testa+Casa+Luce (Head+House+Light) (Boccioni) 105, 106 Thovez, Enrico 141 Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista 81, 113, 134, 139, 147 Tietze, Hans 138–139 Tinti, Mario 145, 204 Tito, Ettore 134, 136

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Index Togliatti, Palmiro 242–243 Tomasella, Giuliana 115n14, 115n21, 121n133, 121n142, 143, 157n102 ‘Torre Brasini,’ 178–179 INAIL 161, 177–180, 184 Tozzi, Mario 216, 217 tradition 124, 129, 152, 165, 168–169, 183–184, 204 Treccani, Giovanni 219, 220, 233n97 La tribuna illustrata (journal) 56, 57, 72 Turin 11 General Italian Exhibition of Sacred Art and International Exhibition of Electricity 59–60 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art 66 jubilee exhibition in 55–58, 60, 61–65, 66–69, 77–78, 79, 82, 84n30 University of 92 Uffizi Gallery 38, 88 unification of Italy 1–3, 18, 163, 168 see also Jubilee of the Fatherland L’unità (newspaper) 242–243 universal exhibitions 58–61, 78 Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Paris 58–59, 78, 84n30, 171 Venice Biennale 66, 84n30, 132, 136, 144, 146–147, 202, 204, 216 see also Jubilee of the Fatherland universal male suffrage 58, 61 The Unnamed (Hayez) 6, 8 upper class 34, 161, 241 see also bourgeoisie urbanism 161, 163–165, 168, 170 cosmopolitanism, versus nationalism 110–114 Fascism, urban projects in the early days of 169–177 L’urbe massima: l’architettura e la decorazione di Armando Brasini (The Greatest City: The Architecture and Decoration of Armando Brasini) (Orano) 170–171 Valori plastici (journal) 122, 124, 126–127, 146–147, 152, 240–241 debate over Baroque in 129–135 Vasari, Giorgio 9–10, 28 Velázquez, Diego 8, 141 Venice Biennale 66, 84n30, 132, 136, 144, 146–147, 202, 204, 216

Venturi, Adolfo 26–31, 41, 44, 45, 47, 51n43, 53n102 Venturi, Ghino 70 Venturi, Lionello 51n43, 93, 110–111, 120n116, 120n119, 131–132, 138 Venturi, Robert 181–182 vernacular, Baroque and the modern 163–169 Via della Mercede 36 Via dell’Impero (Via dei Fori Imperiali) 174 Via Imperiale 172–174 Viale delle Milizie 167–168 Via Nazionale 23, 26, 178 Via Quattro Novembre 178 Via Veneto 26 Victor Emanuel II 28, 59, 171 Victory Bulletin 166 Vigna Cartoni 69–70 Villa Borghese 23, 38, 141 see also Galleria Borghese Villa Colonna 178 Villa Laetitia 74 Villa Ludovisi 26, 38 Villa Medici 23 Villa Pamphili 23 Villa Strohl-Fern 147 villini (little villas) 74 violence 26, 132, 153 see also warfare Vision of Constantine (Bernini) 46 La Vittoria (The Victory) (Wildt) 202 Vittoria dell’aria (Victory of the Air) (Fontana) 222–223 Vittoriano 171, 178 La voce (journal) 91, 93, 97, 104, 111, 132, 240–241 volume 93, 127, 132, 152, 161, 185, 188–189, 206 von Hildebrand, Adolf 92 Vossler, Karl 214, 232n57 Wagner, Richard 9, 38, 40 warfare class 213 First World War 94, 113, 138–139, 141, 166, 171, 202 Second World War 228, 229, 241, 243 Wildt, Adolfo 12, 133, 197–199, 216, 221–223, 227, 229, 238 L’arte del marmo (The Art of Marble) 208, 210 as artist-politician 205–213

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Index Benito Mussolini 203 Margherita Sarfatti 208 Maschera del dolore – Autoritratto (Mask of Pain – Self-Portrait) 201–202 as most original milanese sculptor 199–205 Nicola Bonservizi 212 The Prisoner 207 Santa Lucia 197 La Vittoria (The Victory) 202 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 9–10, 28, 205 Wölfflin, Heinrich 5, 79, 132, 163 Classical Art 9–10, 92 on Futurism 96, 98–99, 101, 106, 114n7 Principles of Art History 9–10, 51n43, 207 Renaissance and Baroque 9–10, 11–12, 25, 51n43, 88–89

on sculpture, during Fascism 200, 205, 209, 215 Woman on a Horse (Metzinger) 99, 101 women 22–23, 30, 34, 147 feminism 141 femme fatales 22–23, 204–205 working class 168, 169 INAIL 161, 177–180, 184 Rosso, Medardo 95–96, 105, 205, 206–208, 209, 221, 231n37 see also Wildt, Adolfo world’s fairs 58–61 Worringer, Wilhelm 12, 111 youth culture, interwar Italian 215–220, 221, 223, 225–226, 233n97, 240–241, 243

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