(Avant Garde Critical Studies) Günter Berghaus (Ed.) - Futurism and The Technological Imagination (2009, Rodopi)

Futurism and the
Technological
Imagination
AVANT-GARDE
CRITICAL STUDIES
24
Editor
Klaus Beekman
Associate Editors
Sophie Berrebi, Ben Rebel,
Jan de Vries, Willem G. Weststeijn
International Advisory Board

Henri Béhar, Hubert van den Berg,
Peter Bürger, Ralf Grüttemeier,
Hilde Heinen, Leigh Landy
Founding Editor
Fernand Drijkoningen†
Futurism and the
Technological
Imagination
Edited by
Günter Berghaus
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

Cover illustration: Enrico Prampolini, “Il pilota dell’infinito”, 1932, olio
su tavola, 116 x 90 cm. Courtesy of Massimo Prampolini and Collezione
Massimo Carpi.
Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff
All titles in the Avant-Garde Critical Studies series (from 1999 onwards)
are available to download from the Ingenta website http://www.ingenta.com
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-2747-3
E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2748-0
Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009
Printed in The Netherlands
Contents
Editor’s Foreword vii
Günter Berghaus
Futurism and the Technological Imagination Poised between
Machine Cult and Machine Angst 1
Domenico Pietropaolo
Science and the Aesthetics of Geometric Splendour
in Italian Futurism 41
Serge Milan
The ‘Futurist Sensibility’: An Anti-philosophy for the
Age of Technology 63
Roger Griffin
The Multiplication of Man: Futurism’s Technolatry
Viewed Through the Lens of Modernism 77
Vera Castiglione
A Futurist before Futurism: Émile Verhaeren and the
Technological Epic 101
Patrizia Veroli
Loie Fuller’s Serpentine Dance and Futurism:
Electricity, Technological Imagination and the Myth
of the Machine 125
Maria Elena Versari

Futurist Machine Art, Constructivism and the Moder-
nity of Mechanization 149
vi Contents
Gerardo Regnani
Futurism and Photography: Between Scientific Inquiry
and Aesthetic Imagination
177
Wanda Strauven
Futurist Poetics and the Cinematic Imagination:
Marinetti’s Cinema without Films 201
Margaret Fisher
Futurism and Radio 229
Matteo D'Ambrosio
From Words-in-Freedom to Electronic Literature:
Futurism and the Neo-Avantgarde 263
Michelangelo Sabatino
Tabula rasa or Hybridity? Primitivism and the Vernac-
ular in Futurist and Rationalist Architecture 287
Pierpaolo Antonello
Beyond Futurism: Bruno Munari’s Useless Machines 315
Marja Härmänmaa
Futurism and Nature: The Death of the Great Pan? 337
Illustrations 361
Abstracts 367
Notes on Contributors 373
Index 379
Editor’s Foreword
This collection of essays results from a workshop held on 29 July

2008 in Helsinki under the auspices of the International Society for
the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI). It contains a number of re-
written conference contributions as well as several specially
commissioned essays to round off the volume. Together, they address
a variety of aspects of the Futurists’ relationship to technology both on
an ideological level and with regard to their artistic endeavours.
The rapid unfolding of science and technology in the wake of the

Industrial Revolution rang in the Age of Modernity, characterized not
only by an awe-inspiring transformation of our physical environment
but also by a whole range of apparatuses that allowed reality to be
perceived and experienced in a novel manner. This, in turn, led to the
birth of several artistic schools and movements that sought to interpret
and convey the essence of this new and rapidly changing world.
Some of the most remarkable examples of the technological

imagination in arts and literature were offered by the Futurist
movement. It was founded in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, a
man who ever since his first visit to Paris, in 1894, had been
fascinated by the dizzying pace of modern life. He therefore aspired to
renovate the form and content of arts and literature and turn them into
suitable vehicles of expression in the Era of the Machine. The
glorification of technology became a salient feature of many of his
manifestos and thus of Futurism as a cultural phenomenon. The artists
who joined the movement made use of the changed forms of
communication, incorporated the break-up of the conventional time-
space nexus in their works, and sought to express the spirit of
modernity by way of entirely new and experimental works of art.
However, during the First World War, the negative and threatening
features of technology became more and more apparent. In the 1920s,
this gave rise to a Futurist “machine angst” (angoscia delle macchine),
and a variety of attempts to merge organic and mechanical
technologies, culminating, in the 1930s, in a Futurist Naturist
movement and the proclamation of a specifically Futurist spirituality.
viii Editor’s Foreword
As many scholars in the past had focussed their attention on

Futurist’ technophilia and modernolatry, our Helsinki meeting sought
to broaden the picture by also examining the flipside of the coin. In
fact it was largely due to Marja Härmänmaa, who had analysed the
neglected features of secondo futurismo in her pioneering study, Un
patriota che sfidò la decadenza: F. T. Marinetti e l'idea dell'uomo
nuovo fascista, 1929-1944 (2000), that this workshop came about. I
had suggested to her in 2005 to organize a symposium on the later
phase of the Futurist movement. When, in 2007, she persuaded ISSEI
to hold their 2008 congress in Helsinki on the topic of “Language and
the Scientific Imagination”, an ideal framework had been set in place
for our workshop.
I should like to express my sincerest gratitude to Marja

Härmänmaa, Ezra Talmor and Rachel Ben-David for having made our
symposium possible. The Helsinki event will be remembered by all
participants for its intellectual stimulation, convivial gatherings and
culinary indulgences.
Unfortunately, not every presentation given at our conference

could be included in this volume. I extend my warmest thanks to all
delegates who participated in our debates with papers and improvised
interventions, and to all other colleagues who subsequently submitted
essays for this volume.
I hope that what has been selected here amounts to a balanced and
multifaceted account of the Futurist technological imagination, and
will be considered a useful contribution to the 2009 centenary of
Futurism.
Günter Berghaus
28 July 2009
Futurism and the Technological Imagination
Poised between Machine Cult and Machine Angst
Günter Berghaus
Abstract: This chapter deals with some of the great changes that affected Italy during
the ‘second Industrial revolution’, especially in the fields of transportation and
communication. It shows how Marinetti experienced the first stages of
industrialization in Italy, discusses some of his proto-Futurist visions of life and art in
the machine age, and surveys his theoretical writings on technology and on a Futurist
art and literature of the machine age. Marinetti repeatedly defined Futurism as a
movement that was committed to ‘the enthusiastic glorification of scientific
discoveries and modern machines’ (Marinetti 2005: 105). However, it would be
unwise to take it for granted that Marinetti’s attitude was identical with that of other
Futurists, as many of them possessed viewpoints that were different from those of the
movement’s leader. Similarly, it would be imprudent to assume that in the course of
thirty years Futurism remained a stable and unchanging entity. For this reason, I shall
outline in this chapter not only those trends that occupied a dominant position in
Futurism’s long history, but also some of the dissenting voices that came from within
the movement. I shall point out some contradictions in Marinetti’s own ideology of
the machine and discuss developments in the second and third phase of Futurism that
demonstrate that some of the sceptical views on modernity that were a mere
undercurrent in the years 1909-1915 became a major and significant aspect of
Futurism in its later years of its existence. Thus, this chapter will investigate to what
degree the Futurist machine cult was tempered by an underlying machine angst and
suggest that Futurist attitudes towards an industrialized society were more complex
and contradictory than appears at first sight.
‘The essence of technology is not itself something technological’

(Heidegger 1985: 13)
The advent of the Age of Mobility in Italy
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti had been brought up in Egypt in

accordance with religious and philosophical principles that belonged
to a pre-industrial age. When, as an adolescent, he came to Europe, he
discovered a new world. He marvelled at the wonders of technology
displayed in Paris and in the capitals of other industrialized countries.
However, when he visited the land of his forefathers he could not fail
2 Günter Berghaus
to notice that, in comparison, Italy lagged far behind the most

advanced nations and was still an under-developed, backward country.
It is ironic that the peninsula, which in the early modern period had
been economically at the forefront of European developments, had
fallen far behind in the era of the Industrial Revolution. It was only
after Unification (1861) that the industrialization of Italy began to take
off, especially in Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna and the Veneto, i.e.
those regions which had long been integrated into central Europe’s
economy and were therefore more able to adapt to the new realities of
the Industrial Age (Gerschenkron 1962; Caracciolo 1963; Clough
1964; Toniolo 1973; Federico 1994; Giannetti 1998). The years 1896-
1908 were a period of unprecedented economic growth and
development, especially in the new chemical, electrical, petrochemical
and steel industries, as well as in the production of mass consumer
goods and the new means of communication and transportation. It also
provided the population with hitherto unknown comforts and
amenities, such as spacious and well-heated dwellings provided with
gas and water supply, sewage systems, electrical power and telephone
connections. Expanding educational facilities improved literacy and
changed people’s perceptions of themselves and of the world around
them.
Italy, like the rest of Europe, entered into the Age of Mobility.
Railway networks, which had begun rather modestly in the late
1830s,1 grew by the time of Unification to 1,632 km (transporting over
1.2 mill. passengers), expanded to 16,053 km by 1896 and transported
more than 2.8 mill. passengers in 1903 (Crispo 1940; Clough 1964:
26-28, 66-71; Briano 1977). There were years, when half of the
State’s infrastructure budget was allocated to railway construction and
75 per cent of public-works funds were invested in vast transportation
schemes (Schram 1997:3).2 Magnificent railway stations were erected
in every city – described, again and again, as ‘modern cathedrals of
1
The first Italian railway line, between Naples and Portici, was inaugurated on 3
October 1839, nine years after the world's first inter-city railway between Liverpool
and Manchester.
2
However, recent research has suggested that the economic benefit of Italy’s railway
system was much less than generally assumed. Given the length of Italian coastlines,
shipping always remained a significant means of transportation. Even in the regions
with the most dynamic economies, the length of railways and the density of traffic
on them always remained way below those of the economically more advanced
nations in Europe. See Schram 1997: 70 and 152-164.
Futurism and the Technological Imagination 3
the industrial age’ – and huge swathes were cut through the fabric of
the urban centres to allow for the construction of thoroughfares in and
out of town. Given the prominent place accorded to these
developments in political discourse, it is not astonishing that in the
public mind the notion gained ground that Italy had become a mobile
society. And indeed, in every major city, monumental changes were
taking place that demonstrated that the modern technologies of
communication and transportation were conquering time and space.
Table 1: Growth of railway networks in selected European countries
England Germany France Italy

1840 2,390 km 469 km 410 km 20 km
1850 9,797 km 5,856 km 2,915 km 620 km
1875 23,365 km 27,970 km 19,357 km 8,018 km
1900 30,079 km 51,678 km 38,109 km 16,479 km
(From Mitchell 1998: 673-677)
But this was not all. Everywhere, horse-driven cabs were giving
way to electrified trams and motorized omnibuses. Bicycles became a
common sight, especially after 1885, when the firm of Edoardo
Bianchi introduced the ‘safety bike’, i.e. a chain driven vehicle with
wheels of nearly identical size and furnished with pneumatic tires.
Furthermore, soon after the invention of the Diesel and Otto motors
and Carl Benz’s historical drive through the street of Mannheim in an
‘auto-mobile tricyle’ (1885), Italian engineers began to construct
motor vehicles powered by internal combustion engines: in 1894,
Enrico Bernardi presented a first Italian automobile with a petrol
motor and in 1895 Michele Lanza launched his Phaeton. In 1898, a
first Salone Internazionale dell'Automobile was held at the National
Exposition of Turin and featured, on 25 July, a car race (Concorso
internazionale di veicoli automobili) from Turin to Alessandria and
back. On 11 July 1899, the Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino
(FIAT) was founded and, within a few years, became the pride of the
country. But FIAT was not alone: Aquila, Bianchi, Bugatti, Ceirano,
Diatto, Flag, Isotta, Itala, Lancia, Scat, SPA, Temperino, Züst and
various other manufacturers laid the foundations for an Italian
automobile industry. However, in terms of actual production figures,
4 Günter Berghaus
the country trailed far behind other industrialized nations (see tables 2
and 3).
Table 2: FIAT production numbers
1900 1901 1903 1904 1906 1907 1908 1909 1911 1912 1913 1914
24 73 135 268 1,149 1,420 1,300 1,800 2,631 3,500 3,050 4,644
(Figures taken from Bardou 1977: 58-59, 106, and Pietra 1985: 34-41)
Table 3: Car production and ownership in selected countries
Manufacturers’ output Cars registered in Number of citizens

individual countries per automobile
1895 1900 1907 1907 1913 1907 1913
France 144 4,800 25,200 40,000 125,00 981 318
Germany 135 800 5,150 16,200 70,000 3,824 950
Britain 175 12,000 63,000 250,000 640 165
USA 4,000 44,000 143,000 1,258,000 608 77
Italy 2,500 6,080 17,000 5,554 2,070
(Figures based on Bardou 1977: 25-107)
Whereas railway travel is a

communal experience deter-
mined by factors the individual
cannot control, the driver of a
motorcar determines the
journey him- or herself and
feels a sense of personal
freedom combined with the
adrenaline rush caused by the
experience of speed. The
autonomy of movement in a
motorcar is fundamentally
different from a journey in a
train running on fixed tracks.
Illustr. 1: Michele Lanza in his Also, the car is (just about)
‘Victoria’ of 1898, Coll.
Bassignana, Turin
within reach of an individual’s
financial resources. Marinetti,
for example, could buy himself a car, but not a railway or an

aeroplane. A precondition for this was that car manufacturing shifted
from artisanal to industrial production methods.
As the output of cars increased, also the interest of the public in the
new form of locomotion stepped up. It should come as no surprise to
us to disover that much of this was channelled by the persuasive force
of advertising and the evocative power of the illustrated press. As
early as 1894, the first magazine entirely dedicated to automobiles
saw the world: La Locomotion automobile: Revue universelle des
voitures, vélocipèdes et véhicules mécaniques.3 Its appearance
coincided with the Deuxième Salon de la Bicyclette, which had also
nine car manufacturers presenting their products. In the next decade,
one salon after another presented the latest car models, and nearly
every country instituted car races. The consequence of this was that, in
1900, France possessed no less than 25 publications dedicated to
automobiles, although, taken altogether, only 5,386 cars were actually
on the streets of the country! (Bardou 1977: 32) This indicates that the
general curiosity that surrounded the motorcar was much higher than
the actually number of people who could experience the thrill and
excitement generated by a ride on this Modern Pegasus.
Table 4: Early Grand-Prix automobile races in Italy
12 September 1897 Arona-Stresa-Arona (34 km)

17 July 1898 Torino-Asti-Alessandria-Torino (192 km)
14 March 1899 Verona-Brescia-Mantova-Verona (161 km)
30 April 1899 Turin-Pinerolo-Avigliana-Turin (90 km)
8 May 1899 Reggio Emilia (85 km)
22 May 1899 Bologna-Poggio Renatico-Malalbergo-Bologna (80 km)
19 June 1899 Padua-Vincenza-Thiene-Bassano-Trevisio-Padua (175 km)
15 August 1899 Piacenza-Cremona-Borgo-Piacenza (100 km)
10 September 1899 Brescia Sprint: Torno della Città (6 km)
11 September 1899 Brescia-Cremona-Mantua-Verona-Brescia (223 km)
20 September 1899 Bergamo-Treviglio-Crema-Bergamo (92 km)
29 October 1899 Treviso Sprint in the city’s Hippodrome (3 km)
30 October 1899 Campionato Italiano di Resistenza: Treviso-Oderzo-
Codogné-Conegliano-Treviso (80 km)
3
Sixteen issues from December 1894 to September 1909 are preserved in the
Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.
6 Günter Berghaus
In Italy, the situation was not much different. Motor-clubs sprang

up everywhere and organized car rallies. Newspapers and illustrated
magazines vied with each other to interview the winners of these races
and to report on the latest speed records. It is not surprising therefore
that, in the early years of the twentieth century, the motorcar turned
into an icon of technological progress and acquired quasi-
mythological significance. The automobile not only symbolized the
human desire to overcome the limits of time and space; it also became
the machine par excellence (and to this day, it is called ‘la macchina’
in Italy!)
However, the speedy motor vehicle eulogized by Marinetti in the
Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism was not a consumer but a
racing car: ‘We believe that this wonderful world has been further
enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed. A racing car, its bonnet
decked-out with exhaust pipes like serpents with galvanic breath... a
roaring motor car, which seems to race on like machine-gun fire, is
more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.’ (Marinetti
1909a: 13) It was this insistence on speed and dynamism that became
a defining characteristic of Futurism and set it apart from its ‘static’
predecessors in literature (Symbolism) and painting (Cubism).
Illustr. 2: Marinetti at the wheel of his BN 30/40 HP FIAT Isotta Fraschini ‘Gran
Lusso’ in 1908.
Illustr. 3: Brescia car race in 1907. From a contemporary postcard.
Given this widespread enthusiasm for cars – which to this day has
not abated but rather increased – one must not forget, however, that, in
Marinetti’s time, the automobile was not a ‘Volkswagen’, a people’s
vehicle, but a luxury item for a small privileged élite. Marinetti’s four-
cylinder FIAT which, in 1908, he drove into a ditch was not a car for
the proverbial ‘man in the street’. The products of the FIAT plant
were, at least in comparison to Ford, expensive vehicles. In 1905, they
cost 17,000 Lire (Pietra 1985: 37). Even with rising production
Table 5: Annual wages in Italy in selected professions (in Lire)4
1900 1902 1904 1906 1908 1910 1912

Textiles 347 357 360 368 405 418 434
Construction 476 516 635 688 714 781 820
Chemicals 542 569 611 622 698 754 561
Metalworking 781 820 860 876 928 1003 1040
Printing 873 900 952 979 1005 1058 1093
(Based on Zamagni 1984: 59-93)
4
The figures have been arrived at by multiplying the daily wage by 5.4 to arrive at
weekly figures and then by 49 to arrive at annual wages. See Zamagni 1984: 72.
8 Günter Berghaus
numbers and the introduction of American-style division of labour, in

1912, they still cost 7,500 Lire – nearly double that of a Ford Model T
(Pietra 1985: 41). When such a price is put in relation to the pay scales
of the period (see Table 5), it becomes apparent why, despite rapidly
increasing output capacities, Italy was still far away from entering the
age of mass-mobilization. (Zenone 2002)
Table 6: Some memorable speed records, 1894-1909
Date 22 July 25 Febr. 18 Dec. 29 April 31 March 26 Jan.

1894 1895 1898 1899 1904 1906
18.66 24.54 63.15 105.88 152.53 205.44
Speed
km/h km/h km/h km/h km/h km/h
Gaston de
Jules de Emile Camille Louis Fred
Driver Chasseloup
Dion Levassor Jenatzy Rigolly Marriott
-Laubat
Stanley
De Dion- Panhard- Jeantaud La Jamais Gobron
Vehicle Rocket
Bouton Levassor Duc Contente Brillié
Racer
Paris- Paris-
Location Achères Achères Nice Arles
Rouen Bordeaux
With the new century approaching, another development in the

domain of transportation gathered pace: civil aviation. But just as in
the field of cars and railways, Italian aeronautics lagged far behind
Germany, France and the USA, which in the late-nineteenth century
had made great advances in developing practicable aircrafts. After the
first attempts by Enrico Forlanini to construct a viable flying
mechanism (his ‘helicopter’
was exhibited in the Giardini
Pubblici in Milan in July
1877), it took nearly thirty
years before the Italian
public was given another
chance to view, with their
own eyes, what newspaper
and popular magazines had
frequently reported on:
manned flights in an
Illustr. 4: Léon Delagrange on 24 May
1908 on piazza d’Armi in Rome. Coll.
aeroplane. In 1906, the Great
David Lam. International Exhibition was
held in Milan and had as one
Illustr. 5: Delagrange 's flight with sculptor Thérèse Peltier as the first woman on a
passenger seat in Turin on 8 July 1908; Coll. David Lam.
of its main attractions a Gallery of Aeronautics. The following year,

an Aviators’ Club was founded in Rome, who invited the famous
French aviator, Léon Delagrange, to demonstrate his flying skills. On
24 May 1908, a stunned audience could observe in Piazza d'Armi how
Delagrange’s Voisin aeroplane ploughed its way through the clouds
over Rome. A few months later, on 23 June, Delagrange set an
endurance record of 18 minutes, 30 seconds in Milan. And on 8 July
1908, he not only repeated his amazing flying feats, but also took the
sculptor Thérèse Peltier, as the first woman ever on the passenger seat
of an aeroplane, 656 feet off the ground in Turin5.
1909 was not only the founding year of Futurism but also a
significant chapter in the history of Italian aviation. On 13 January,
the engineer Aristide Faccioli took the first aeroplane entirely built in
5
David Lam kindly informed me that Thérèse Peltier may not, in fact, have been the
first woman passenger. It appears that Henri Farman carried a lady named Mlle P.
van Pottelsberghe de la Poterie during his flights at Ghent in May-June 1908. They
flew at least several short hops at low altitude during the Ghent show, according to
Le patriote illustré (Bruxelles), 7 June 1908: 353.
10 Günter Berghaus
Italy to the skies over Turin. On 1 April 1909, another pioneer, Wilbur
Wright, impressed the Roman public with an astounding airshow. As a
consequence of this, the military High Command asked Wright to give
a series of flying instructions to two Italian pilots, Mario Calderara
and Umberto Savoia. The first took place on 15 and 16 April, in
Centocelle near Rome, before the eyes of King Vittorio Emanuele III
and Queen Mother Margherita. The event, naturally, was widely
reported on in the Italian press and inspired Marinetti in his second
Futurist manifesto to proclaim a vision of himself and his brethren in
arms taking to the sky:
We cut out our Futurist airplanes from the buff-colored sailcloth of

boats. Some of them had stabilizing wings and, being fitted with
engines, soared like bloody vultures that took wriggling calves up into
the sky. Look at this, for example. My multicellular biplane with its
tail rudder: 100 horsepower, 8 cylinders, 80 kilograms... Between my
feet I have a small machine gun I can fire by pressing a steel button...
And we’re off, intoxicated by our skillful maneuvers, in exhilarating
flight, sputtering, weightless, and pitched like a song inviting drinking
and dancing. (Marinetti 1909b: 29-30)
This text of the manifesto was published in the August-October

issue of Poesia and may well reflect the fact that, on 9-20 September
1909, Marinetti had occasion to witness the first national airshow at
Brescia.6 The event made the headlines in all national newspapers
(Brescia 1909 a-d) and was followed up in November by an
impressive Prima Esposizione Italiana di Aviazione in Milan. This
aeronautics show exhibited not only the Voisin biplane that
Delagrange had flown two years before, but also the first Italian
constructions of AVIS (Aeroplans Voisin Italie Settentrionnelle) and
FIAM (Fabbrica Italiana Aeroplani Milano). The success was such
that only a few months later, on 8 April 1910, a second aeronautic
show was held in Turin. Its highlight was a flight over the Alps, which
ended on 27 September with the deadly crash of the Peruvian-born
pilot Jorge Chávez after having crossed the 2,000m high Simplon
Pass. (Milano 1910a-d)
6
Jeffrey Schnapp believes that Marinetti had his first flying experience at the airshow
in Brescia. (Schnapp 1994: 156) If this had been the case, Marinetti most certainly
would have exploited it to the full, not least because his ‘competitor’ D’Annunzio
undertook a well-publicized test flight in Brescia.
Illustr. 6: Airshow in Verona, 1910.

From Illustrazione italiana, vol.37, no. 26 (6 June 1910): 564-565.
Illustr. 7: Two posters for the International Airshow in Milan 1910.

12 Günter Berghaus
As numerous articles in the popular press suggest, Italy was seized

by was aeromania, fuelled in the following years by more airshows,
exhibitions, flying competitions and so on (see Table 7). Every week,
the newspapers and popular magazines reported on the latest flight
awards, new distance or altitude records, accidents or even deaths of
famous aviators. For most people, of course, it was a flying fever with
their feet firmly rooted on the ground. Flying was a spectacle, an
entertainment, a dream, a social event, and very soon the subject of
novels and films, such as D’Annunzio’s Forse che sì forse che no
(1910), Pathè’s Aviation Craze (1910) and a Gaumont film of the
same year only known by its German title, Ah! … da fliegt ein
Aeroplan! (McKernan 2004).
Naturally, the Futurists followed suit. Paolo Buzzi’s Aeroplani was
the first in a long series of Futurist publications on the theme of flying
(Salaris 1990), although, in this case, the title was rather misleading,
since the volume did not contain a single poem on the topic of flying.
Table 7: Some memorable early aviation shows in Italy
9 – 20 September 1909 First International Airshow held in Brescia

28 March – 5 April 1910 Aviation display on the Campo di Marte in Florence
1-7 May 1910 Settimana dell’Aviazione in Palermo
22 – 30 May 1910 Aviation display in Bologna
22 – 29 May 1910 International Airshow in Verona
31 July - 7 August 1910 Aviation show in the Pineta aerodrome of Pescara
First International Airshow in Milan on a terrain that has now
become Taliedo airport, including an air race from Briga to Milan
25 September – 1
and a raid across the Alps, ‘Gran Premio della Traversata delle
October 1910
Alpi’. On 23 September, Jorge Chávez was killed while landing in
Domodossola.
Flying competition in the Ippodromo di Mirafiori in Turin. On 13
5 – 13 November 1910 November, a crowd of 200,000 people is reported to have
observed the flights
19 February 1911 Aerial displays by Umberto Cagno and Giulio Gavotti in Venice
26 February 1911 Flying competition in Roma
Airshow in Piacenza on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of
25 – 27 March 1911
the unification of Italy
‘Settimana Aviatoria’ with flight competitions on the Campo di
7 –14 May 1911
Marte in Florence
‘Raid aviatorio Parigi - Roma - Torino’ with intermediate air
displays in Genoa, Pisa, Florence and Bologna, organized to
28 May – 12 June 1911 commemorate the Unification of Italy in 1861. André Beaumont
beats Roland Garros in the 1,465 km (910 mile) air race in 28
hours, 5 minutes.
29 – 31 October 1911 ‘Primo Raid nazionale aereo Milano - Torino - Milano’
Marinetti experienced his first flight with the Peruvian aviator

Bielovucic at the 1910 airshow in Milan. (Marinetti 2006: 257) It
inspired him to a long series of publications, starting with the Pope’s
Aeroplane (1912), and served as inspiration to the Technical
Manifesto of Literature (1912). It seems that the motorcar, which in
previous years had been Marinetti’s mechanical muse, was
successively being replaced by the aeroplane as the main metaphor of
the Futurist quest for speed and overcoming the limitations of time
and space. There is even reason to believe that the Futurist concern
with the fusion of man and machine received considerable impetus
from these early flight experiences. When Marinetti acquired his first
automobile, more than 25 years had already passed since the
pioneering days of Benz and Maybach, and motorcars had become
rather sophisticated and comfortable vehicles.7 Compared to a ride in a
Fiat or Mercedes, flying in an aeroplane was still a mind-blowing
experience (in more than one sense). Marinetti mentions in The New
Ethical Religion of Speed the ‘wild, cheek-coloring massage of a
frenzied wind’ that made his ‘breast opening up like a great hole’
(Marinetti 1916: 257). To this he could have added the deafening din
of the motor, the bone-shaking reverberations of the chassis, the
intoxicating fumes of the petrol, and so on. In those early days of
aviation, one did indeed feel at one with the amazing flying machine.
However, one should not forget that aviation was not only an
adventure and was not only put to civil use. Quite early on, the Italian
Ministry of Defence developed a strong interest in the new
technology. In 1909, they formed a military aviation unit and, in 1910,
placed a substantial order for ten airplanes and nine airships. It did not
take long and the strategic thinking behind those decisions became
apparent. Italian colonialist expansion in North Africa was contested
by Turkey and led to war. On 5 October 1911, the Italian army landed
at Tripoli and unleashed the first armed conflict in which aviation
played a significant role. A sizeable fleet of Blériot, Etrich and
Farman planes rendered the Italian army good service in their
reconnoitring missions. One thousand meters over the enemy
positions, the pilots could observe their manoeuvres in the theatre of
war and report them to the generals on the ground. On 22 October
7
This is, unless they were racing cars. It is therefore no wonder that when Marinetti
mentions automobiles in connection with speed and danger he always refers to a
racing car.
14 Günter Berghaus
1911, Captain Carlo Piazza flew in his Blériot monoplane from

Tripoli, to Azzia, with the mission of showering the Arabian soldiers
and civil population with propaganda leaflets exhorting them to
surrender. Those who did not heed the advice would soon experience
the consequences: on 1 and 2 November 1911, Lieutenant Giulio
Gavotti released several bombs on the Turkish troops. This was the
first time ever that bombs had been dropped from an aeroplane.
Marinetti who had travelled to Libya as a war correspondent,
observed at close quarters the Turkish-Italian battles. In a letter to
Palazzeschi, of January 1912, he described them as ‘the most beautiful
aesthetic spectacle of my life’. (Marinetti and Palazzeschi 1978: 61)
The use of aeroplanes in the conflict made a lasting impression on
him, but he also evoked other aspects of the ‘mechanical orchestra’
performing in the ‘theatre of war’ in a series of articles for
L’Intransigeant and recited them in various Italian theatres. They were
later issued in his book, La Bataille de Tripoli, 1912.
Proto-Futurism
Long before Futurism entered the scene, the subject-matter of modern

industry and life in the machine age had become a focus of attention
for artists and critics alike. (Grant 1927; Ginestier 1954; Francastel
1956; Klingender 1968; Le Bot 1973; Segeberg 1987; Beneke 2002;
Comité pour l'histoire économique 2002). As early as 1848, Théophile
Gautier had suggested that ‘the artistic formulas of the ancient régime
were totally unsuited to our new Republic’ and had demanded that ‘a
whole new vast system of symbols must be invented, answering the
needs of our times.’ (Gautier 1848: 9-11) A few years later, he had
added:
Initially one might have thought that the mechanical inventions would
deal a mortal blow to the arts. But on the contrary, they have rendered
them invaluable service. A new era of poetry has arisen from the
discovery of steam power. [...] The locomotive shall be the pegasus of
our time. (Gautier 1855/6: 309)
Another major proponent of an art and literature that reflected the

great upheavals of the modern era was Maxime du Camp. In the
preface to his collection of poems, Les Chants modernes (1855), he
described the art and literature of his time as being in a state of

decadence and totally out of touch with the great advances made by
science and technology:
Science produces wonders and industry accomplishes miracles. Yet

we remain impassive, indifferent or contemptuous, and go on plucking
the strained cords of our lyres [...] One discovers the force of steam,
and we sing in praise of Venus rising from the foam of the sea. One
discovers electricity, and we sing our songs to Bacchus, friend of the
ruby grapes. This is absurd! [...] The cult of the old in this country is a
lunacy, an illness, an epidemic. (Du Camp 1860: 9-10)
Du Camp attacked the Académie Française for belonging to ‘a

crusty old world’ (Du Camp 1860: 28) and for failing to support
‘works that can be considered modern and truly alive’ (Du Camp
1860: 25). He called for an art of the future and exhorted the young
generation: ‘Let’s leave the intellectual invalids grinding themselves
to a halt with their useless regrets and naïve attempts of finding
paradise in the past, when in reality it is waiting for us in the future.
So let us embrace, work towards and fecundate the eternally young
forces of progress.’ (Du Camp 1860: 35) In order to reach ‘the golden
age ahead of us’, he suggested that the pioneers join forces and ‘claim
new ground on which to build the road into the beautiful lands of the
future. This is not only our duty; it is our mission!’ (Du Camp 1860:
54)
Such proto-Futurist visions show that F.T. Marinetti’s project of
building a great railroad into the Future, described in his second
Futurist proclamation (Marinetti 1909b: 22-31), was not altogether a
novel undertaking. Utopian forecasts of an ultra-modern life in a fully
industrialized urban environment were quite common, particularly in
the science-fiction literature of the late-nineteenth century, ranging
from Jules Verne to H. G. Wells and including the home-grown Paolo
Mantegazza and Emilio Salgari.8 Marinetti himself acknowledged the
influence of some technophile predecessors such as Zola, Verhaeren,
Adam, Romains, etc. (Mariani 1970; Marinelli 1987; Berghaus 1995),
8
Jules Vernes’ works were appearing in Italy in large numbers from the 1860s
onwards, and the series of translations of H.G. Wells’ novels started in 1900. This
led to a growth of Italian science fiction, best represented by Paolo Mantegazza’s
L’anno 3000 - Sogno (Milan: Treves, 1897), and Emilio Salgari’s Le meraviglie del
duemila (Florence: Bemporad e Figlio, 1907).
16 Günter Berghaus
although he never mentioned Mario Morasso, whose writings

exercised considerable influence in Italy. In fact, Marinetti himself
published in his journal Poesia one of Morasso’s proto-Futurist
eulogies of the machine world, L’artigliere meccanico, whose
comparison of the Nike of Samothrace with a speeding motor car9
may have inspired Marinetti a few years later to his famous statement:
‘A roaring motorcar, which seems to race on like machine-gun fire, is
more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.’ (Marinetti
1909a: 13)
When, in 1894, Marinetti settled in Milan, he discovered that,
despite the general backwardness of Italy, in the Northern provinces at
least a new civilization was beginning to take shape. The capital of
Lombardy was in the process of becoming a conurbation that could
stand comparison with other major cities – if not exactly with London,
Paris or Berlin, then at least with other regional centres in Europe. A
‘Haussmannization’ was under way that demolished the old popular
and medieval quarters and cut large new axes through the city. As part
of the new urban topography, huge industrial complexes were erected
in the suburbs, together with modern living quarters for the workforce
and large administrative buildings. In the centre, Milan became a city
of banks, department stores, theatres, cinemas, music-halls, hospitals,
schools, etc. The population lived with the comfort of sanitary
services unknown in other Italian cities: a supply of drinking water
was provided from central cisterns directly into apartment blocks, and
modern drains connected every house to an underground sewage
system. Milan was famed to be Italy’s ‘electric city’: streets were
illuminated with powerful arc lamps; more than 5,000 telephones had
been installed; ‘la posta elettrica’ had arrived; and transport was
speeded up with electric tramways (as well as motorized omnibuses),
which replaced the horse-drawn cart and coach.
9
‘Fu detto per l’alata e decapitata Vittoria di Samotracia, troneggiante in cima allo
scalone del Louvre, che ha nelle pieghe della sua veste racchiuso il vento, e che
nell’atteggiamento della sua persona rivela l’impeto della corsa facile e gioconda;
orbene, e non è irriverente il paragone, anche il ferreo mostro quando scuote e
scalpita per il battito concitato del motore offre nello stesso modo una magnifica
rivelazione di forza virtuale e dimostra palesemente la folle velocità di cui è capace.’
(Morasso 1906: 78) Marinetti’s debt to Morasso has been discussed by Cavallini
(2006: 157-164).
Illustr. 8: Piazza Duomo in Milan during an airshow in 1910. On the left we see the
entrance to the Victor Emanuel Gallery. From Illustrazione italiana vol. 37, no. 41 (9
Oct. 1910): 359.
Marinetti has left us a vivid description of how, as a young man, he

reacted to these innovative developments. In the first chapter of his
autobiography, entitled ‘An Italian Egypt in Lombardy’, he recalled
how his father took him to Milan and made him experience the
evolving metropolis as ‘a pleasing example of the commanding
aesthetics of the machine’ (Marinetti 1969: 11). He described how his
‘adolescent feet, habituated to the yielding sand of Africa’ (11) grew
accustomed to Milan’s marble pavements, how his eyes were fixed on
‘the gas jets high up in the vaults of the Victor Emanuel Gallery’ (11),
and how on Piazza Duomo his ears were reverberating from the
sounds of an ‘ultrafast and prolific traffic’ (12) (see illustr. 8). He was
greatly taken by the fact that ‘illuminated advertisement boards
insolently sweep away any artistic sense of modesty or clerical
prudence’ (5) and that the ‘clamour of real money derides the church
bells – moaning, swinging, shedding medieval tears’ (10). In his
account, pre-industrial lifestyles are yielding to the onslaught of
18 Günter Berghaus
Illustr. 9: International Exhibition of 1906. Illustr. 10: Main entrance to the Sempione
The figure on the cathedral is Meneghino, park, where the Expo 1906 was held. From
a figure from the Milanese popular theatre a contemporary guidebook.
and carnival tradition. From a contemp-
orary postcard.
modernity (‘Provincialism goat’s voice is bickering about the tram

drivers and gasmen that are switching from horses to motors’ [4]). The
proletariat is preparing for ‘the Strike, the prophet of a revolution’ (4),
whilst others are participating in a cult of diversion centred on the
caffè concerto, the Variety theatre and other forms of popular
entertainment. But the greatest attraction of all is ‘the uncouth and
uproarious poetry of the Great Steel Industry’ (10) and the
‘overpowering poetry of the Breda Foundries producing tractors
threshing machines trucks ploughs machine guns torpedoes aeroplanes
merchant ships rails’ (10).
Today, when assessing the industrialization of Italy, we tend to
look at statistics and production figures. However, we should not
forget how the average inhabitant of the time experienced the ‘Arrival
of the Future’. When Marinetti looked out of the window of his
apartment in via del Senato he could observe a hustle and bustle that
conjured up in his mind images of La grande Milano futurista,
metaphor of a city as a gigantic machine, symbol of la nuova Italia
rinascente:
Milan! Genoa!... This is where the new, revitalized Italy lies! Here are
the cities that we love! It is cities such as these that lift our Italian
pride! We have great centers which are aflame day and night,
breathing their huge fires all over the open countryside. We have
soaked with our sweat a whole forest of immense mill chimneys,
whose capitals of stretching smoke hold up our sky, which wishes to
be seen as nothing but a vast factory ceiling. (Marinetti 1910d: 170)10
10
The continuity between Marinetti’s Late-Symbolist poetry and his Futurist
mythography of the machine has been pointed out by Nazzaro 1987: 35-42.
In the following years, Marinetti became an ideologue of

modernity and adopted the role of a bard who would sing the praises
of the città-fabbrica, of Milan’s ‘Great Steel Industry [...] and the hard
Breda Foundries’, home of humanized machines and mechanized
men. (Marinetti 1969: 10) But how were other Italian artists
responding to these developments? Marinetti judged that Italian poets
of his time were ‘unsophisticated, absolutely unaffected by the
modern spirit and contemptuous of the heaving research that animates
the soul of our century.’ (Marinetti 1899: 61) Also his friend Carrà
found that the artistic production of these years was ‘dominated by
works that had no other scope than that of satisfying the frivolous and
corrupt taste of society’. (Carrà 1978: 655) And indeed, the cultural
predilections of the Italian bourgeoisie were firmly rooted in a bygone
era. Cultural and political institutions continued to be ossified and to
pay servile respect to a glorious Italian past. For this reason, Marinetti
saw it as his mission to try and cure the romantic Italians of their fear
of the dynamic forces of modern life. His writings of the years 1898-
1908 document how he set about his task to replace the negative
image of industry and technology with a positive one of the
civilization of the Machine Age. And once the Futurist movement had
come into existence, he drew up a political and artistic programme
that promoted the great changes that had been brought about by the
Industrial Revolution.
Futurist machine cult
Marinetti and his fellow Futurists saw in the machine an ally in their
attempt to rid Italian society from the fetters of the past:
We renounce the obsessive splendors of the centuries that are gone

forever and we cooperate with triumphant machines, which keep the
earth enclosed in their net of speed. We connive with the Machine to
destroy the poetry of far-off times, of faraway places and of solitude
in the wild, the poignant nostalgia of parting, and in their place we set
the tragic lyricism of speed in all places, at all times. (Marinetti
1911b: 44)
In The New Ethical Religion of Speed, Marinetti described the

invention of the motor as a sign of human genius, power and
20 Günter Berghaus
authority, which comes close to giving humans divine status:
Human energies, increased a hundredfold by speed, will command

Time and Space. [...] Man gained mastery over horses, elephants, and
camels to reveal his divine power through an increase in speed. [...]
He extracted electricity and different fuels from the universe, so as to
create new allies in the guise of engines. Man made use of fire to
shape the metals he had won and made malleable so as to create an
ally for himself, in the shape of fuels and electricity. In this way, he
established an army of slaves who were hostile and dangerous, yet
sufficiently domesticated to carry him swiftly over the earth’s
horizons. (Marinetti 1916: 253)
During the first phase of the Futurist movement, Marinetti

presented the machine as a vehicle for overcoming the restrictions of
given nature and unleashing the emancipatory quality of created
nature. He poured all his positivist, optimistic thinking into this
ideological vessel. Science and technology were portrayed as tools for
abolishing nature’s domination over the human race. Whereas the
Romantics had fled from the contemporary world and taken refuge in
an arcadian Nature, Marinetti sought to direct people’s minds towards
a modified and improved reality. The machine symbolized in a most
succinct form his Futurist vision of an industrialized environment
forming a ‘second Nature’ working to the advantage of humankind.
Nothing in his long catalogue of rhetorical devices came closer to
representing the force of emancipation, for both men and women, than
the machine. It served as a vehicle for an ideological and aesthetic
programme. Through the machine, the human being became a
demiurge who creates a Nature that is superior to the one made by
God. The Futurist Machine Age was to bring about nothing less than a
complete ‘re-fashioning of the universe’, both in material terms and in
the social sphere. By overcoming the restrictions imposed by Nature
and society, and by harnessing the time-saving potential of fully
mechanized economy, men and women were to discover and unfold
their true creative potential:
We shall thus arrive at a real reduction in the cost of living and of

wages, with a corresponding reduction in the number of working
hours. Today, the production of 2,000 kilowatts requires only one
workman. Machines will soon constitute an obedient workforce of
iron, steel, and aluminum at the service of mankind, which will be

relieved, almost entirely, of manual labor. (Marinetti 2006: 396) 11
The end result was going to be a Futurist Arcadia, where ‘the earth is
at last giving up its entire yield. Squeezed by the vast electrical hand
of man, it dispenses the full substance of its riches [...]. Hunger and
need have disappeared. Bitter social problems have been obliterated.
[...] The need for tiring, humiliating labor is finished.’ (Marinetti
1911c: 223) For this reason, Marinetti felt a total commitment to the
advancement of science and technology: ‘Politicians, men of letters,
and artists must work unstintingly, with their books, their speeches,
their conferences, and their journals to [...] cultivate and glorify the
triumph of science and its everyday heroism.’ (Marinetti 1910c :101)
The Futurist belief in the ‘vivifying current of science’ (Boccioni et al.
1910b: 28) led to a machine cult with Marinetti acting as its high
priest. Just as Moses had brought the gospel inscribed on stone tablets
from the mountain, Marinetti took his manifestos to the People,
confronted their veneration of the Golden Calf of Passéism and
replaced it with the idol of the machine. Based on earlier sources, he
constructed a new mythology of technology, science, industrial
development, and a liturgy to celebrate and propagate the modernist
gospel.
The machine, which reigned supreme in the Futurist Olympus, also
provided the model for the Futurists’ artistic creations. Marinetti
wanted to develop an art that was in tune with the civilization of the
machine (see Fillìa, Curtoni, Caligaris 1926: 57). In a text of 1924 he
referred to the innate aesthetic quality of the machine: ‘The machine is
our great inspiration and will give us new rites, new laws [...] and
lessons in order, discipline, force, precision, optimism and continuity.’
(Marinetti 1924b: 29) Marinetti had intuited these new laws and
principles when he was standing on the bridge of a battleship and
11
In the 1920s, the Futurists linked technological progress to the emancipation of
woman. A good example is Luigi Alessio’s play Aeroplani, in which the female
aviator declares: ‘Flying makes you feel truly superior to the small world of women
who live enclosed in the kitchen and drawing room. It is like being turned into a
divine being.’ As a result, she leaves all social and sexual barriers behind and ends
up in bed with her mechanic. See also my interview with the aerodanzatrice
Giannina Cenzi in Berghaus 1990.
22 Günter Berghaus
heard the lyrical drive of electricity passing through the armor-plating

of its four turrets, descending by way of metal tubes to the powder
magazine, drawing its howitzers as far as the breech, as far as its
protruding barrels. Raise sights, point, up, flash, automatic recoil, a
very personal launching of the shell, impact, crash, stench of rotten
eggs, sewer gas, rust, ammonia, and so on. This new drama, which is
full of unforeseen Futurist possibilities and geometrical splendor, is
for us a hundred thousand times more interesting than human
psychology. (Marinetti 1914:136)
Again and again, Marinetti proclaimed that the laws of the machine
had become laws of aesthetic creativity. This did not mean that every
Futurist had to acquire a degree in physics or engineering. The
machine was a myth and a symbol. Its working principles were not an
exact science. Rather, one needs ‘great mechanical intuition’ and ‘a
nose for things metallic’ to comprehend it (Marinetti 1915b: 87). The
Futurists’ ability to intuit ‘the breathing, the sensibilities, and the
instincts of metals’ (Marinetti 1912: 111) was fundamentally different
from the ‘shackles imposed by academic strategy and Teutonic
science’. (Marinetti, 1919: 326) The Futurist artist, with his superior
intuition, instinct, sensibility and imaginative intelligence, was able to
grasp the ‘truly mysterious’ (Marinetti 1915b: 86) quality of the
machine, this ‘new, instinctive animal whose innate character we shall
only know when we are acquainted with the natural proclivities of the
different forces that compose it’. (Marinetti 1912: 111) It is from this
engaging embrace of the machine that Marinetti could develop a
Futurist ‘aesthetics of the machine’ and the Futurist ‘idea of
mechanical beauty’.12 In his view, these concepts were applicable to
all artistic genres and media: ‘We should imitate the movements of
machines’, he wrote in Futurist Dance (Marinetti 1917: 214); ‘Let us
imitate the train and the motorcar’ in The New Ethical Religion of
Speed (Marinetti 1916a: 257); ‘Listen to engines and reproduce their
conversations’ in the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature
(Marinetti 1912: 111); and ‘Imitate engines and their rhythms’, in
Dynamic, Multichanneled Recitation (Marinetti 1916b: 196). In the
Manifesto of Futurist Playwrights he exhorted artists:
We have to introduce into the theater a sense of the rule of the

Machine, [...] and the great discoveries of science, which have totally
12
See Marinetti 2006: 85, 167, 394, and 413.
transformed our sensibilities and mentalities as men of the twentieth

century. (Marinetti 1910a:182)
Marinetti declared that Futurist art in all its manifestations was the
result of ‘the enthusiastic emulation of electricity and machines; an
essential conciseness and compactness; the sweet precision of
machinery and of well-oiled thought; the harmony of energies
converging in one victorious path. (Marinetti 1913a: 135) Key Futurist
principles such as dynamism, interpenetration and simultaneity were
directly derived from scientific discoveries. Marinetti’s literary
programme of 1912 with its use of Words-in-Freedom and Synoptic
Tables of Lyrical Values, its Multi-Linear Lyricism and Strings of
Sensation was based on modern technologies of communication –
hence his characterization of this new style as ‘telegraphic’ and
‘radiophonic’. According to his own testimony, it was during one of
his first flights over Milan that he experienced time and space in an
entirely new manner13 and felt compelled to institute a literary reform
that went far beyond his early attempts based on the late-Symbolist
vers libre style:
Futurism is based on the complete renewal of human sensibility

brought about by the great discoveries made by science. Anyone who
today uses the telegraph, the telephone, and the gramophone, the train,
the bicycle, the motorcycle, the automobile, the ocean liner, the
airship, the airplane, the film theater, the great daily newspaper (which
synthesizes the daily events of the whole world), fails to recognize
that these different forms of communication, of transport and
information, have a far-reaching effect on their psyche. (Marinetti
1913a: 120)
And it was exactly this ‘far-reaching effect on their psyche’ that

Marinetti and his fellow Futurists explored for the next decade or two.
This is the reason why Futurism amounted to more than a glorification
of ‘the victories of science, and man’s increasing dominion over the
dark forces of nature.’ (Marinetti 1910b: 70) Rather, it involved a
development of an ‘artistic sensibility for machines and speed’
(Marinetti 1921a: 370), which for Marinetti, at that time, meant a
13
See the description of his first flight with Juan Bielovucic in ‘The New Ethical
Religion of Speed’ in Marinetti 2006: 257 and La grande Milano (Marinetti 1969:
66 + 110), referred to in his introduction to the ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist
Literature’ in Marinetti 2006: 107.
24 Günter Berghaus
plunging into the ‘mysterious ocean of matter’. (Marinetti 1912: 110)

Again and again he wrote about his ‘lyrical obsession for matter’
(Marinetti 1912: 111) and how one could ‘penetrate the essence of
matter’ (Marinetti 1912: 112). From a profound understanding of the
‘mysterious life of matter’ (Marinetti 1912: 112) he wished to develop
an ‘intuitive psychology of matter’ (Marinetti 1912: 112) that could
serve as a foundation to his artistic programme.
Whereas in the nineteenth century, artists restricted themselves to a
description or evocation of the new realities of the industrial age,
Marinetti proposed an interaction with the machine world that would
have effects on both the machine and the human being. On the one
hand, he agreed with the architect Marchi that they needed to ‘go
down to the bottom of raw matter and remould it according to our
will’ (Marchi 1924: 47); on the other hand he considered the machine
to be the ‘source and master of the new artistic sensibility’. (Marinetti
1925: 15) The long-term consequences of these ideas were immense.
The whole concept of Materialästhetik (the aesthetics of the
material14), which was so fundamental to twentieth-century art and
design, was already contained in these statements. The Futurists laid
the foundations of a functionalist aesthetics of the Machine Age. The
architecture of the Bauhaus would have been unthinkable without it,
as would the industrial and interior design of the De Stijl group,15 or
the Constructivists’ principles of tektonika (ideological and formal
conception of the work), faktura (the choice and handling of the
14
The concept was particularly important to Constructivist artists, but can also be
found in the writings of Enrico Prampolini. Whereas conventional idealist aesthetics
in the Kantian or Hegelian mould saw a work of art as being dependent on the
artist’s creativity rather than the material from which it was produced, the
Constructivists regarded the material as playing a significant role in the creative
process and the quality of the resulting work See Rübel et al. 2005.
15
In a fundamental article of De Stijl aesthetics, Oud quotes the Futurist ‘nouveau
réalisme’ derived from ‘la précision, le rythme, la brutalité des machines et leurs
mouvements’ to establish the principle of letting the material and the manner of
production speak for themselves. See Oud 1918. The previous issue of De Stijl (no.
2 of December 1917, pp. 26-29) contained Severini’s essay ‘Le Machinisme et l’art’,
which proclaimed: ‘Le procédé de construction d’une machine est analogue au
procédé de construction d’une œuvre d’art.’
material), and konstruktsiya (the process of giving form, structure,

unity and organic coherence to it).16
In the first phase of the Futurist movement, Marinetti believed that
the ‘re-fashioning of the Universe’ could only be achieved through an
identification with the machine world. He maintained that ‘a fusion of
the instincts with what the engine gives us’ (Marinetti 1913a: 122)
would provide human beings with the necessary power of
introspection and an ability to ‘overcome the seeming hostility that
separates our human flesh from the metal of engines’. (Marinetti
1912: 113) From this he concluded:
With the knowledge and friendship of matter, of which the scientists

can know only the physicochemical reactions, we are preparing for the
creation of mechanical man, one who will have parts that can be
changed. We shall liberate him from the idea of death, and therefore
from death itself. (Marinetti 1912: 113-14)
This idea of going beyond death ‘with the metallization of the human
body and seizing hold of the spirit of life as a driving force’ (Marinetti
1933: 411) formed the basic motivation behind Marinetti’s dream of
‘the formation of the nonhuman, mechanical species of extended
man’:
The day when it will be possible for man to externalize his will so
that, like a huge invisible arm, it can beyond him, then his Dream and
his Desire, which today are merely idle words, will rule supreme over
conquered Space and Time. This nonhuman, mechanical species, built
for constant speed, will [...] possess the most unusual organs; organs
adapted to the needs of an environment in which there are continuous
clashes. (Marinetti 1915b: 87)
As these quotations show, Futurism was much more than an artistic

reflection of the emerging industrial world in Northern Italy. The
Futurist artist was at the same time an engineer, a scientist, a
philosopher and a politician. Furnished with the new principles of
aesthetic organization based on a lyrical introspection into the laws of
the machine, a new world could be shaped and moulded like a social
sculpture: ‘We must invent and rebuild the Futurist city like an
16
Futurist contacts with the Bauhaus, the Purists around Le Corbusier and De Stijl
and the Russian Constructivists are well-documented in the journals of these
movements. See also Maria Elena Versari’s contribution in this volume.
26 Günter Berghaus
immense and tumultuous shipyard, agile, mobile and dynamic in

every detail; and the Futurist house must be like a gigantic machine.’
(Sant’Elia 1914: 170) The Futurists were universalist theoreticians
who sought nothing less than to revolutionize life and society in all
their diverse aspects: moral, artistic, cultural, social, economic and
political. The Futurists were convinced ‘that the triumphant progress
of science makes profound changes in humanity inevitable’ (Boccioni
et al. 1910a: 24) and suggested a remodelling of both the human mind
and body.
The Utopian concepts expressed in the manifesto Extended Man
and the Kingdom of the Machine (Marinetti 1915b) were not entirely
science fiction, but based on Lamarck’s theories of evolution (which
suggested the mutation of species through the formation and
modification of organs according to need; see Marinetti 1915b: 86)
and Alexis Carrel (who in 1912 won the Nobel Prize in recognition of
his revolutionary methods of transplanting organs17). The idea of the
human being functioning like a machine was certainly not a Futurist
invention; however, their anthropomorphic view of the machine
produced a concept of a New Humanity of the Machine Age, where
people were not only friends, masters and allies of the machine, but
fused with it in a symbiotic relationship. Humanizing the machine and
mechanizing human beings meant more than portraying the machine
like a man with character, will-power, sensibility and emotions, or
emphasizing the mechanical functioning of the human body. It was to
give expression to a world in which ‘everything has become
mechanical and life itself is like a whirlwind in a paroxism of speed.
Here, humans turn into machines and the machine tends to become
human.’ (Alessio 192618)
The ultimate aim of the Futurist programme of renewal was the
fusion of humans and machines, of the social and industrial world, of
art and life. Human existence was going to be like ‘an automated
dream’ (Cavacchioli 1912: 210-21119) lived with a ‘steel-toned frame
17
He is quoted by Marinetti 1913a: 120 and Boccioni 1914: 24.
18
Alessio contrasts in his play the world of an old-fashioned professor and decadent
poet with that of an emancipated aviatrix. The more ‘philosophical’ passages are
spoken by two aeroplanes.
19
‘If you want to live, you must create a beautiful mechanical heart, open the red-hot
outflow of the furnace, and electrify yourself with millions of volts like a dynamo!
You have to turn life into an automated dream’ preached Cavacchioli 1912: 210-11.
of mind’. (Marinetti 1915b: 87) Dreams, of course, are not the stuff of
sober, calculated reform plans, but the result of libidinal desires. Our
interpretation of the Futurist Man-Machine or Artificial Living Being
should therefore take into account not only the history of automation
and mechanization in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, but also
the mental constitution of its creators.
From macchinolatria to angoscia della macchina
I leave it to more competent experts to submit the biographies of some

leading Futurists to a psychoanalytical examination. But reading their
Utopian proposals I get a sense that behind their emphatic and often
affected optimism lies hidden an unease or, borrowing from Freud’s
famous phrase, a subconscious Unbehagen an der (Maschinen-)
Kultur. The Futurist machine god had a Janus face, one side divine
and positive, the other obscure and frightening, and too painful to be
admitted to the conscious mind. The experience of chaos and
alienation led to the incorporation of the external threat into the
internal world and a transformation of the enemy into a friendly
object. The Futurist mythicization of the machine may belong to this
well-known psychic process. It might also explain the erotically
charged embrace of technology and the attempt to use machine
aesthetics as a means of imposing order and control on anxiety-
producing energies.
The Futurist cult of the machine may have been a way of
exorcizing the ‘shadow’ side of modernity. Jung dealt with this
problem extensively in his analysis of the Fascist mind, and many of
his explanations seem relevant to an understanding of Futurism, too.20
The crisis of modernity, which Marinetti was so painfully aware of,
led him on the one hand to a violent rejection of any romantic
hankering after a pre-industrial past, but on the other hand to no less
illusionary fantasies of integrity and belonging. His Utopian dream of
fusion with the machine (in Extended Man and the Reign of the
Machine), or of the redemption of the Ego through a return to
primeval matter (in the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature)
20
For a more detailed discussion of the Fascist reaction to the crisis of modernity see
Berghaus 1996.
28 Günter Berghaus
can be read as infantile regressive fantasies and a subconscious urge

towards establishing unity with Magna Mater. But for him the return
to the womb did not lead to Mother Nature, but into the ‘Alcove of
Steel’!21
Any experience of alienation and fragmentation in the social world
re-evokes the early infantile experience of separation from the mother
and generates desires of belonging and undifferentiated Being. Such a
return to a foetal state in the corporate womb of human society was
promised by Fascist organizations, and in a slightly different way by
the Futurist movement, as well. (Berghaus 1996) To us, this may
appear like wishful thinking or escapism, but to them it was a formula
to effect transcendence and salvation in a new and ideal order.
The spectrum of Futurist attitudes towards the machine
As I noted above in my introductory remarks, the heterogeneity of

concepts promoted by various Futurist artists must be borne in mind
when dealing with Futurist machine aesthetics. Some scholars have
tended to ignore this complexity and diversity of the Futurist machine
cult and have offered rather one-dimensional interpretations of the
phenomenon. In my opinion, their readings of certain statements
Marinetti made on the subject (the other thousand Futurists do not
seem to matter!) can hardly provide a satisfactory explanation of the
vast range of phenomena documented, for example, in the Turin
exhibition Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo of 1980.22
Although the first phase of the Futurist movement was
undoubtedly characterized by a great deal of technophilia and
macchinolatria, one should not ignore or underestimate the dissenting,
critical voices coming from within the movement (for example from
Buzzi, Cavacchioli, Lucini etc.) The eschatological features of the
Futurist machine cult may have been less obvious in the first phase,
but as the movement was emerging after the First World War with a
21
L’alcòva d’acciaio was the title of a collection of autobiographical essays dealing
with his adventures in love and war, published in 1921.
22
See the 625-page catalogue edited by Enrico Crispolti. This publication was
preceded by the magisterial studies, Il secondo futurismo (Crispolti 1964) and Il mito
della macchina e altri temi del futurismo (Crispolti 1969). A useful summary of
these works was presented in Storia e critica del futurismo (Crispolti 1986).
significantly changed membership, the critical voices came more and

more to the fore. One of the most emblematic signs of this new trend
was the play Angoscia delle macchine (Anguish of the Machines) by
the Sicilian playwright Ruggero Vasari. Vasari’s critical assessment of
the technological developments of past decades would not seem too
much of a surprise had it been formulated in the late 1920s, when the
world economic crisis set an end to the machine cult which had left its
mark on both European and North-American art. But Anguish of the
Machines was conceived in 1921, written in 1923, published in 1925,
and performed in 1927. Its evolution ran parallel to the development
of a Futurist machine aesthetic and mirrored it like a negative foil.
Vasari’s play is an astonishing inversion of contemporary Futurist
eulogies of the mechanized civilization. It did not present any
Promethean supermen performing feats of ingenuity and propagating
concepts of human progress and conquest. Rather, it postulated that
women, whom Marinetti had characterized as personifications of
passéism, were catalysts of emancipation from the yoke of
technology. Vasari’s play acted as a dialectic counterweight to the
naïve adulation of a brave new world, which prevailed amongst the
Futurist membership. He responded to their modernolatria by
projecting a far more complex and contradictory image of modernity,
which also tied in with the more advanced concepts of modernism in
northern Europe:
The spiritual climate surrounding the modernist artist is ambivalent: it

is above all exhilarating and exalting, because of the momentum that
mankind seems to be gaining and because of the endless prospects that
seemed to open up. But at the same time it is also frustrating,
frightening and alienating, because of the discrepancy which is more
and more acutely felt to exist between (spiritual) man and
(technological) civilization. This dualistic view of the world
continually alternates optimism with pessimism, reckless confidence
with gloomy feelings of doom, and these moods may even manifest
themselves simultaneously. (Gobbers 1995: 9)
When surveying the wide spectrum of artists belonging to the

second Futurist movement, it immediately becomes apparent that the
new recruits belonged to a different generation from that of Marinetti
or Boccioni. They were not mere epigones, but men (and some
women) of the twentieth century with attitudes to technology that
could be very different from those of the old leadership. They took
30 Günter Berghaus
stock of new historical developments in Italy and abroad and modified

the early Futurist models according to their own sentiments and
insights. Causes for these changes in Futurist ideology and machine
aesthetics might be disillusionment with the Fascist project of
modernization, or observation of alternative developments in the
Soviet Union, or the discovery of American models of modernity in
economics and culture. Furthermore, the new generation of Futurists
was influenced by the works and theories of other European artists,
many of whom had originally been inspired by the Futurists (e.g.
Loos, Léger, Tatlin, Le Corbusier, Mallet-Stevens or Gropius).
Even a brief examination of the manifestos and essays on the
subject of science and technology in the 1920s reveals that secondo
futurismo overcame the often narrow ideological constraints of
Marinetti’s machine cult. Whereas the world-view expounded in the
first Futurist manifestos had been rather schematic (the world was
basically divided into an old and decrepit past and a pure and healthy
future), real-life experience in the advanced technological society of
the 1920s and 1930s brought about the realization that things were not
quite so simple. But it took a while before the harmful aspects were
openly addressed in Futurist works and manifestos.
During its first phase, the Futurist movement had been marching
under the banner of the great technological advances of the Industrial
Era. Italy had received only a first taste of it, but even that had
provoked considerable anxieties. Consequently, the Futurists had seen
it as their foremost task to sketch out an optimistic vision of the future.
During this period of primo futurismo, there had been some attempts
at applying the new concept of the machine to poetry, painting,
sculpture, music, theatre and architecture. But it was only during the
secondo futurismo that these experiments turned into a systematic
exploration in all fields of the applied arts, giving birth to functionalist
aesthetics in industrial design, architecture, town planning, interior
design, and so on.
The idealistic views expressed in many of these works were partly
due to the fact that there existed a dominant trend in both conservative
and Fascist aesthetics that aimed at bridging the gap that had arisen
between humankind and Nature by harking back to a pre-industrial,
rural idyll. The Futurists were vehemently opposed to this. In their
view, human integration into the Second Nature of industry was an
irreversible fact of history. However, the more technology was
changing society (and under the Fascist régime Italy was moving very
fast in that direction), the more they could discern that this
development differed from what Marinetti had anticipated in 1909 or
even 1918/19. The dangerous and destructive aspects of Mussolini’s
version of modernity became apparent even to the most starry-eyed
macchinolatrist. The idealized images of the Mechanical Age, which
had been presented in the manifestos of the 1910s and which, to some
extent, were still propagated by Marinetti to counterbalance the
influence of the retrograde Novecento movement, became mitigated
by a far more complex and contradictory attitude other Futurists had
adopted towards technology.
Consequently, a basically positive attitude towards the Machine
Age went hand in hand with an increasing awareness of the flipside of
the coin. Macchinolatria was tempered by machine angst (angoscia
della macchina), technophilia was complemented by introspection and
quasi-surrealist subjectivism (see, for example, Pino Masnata’s
Visionic aesthetics). The First Nature entered again into the Futurists’
radius of attention and was recognized as a complementary factor to
the technological environment. Nowhere does this become more
apparent than in the journal La forza: Mensile della Federazione
Nazionale dei Gruppi Naturisti-Futuristi presieduta da S.E. Marinetti.
Direttore responsabile: Luigi Colombo. Prampolini contributed an
essay on ‘La macchina naturista’, Fillìa one on ‘Naturismo e arte’.
Other articles dealt with questions of health, medicine, food, rural
architecture, heliotherapy, herbal remedies, health farms, etc. In
today’s terminology one would probably call this journal an
ecological magazine, yet this facet of Futurist activity is out of line
with pre-established concepts of the movement and hence has been
almost completely ignored by scholars.23
Marinetti was not indifferent to the machine angst that came to be
diffused amongst fellow Futurists in the late 1920s. Technology, he
realized, was not only a motor of progress, but could also be a
destructive force or ‘a monster that wants to squash me, to burn me, to
23
I have seen copies of the journal in several Italian libraries and archives and it is
listed in Salaris’ Bibliografia del futurismo, p. 96 and the regesto of Evangelisti’s
Fillìa e l’avanguardia futurista negli anni del fascismo, p. 173. But I have not found
it mentioned, let alone analysed, in the scholarly literature on Futurism. A rare
exception is Marja Härmänmaa’s book, Un patriota che sfidò la decadenza, and her
essay in this volume
32 Günter Berghaus
chew me’ (Marinetti 1935: 1003). Hence, it needed to be tamed, to be

humanized. For this reason, Marinetti became a key figure in the
Futurist trend towards a spiritualization of the machine and its
portrayal as a cosmic force.
There had always been a tendency in Marinetti to see in the
machine a metaphysical force and not just as a symbol of
technological progress. This trend became dominant in the Aero-
Futurism of the 1930s, when a transcendental machine cult with
spiritual and cosmological overtones took shape: ‘Aereo = the most
perfect vision of the mechanical nature, expression of the spirit of our
times and [...] indication of the new spirituality’. (Fillìa 1930)
Aeropittura, in its first phase, combined the older tradition of
macchinolatria with the more recent trend towards spiritualism.24 The
retreat from political and social realities into the still virginal space of
the cosmos was in many ways an equivalent to the escape of
Novecento artists into the harmonic ideals of a rural lifestyle or an
historical past. To Futurist artists disenchanted with the ugly reality of
Fascist Italy, aeropittura offered metaphysical consolation and
escapist thrill.25 The Utopian desire for a New Man leading a New
Life in the New City directed many Futurists into the ‘airy-fairy’ land
of aeropittura / -poesia / -musica etc. ‘Flying’ was a metaphor for this
evasion of reality. The sky became the unlimited realm of cosmic
fantasies and offered a reprieve from a marginalized existence in the
niches of the Fascist art market. Aerovita was an expression of this
Futurist dream of the ‘dominî infiniti della pura fantasia’, which
Marinetti spoke about when he contrasted his movement with the
Fascist engagement in political realities. (Marinetti 1924a: 432, 537)
24
‘La creazione di una NUOVA MORALE dove la macchina è azione e fine:
interpretare questa spiritualizzazione meccanica è segnare l’inizio di un’ ARTE
SACRA moderna’. (Fillìa 1926) Fillìa indicates here an inner link between the two
dominant trends in Futurist painting of the 1930s, aeropittura and arte sacra
futurista.
25
See, for example, the following remarks: ‘L’uomo ha bisogno di staccarsi dalla
terra, ha bisogno di sognare, di desiderare eterne felicità, di dimenticare
continuamente la realtà quotidiana.’ (Fillìa 1931); ‘Per giungere alle alte mète di una
nuova spiritualità extra-terrestre, dobbiamo superare la trasfigurazione della realtà
apparente, [...] e lanciarci verso l’equilibrio assoluto dell’infinito ed in esso dare vita
alle immagini latenti di un nuovo mondo di realtà cosmiche.’ (Prampolini 1931);
‘Questi quadri cioè rompono nettamente il cerchio della realtà per indicare i misteri
di una nuova spiritualità.’ (Fillìa 1930).
This is not to deny that there were genuinely innovative elements to be

found in spiritualist Futurism, at least in the works of Fillìa and
Prampolini. Their research tied in with international trends which
certainly do not qualify to be interpreted as ‘escapist’. But a great deal
of aeropaintings was just that26 and as such enjoyed considerable
popularity, not only in Italy, but also in other countries, where the
peaceful use of aeronautics captured people’s imagination.
The Futurist reform of lifestyles was an integral element of a
political programme propagated in many manifestos, such as Against
Sentimentalized Love and Parliamentarianism; The New Ethical
Religion of Speed; Against Marriage; Against the Papacy and the
Catholic Mentality, Repositories of Every Kind of Traditionalism; and
Beyond Communism. Marinetti composed various manuals that
promoted new modes of starting and conducting relationships (Come
si seducono le donne, 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1933; Gli amori
futuristi, 1922; Il novissimo segretario galante, 1928; Novelle colle
labbra tinte, 1930) and a reform of Italian eating habits (La cucina
futurista, 1932). Health and hygiene were not only Marinettian
metaphors for the purging of the body politic (‘la guerra – sola igiene
del mondo’) but also a reflection of his interest in sport, body culture
and nutrition (Marinetti 2006: 70, 76, 92, 236, 241, 271, 367). It is
therefore not astonishing that the German Naturist movement came to
be a significant force in Italian Futurism. In 1934, Marinetti founded a
federation of Futurist Naturists, organized three national conferences
and played an active role in the editorial business of the journal, La
forza. This engagement did in no way contradict but rather
complement his interest in machine culture. After all, there is a long
philosophical tradition of interpreting Nature and the human body as a
machine. Marinetti was opposed to any fetishization of the muscular
body and was highly critical of the Fascist adoption of sporting
spectacles for the purpose of indoctrination. He was interested in
healthy bodies with agile minds. Modern physical culture was an ally
in his battle against decadence, materialism and outdated values.
Therefore, it was an integral element of his concept of aerovita, which
was explored in a whole variety of artistic genres (aeropittura,
aeropoesia, aeromusica, etc.).
26
I am primarily referring here to the many minor artists who made up the bulk of the
Futurist movement in its last phase. For these links between Italian Futurism and the
Esprit nouveau in European avant-garde art see Crispolti 1986.
34 Günter Berghaus
The most important of these new trends, from a social viewpoint,

were architecture and urbanism, as they provided a physical
environment for the new ‘air-borne life’. It is interesting to note that
Futurist architects such as Virgilio Marchi developed a concept of an
organicist architecture and that nearly every issue of La forza
contained articles on a Futurist architecture based on the constructive
principles of Nature. Marinetti repeatedly intervened in these debates
of architects and urbanists. He was very stand-offish with regard to the
ruralist movement of Strapaese and the Fascist campaign against
unhealthy city lifestyles. For him, the modern-designed city was a
‘power plant of energy and optimism’ (Marinetti 1969: 3) whereas
villages were akin to cemeteries, in which the forces of the past crush
the dynamism of youth. Therefore, when he engaged himself in the
debates about rationalist architecture he became an active supporter of
an urbanism that combined ecology with technology.
As Marja Härmänmaa has shown in her detailed examination of
Marinetti’s late œuvre, the writer increasingly relinquished his dream
of a Futurist superman fusing with the machine and living in a
metallic environment of the industrial age.27 The Metallic Man turned
out to be an unrealizable concept, but this did not mean that the ideal
heroic citizen had to be completely relinquished. But he was now a
man with feelings and spiritual concerns. Love, friendship and
religion played an increasingly significant role in Marinetti’s creative
writings and sat quite comfortably next to other characteristics such as
patriotism, individualism, anti-conformism etc. Marinetti’s
technological imagination should therefore be seen as a complex and
often contradictory tool. His creative writings were far from being
monolithic and demonstrate a considerable degree of development
over a trajectory of more than 40 years.
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Science and the Aesthetics of Geometric Splendour in
Italian Futurism
Abstract: My purpose in this essay is to explore aspects of the Futurist imagination

that are conditioned by science, with a view to illustrating the formative power of the
scientific culture of the time in the special configuration that it was given in
contemporary Italy. After a brief discussion of the difficulties involved in the study of
science as a cultural substratum of Futurism, I shall argue that, in its pursuit of
aesthetic principles appropriate to the movement, Futurism consciously took its lead
from contemporary science. In particular, Futurism had fruitful contact with various
aspects of electromagnetism, atomic theory and relativity, although in the definition
and practice of its art forms, it was the geometric understanding of nature implicit in
these sciences that emerged with the greatest clarity. In that understanding of nature
lies the Futurist notion of geometric splendour as an ideal of aesthetic attainment.
Futurism presented itself as a culture of consilience, the aesthetic base of which was at
once humanistic and scientific. Within such a purview of culture, Futurists discovered
that art has legitimate claims to make in areas of the imagination that were generally
considered to lie beyond its competence and reach. The superimposition of the
scientific on the artistic intellect occurs chiefly through the mediation of institutions
for the dissemination of science and was articulated in imaginative configurations of
experience grounded in principles at once humanistic and scientific. In pursuing its
goal of aesthetic self-expression, Futurism elaborated new forms of art, such as
photodynamism and tactile theatre, by following an imaginative course parallel to that
of contemporary geometry and science.
One day in 1914, standing on the bridge of a warship readied for

battle, Marinetti became suddenly conscious of a new sensation that
permeated his entire person, a wonderful feeling of being in tune with
a reality that radiated everywhere a mysterious force he called
‘geometric and mechanical splendour’ (Marinetti 1914: 136). The
epiphanic sensation by which he felt inundated was an aesthetic
experience that generated in him an awareness of the immensity and
power of the machine on which he stood and of an invisible flux of
energy that connected him to the rest of the universe. In a manifesto
written later that year, Marinetti proclaimed geometric splendour as
the Futurist response to the traditionalist notion of beauty. Geometric
splendour was the ideal of Futurist lyricism, in the attainment of
42 Domenico Pietropaolo
which a poet’s sense of his individual identity ‘is burnt up and

destroys itself in the superior vibrancy of the cosmos’ (Marinetti
1916a: 195). In this statement, which is the Futurist equivalent of
Leopardi’s dolce naufragar in the infinite, we can discern not only the
polemical stance assumed by Futurism toward literary tradition but
also its enthusiasm for the culture of scientific theory that informed its
view of the cosmos. The idea and the image of the vibrancy of the
universe into which the individual vanishes are the product of an
imagination that is in tune with the scientific efforts of the time to
understand the essence of reality, all the way from the configuration of
the hydrogen atom to the structure of the entire universe, uncovering
all the small and grand designs that give it body and form. Such is the
imagination that delights in the production and discovery of geometric
splendour.
The difficulties involved in the investigation of the scientific
substratum of Futurism are largely due to the distance that separates
the culture of the sciences from the culture of the humanities in our
own day. The two cultures, as they were first called by C.P. Snow in a
famous book now half a century old, are much more distant from each
other in our day than they were in the first two decades of the
twentieth century. The situation in Italy was already radically different
fifty years ago, as we are reminded by the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti. In
his lecture on the crisis of poetic language, with which he opened a
conference of Soviet and Italian poets on 20 October 1957 in Rome,
Ungaretti congratulated his fellow poets from the Soviet Union on the
success of the first satellite to orbit the earth, launched by Soviet
scientists earlier that month, and saluted the event as a great poetic
event. He added, however, that most people were unprepared to
apprehend the wonderful scientific knowledge that it promised
(Ungaretti 1957: 828).1 Only two years later, Snow claimed that, as far
as real scientific knowledge was concerned, few scholars of the
humanities were capable of describing something as elementary as the
1
In a remarkable passage towards the end of his lecture, Ungaretti observed that in
the fifty years or so that preceded the age of Sputnik I, science, alongside poetry,
had been undergoing a crisis of language, words no longer being able to function as
direct points of access to the meaning of reality. In his perception, the chief agents of
this crisis were Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein, Irwin Schrödinger,
Louis de Broglie and Max Born, the luminaries of modern physics whose collective
work had succeeded in undermining the principle of determinism as the cornerstone
of the entire edifice of knowledge (Ungaretti 1974, 833).
Science and the Aesthetics of Geometric Splendour 43
second law of thermodynamics, which he regarded as equivalent to

knowing the plot of a famous Shakespearean play, or of defining such
concepts as those of mass and matter, which he regarded as equivalent
to knowing how to read (Snow 1998: 15). Fifty years later, we need
not accept Snow’s assessment in every detail, but neither should we
dare to dismiss it. If anything, the two cultures have been driven
farther apart by our institutional structures, although the availability of
material from both cultures on the internet may sometimes give the
illusion that a quick reference is equivalent to knowledge.
In the field of literary studies, the situation comes to light in the
analysis of works by authors from the early twentieth century, who
were considerably closer to the world of science than their modern
readers. Much of their scientific material is passed over silently and
remains, more frequently than not, unrecognized for what it is. The
Futurists would have had no difficulty celebrating events of the
magnitude of Sputnik I as great poetic moments in the history of
civilization, but they would also have made every attempt to sustain
their enthusiasm with real knowledge of the scientific ideas that made
it possible. They were only too ready to acknowledge the enlightening
effect of science on their thinking. Gino Severini wrote that science
had transformed their sensibility and had led them to the truth
(Severini 1913: 124). Their artistic research, wrote Bruno Corra, was
always coordinated with their study of physics (Corra 1912: 66).
Unlike scholars, poets and artists from other periods of history who
occasionally borrow thematic material or human drama from the
world of science, the Futurists looked to science for direction of mind
in their project to articulate in language, both challenging and
intelligible, their aesthetic perception of reality.
The osmosis of scientific ideas through the membrane of common
language may indeed be difficult to detect in a culture in which the
technical sense of scientific words has fallen out of general currency
and in which fruitful contact between art and science does not lie
within the general horizon of expectations. In the scholarship on
Futurism, such difficulty is encountered with some predictability.
Consider the following example, taken from the manifesto in which
the astrophysical content is most explicit, that is to say The New
Ethical Religion of Speed (Marinetti 1916b). We are invited to take
part in the reciprocal bombardment of celestial bodies with meteorites
by pitting ourselves against two stars, known as ‘Groombridge 1830’
and ‘Arturo’ respectively. In the context, the astronomical sense of the

Italian name Arturo is crystal clear, but when we see it rendered as
‘Arthur’ in both the 1972 English edition (Marinetti 1972: 96) and the
2006 edition (Marinetti 2006: 255), without raising criticism or
inviting commentary, we know that the distance between the culture
of science and the culture of the humanities is far from negligible and
has in fact shrouded the original clarity of the text.
Known as Arcturus in English, Arturo is the Italian name of the
alpha star in Bootes, and not, as both English versions may lead
uninformed readers to suspect, some allegorical catasterism of the
hero of Camelot. Created by Zeus to protect the constellations of Ursa
Major and Ursa Minor, and designated in English, both technically
and commonly, by the Latinized form of its Greek name, which
means, in fact, guardian of bears, this star is the brightest in the
northern sky, has a very high proper motion across our line of sight,
and is moving towards the earth, a fact that causes it to grow
increasingly luminous. The missed identification of Arcturus
represents a lost opportunity to see that, the compositional procedure
by which Marinetti brings into consilience ideas from different fields
by way of common language was in fact more carefully thought out
than is generally assumed. For in addition to its speed, size and
luminosity, Arcturus has a long cultural history to commend it to
Marinetti’s attention. To begin with, the star Arcturus is especially
relevant to a man of the stage, having been personified into a
theatrical character by Plautus as the speaker of his memorable
prologue to Rudens, in which Arcturus presents himself as a powerful
and dreaded star-god. Much of the symbolic lore of Arcturus
accumulated throughout the centuries is such as to vibrate
sympathetically with the noisy vehemence of several manifestos of
Futurism. These ideas need not all be discussed here; suffice it to say
that, in its personification by Plautus, Arcturus speaks words of
himself that show him to have more than a fibre in common with the
persona postured by the founder of Futurism: ‘Vehemens sum
exoriens, cum occido vehementior.’2
2
‘I am vehement when I rise, and I am more vehement when I set’ (Plautus, Prologue
71). For information on the symbolic value and literary associations of Arcturus in a
standard interpretation from the turn of the nineteenth century, see Allen 1963, 98-
103. This work was originally published in 1899 with the title Star Names and Their
Meanings.
The delusive nature of scientific vocabulary in the common

language of a non-scientific culture, the fiery rhetoric of Futurism, its
penchant for desecration, its predilection for hyperbole, have all, no
doubt, conspired to becloud for modern scholars the genuineness of its
interest in the culture of science. These factors are all intrinsic to
Futurism itself. But there are also extrinsic reasons why scholarship
may find the scientific aspects of Futurism uninteresting. To modern
readers of the manifestos, the rapprochement of Futurism with science
may seem insignificant, given the fact that the Futurists were, after all,
artists and writers interested in combating academism from within the
same fields of activity, namely art, literature, theatre and criticism.
What is more important, the forays of Futurism into science may seem
insignificant also in comparison to its strong cult of technology, in the
shadow of which recognizable scientific references may figure as little
more than afterthoughts or trivial and cryptic allusions.
There are two cultural reasons for this state of affairs, and both are
rooted in the institutional setup of science in early twentieth-century
Italy. They have to do with the configuration of scientific research in
relation to other disciplines, and with the relation of pure science to
engineering, in both theory and practice. Unlike Germany, where
scientific research was being given the abstract and isolationist
character that it now has throughout the world, in Italy research was
being developed along collaborative lines, in a unified view of culture
that presupposed interaction among all the disciplines in the
curriculum at the highest level of conception and rigour possible. The
Milanese journal Scientia, subtitled Rivista di sintesi scientifica, with
that term sintesi that would soon be integrated into the Futurist
vocabulary of the theatre, was founded in 1907 for the express
purpose of giving rise to interdisciplinary dialogue and of ensuring, at
the same time, that science would not be subordinated to humanistic
traditions in the general configuration of culture. ‘To this end it is
necessary that all enlightened men, in whatever special branch of
study they are respectively working, should be conscious of the unity
of the aims of science,’ had written Federigo Enriques, one of the two
founding editors of the journal and himself a scientist of no mean
intellectual stature (Enriques 1914: 2).3 Enriques was concerned
3
The original appeared in 1906, just before the first issue of the journal (Enriques
1906). The other co-founder was Eugenio Rignano, who re-issued some of his own
Scientia essays in English when the journal was 11 years old and enjoyed a solid
especially with the interdisciplinary advancement of research, whereas

others, of perhaps even greater authority, were more preoccupied with
the quick dissemination of science in a vertical sense, down to the
secondary school teacher who could pass on new theories or newly
discovered facts to students prior to their specialization in a given
field. It is more than likely that this was the path by which the
Futurists came into contact with the world of scientific research,
assimilating its new vocabulary to their own and using it to articulate
their artistic ideas. The leader of this movement for the scientific
education of the public was none other than Vito Volterra, a
mathematician of international standing and a man with a
multidisciplinary scientific background of daunting magnitude. In
1906, he founded the Società Italiana per il Progresso delle Scienze
with the express purpose of promoting the scientific education of non-
scientists, and he indefatigably encouraged throughout the country the
creation of organizations designed to oppose excessive specialization
and ‘to enable a rapprochement between scientists and ordinary
cultured people, facilitating a mass diffusion of scientific ideas’ (Israel
2009: 24).4
Italian scientific research was itself dominated by mathematicians,
especially geometers, and had therefore a decidedly theoretical
character. However, this did not alienate the concerns of engineering
and technology from the intellectual world of advanced science.
Volterra insisted on a close connection between pure science and
technology. His model prevailed in Italy until Gentile’s educational
reform, which placed scientific culture in a subordinate position with
respect to the humanistic culture and, moreover, considered science
and technology as institutionally autonomous forms of culture. Early
Futurism flourished in an intellectual climate in which the
conditioning effect of technology on culture was not separate from the
conditioning effect of the highest sciences and frequently assumed a
international reputation (Rignano 1918). According to Gabriella Sava, the ideology

of the journal was to offer an alternative to the hegemony of the humanities in
general culture (Sava 1992: 119). The journal published articles in several languages
and was able to secure the collaboration of well known scientists worldwide. The list
of early contributors to Scientia includes, among others, such luminaries as Vito
Volterra, Tullio Levi Civita, Ernest Rutherford, Albert Einstein and Bertrand
Russell.
4
On the cultural ideology of the Società Italiana per il Progresso delle Scienze and on
Volterra’s role in the organization, see also Goodstein 2007: 154-159.
geometric character. A single example will suffice to illustrate both

the relationship between applied and theoretical science, and the
geometric character of the technological imagination of Futurism.
The example of photodynamism
Consider the camera and the art of photographing objects in motion. A

camera is a small machine with huge Futurist potential; it was used by
Anton Giulio Bragaglia to inaugurate the new Futurist art known as
photodynamism. His photographs can be examined from the narrow
perspective of pure technology or from the inclusive one of integrated
theoretical science. In Futurism, the mystique of machines is typically
related to speed achieved under the influence of forces, which is to say
that it is rooted in the field of mechanics. The camera is concerned
with mechanics both operationally, that is in terms of the levers and
triggers that make it work, and aesthetically, or in terms of the artistic
claims of the objects that it produces. Now, in his famous work, La
Science et l'hypothèse, the distinguished geometer Henri Poincaré
observes that, whereas in England mechanics was taught
experimentally, as an empirical science, on the continent it was taught
deductively, as a theoretical discipline (Poincaré 1905: 89). In Italy
and France, the two countries that concerned early Futurism most
closely, mechanics was a highly mathematical science, couched in a
language that was more mathematical than physical or mechanical.
The art of photographing objects in motion is susceptible to treatment
from the perspective of the new mechanics of the age, which is the
mechanics of relativity. In a contemporary relativistic discussion of
the art of photography, the central image of Einstein’s special theory
of relativity, namely the motion of a train in the frame of reference of
the stationary embankment, is adapted to show that our perception of
objects-in-motion is necessarily different from our perception of
objects-at-rest. The principle revealed by the thought experiment is
that the nature of objects-in-motion cannot be represented by the mere
addition of signs of motion to images derived from the appearance of
the same objects in a state of rest (Carus 1913: 21).
To a very sensitive camera on the embankment, the wheels of a
speeding train will appear to be more oval than circular, the exact
degree of deformation being dependent upon the ratio of the speed of
the train to that of the shutter on the camera. This example is

remarkably similar to the ones used by Bragaglia to develop his
aesthetics of photodynamism. With the aid of lighting designed to
reduce the starkness of contrasts, and by means of shutters engineered
to produce very long exposures, Bragaglia was able to extend the
deformation to a level at which the object’s profile parallel to the lens
appeared as an elongation on the trajectory of motion, and was blurred
beyond recognition everywhere except at the beginning and at the end
of the action. In the time interval of the exposure, a solid object, such
as a rock, moving on a curved path in front of the camera will displace
a tube of air whose cross section is equal to its own as seen from a
point ahead of it along the trajectory. Bragaglia calls such three-
dimensional tubular shapes the ‘volumes of motion’ (Bragaglia 1911:
43). For a moving object with a more complex stationary shape – say,
a dancer – the cross-section and dimensions of the volume of motion
will be correspondingly more intricate, but all else is the same.
Virtually meaningless in the language of pure technology, the
expression ‘volumes of motion,’ as a designation of something to be
represented by means of photography, is perfectly clear in the
scientific discourse of the time. In contemporary physics the concept
arises in the context of the discussion around the geometric
representation of continuous action in the space-time of relativity
theory. In an article published in French in Scientia, the eminent
mathematician Guido Castelnuovo calls it tube horaire since it
represents time as well as space (Castelnuovo 1923: 173). The
trajectories of temporal tubes can be determined mathematically with
great precision and can be properly visualized if all the factors
affecting the motion are taken into account. Bragaglia himself had
considered the representation of the movement of a pendulum by
means of two orthogonal axes. When the pendulum and its
environment are idealized, the trajectory is perfectly sinusoidal; but as
soon as the resistance of the air is factored into the calculation, the
amplitude of the curve will begin to flatten out until we are left with a
straight line. The artistic task of photodynamism is to represent the
infinitesimal effect of resistance at equally infinitesimal intervals of
time throughout the process (Bragaglia 1911: 41-42). Infinitesimal
intervals of time and space are traces of the language of the calculus,
to which Bragaglia had recourse in order to conceptualize the anatomy
of the motion that he set out to capture with his camera and in order to
explain the form of the aesthetic object that appeared in the

photograph.5 In the end the essence of photodynamic creations is not
principally technological, although technological it is, but geometric,
in the sense that this term has as a point of access to a theoretical
science of motion that is inclusive of the applications of its principles.
Between science and technology
The example of photodynamism leads us to the heart of the scientific

aesthetics of Futurism. In one of his proudest moments, when, despite
the ethos of conflagration that he willed upon all academism, and
despite the rhetoric of arson with which he routinely approached the
idea of libraries and literary traditions, Marinetti briefly yielded to his
purest lyrical impulse and described his enthusiasm for the future with
an image of stunning beauty: Futurists believe, he said, in the
possibility of an infinite number of human transformations and are
ready to declare in earnest that there are wings asleep in the flesh of
man (Marinetti 1915a: 86). Itself laden with grand academism, this
fusion of the Lamarckian theory of the evolutionary transmission of
acquired characteristics and of the Ovidian aesthetic of universal
metamorphosis grasps in a single purview the Futurist openness to
science and its faith in technology. Science offers the Futurist
imagination the theoretical knowledge with which to see wings buried
in the shoulders of man, while technology provides it with the
instruments it needs in order to visualize the wings drawn out and
made functional. The aesthetic experience of the former imaginative
process is a sense of geometric splendour, grasped at its highest level
of purity and generality; that of the latter is a sense of the same
splendour viewed under the aspect of technological specificity.
For Marinetti the adjectives geometric and mechanical represent
aesthetic attributes of the same entity, in which they are united. But
5
In his parallel pursuit of plastic dynamism on canvas, Umberto Boccioni is even
more explicit in his use of the language of theoretical mechanics. He analyses the
anatomy of living action in terms of relative and absolute motion, describes the
concept of dynamic form as an instance of the fourth dimension, and speaks of life
as a succession of events, which in four-dimensional space-time are the equivalent
of what we designate as points in the space of ordinary geometry. See Boccioni:
1913: 92-93.
the fact that, when he finds it convenient to express with a single

attribute the Futurist ideal of aesthetic attainment, Marinetti calls it
always ‘geometric splendour’ and never ‘mechanical splendour’ may
be taken as evidence that, although continuous and coterminous, the
two attributes are hierarchically related: the geometric element is self-
contained, and it is inclusive and informative of the mechanical one.
In harmony with the culture of science dominant in Italy at the time,
Marinetti shows by his linguistic usage that the difference between the
geometric and the mechanical aspects of the Futurist aesthetic
experience is not so much a difference in kind as a difference of order.
Technology is related to science by being included in its vision and by
being engendered by its theories, at the ontological and at the cultural
level. A significant inference that can be drawn from this
configuration is that a discourse on technology, if it purports to be
more than a mere description of gears and bolts, will automatically be
imbued with scientific theory and, consequently, with the larger
implications of science for other spheres of life. Such a situation is
conducive to the perception of technology as an aid to the self-
extension of man and his imaginative fusion with the forces of the
cosmos, at which point, however, technology becomes
indistinguishable from pure science and stands on the border of
metaphysics.
Aesthetic force lines and scientific lines of force
The aesthetic principle that represents the desire to merge with the
vibrancy of the universe was articulated chiefly as consciousness of
what the Futurists, following the lead of Umberto Boccioni, called the
force-lines of objects, fictional lines that represent an invisible
extension of the essence of objects, projected beyond their material
finitude and permeating the surrounding space. In this conatus to
irradiate their essence, objects offer themselves to artists and poets
with the dynamic form of their being. In the lines so imagined lies the
geometric lyricism of Futurist art. Although original as an aesthetic
concept, the force-lines of Futurism are the product of a culture that
was heavily conditioned by science. Force-lines are the Futurist
equivalent of the physicist’s lines of force, first introduced by Michael
Faraday to explain the operation of electric and magnetic forces, lines
Illustr. 1: Henry Selby Hele-Shaw and Alfred Hay. ‘Lines of Induction in a Magnetic
Field’ in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series A,
Containing Papers of a Mathematical or Physical Character. Vol. 195 (1900), plates
17, 18, 23 and 24.
connecting a magnetic pole the other, and an electric charge to its

opposite, thereby giving an invisible geometric structure to the space
surrounding them, a structure known as an electromagnetic field. At
every point along these lines of force, the electromagnetic field has
local properties linked to the source from which the lines issue. In the
late nineteenth century, electromagnetic fields and their geometric
interpretation constituted one of the most exciting frontiers of science.
James Clerk Maxwell turned the elements of the field into a set of
differential equations that brought about a veritable revolution in the
world of scientific research. In Maxwell’s theory light figures as the
result of vibrating electric and magnetic fields and hence as a species
of electromagnetic waves.
In quick succession, the theory of light and other achievements of
electromagnetic theory gave rise to what was known as the
electromagnetic worldview, namely the scientific idea that the
electromagnetic understanding of nature could be regarded as the
basis of all science. The hypotheses and models of reality generated
by this world view penetrated humanistic culture very quickly.
Marinetti’s routine references to electricity, light and electromagnetic
waves as explanatory principles of all manner of phenomena is
evidence of how intimately related to the popular science of the
electromagnetic worldview is the conception of Futurism. The full
overlapping of Futurist theory and this early twentieth-century
understanding of the world is too complex to be dealt with here in a
few sentences and will therefore remain to be explored elsewhere. In
this chapter it is only possible to state that the imaginative reception of
the idea of electromagnetic fields enabled the Futurists to imagine the
essence of material substances as extending immaterially and
geometrically into space, where it merges with the electricity that is to
be found at the heart of all things, and where its vibrations disappear
in the pulsating electromagnetic waves of all nature. In the Futurist
imagination, the electromagnetic worldview served to re-ground in
scientific research the otherwise romantic notion that one could see, in
Blake’s words, ‘a world in a grain of sand’ (Blake 1972: 431).
For a long time, Marinetti considered the possibility of a Futurist
culture of consilience as the generative base of an aesthetic position
both scientific and humanistic. Sometimes, the effort concerned areas
of activity that are apparently very distant from the concerns of either
science or aesthetics. By far the most interesting instance occurs in
Illustr. 2 Lines of force and equipotential surfaces of two circuits in proximity. From
Alfred Daniell, A Textbook of the Principles of Physics, London, Macmillan 1884:
597.
Marinetti’s aesthetic and scientific exploration of the sense of touch. It

may not be obvious to students of Futurism who are unacquainted
with developments in the culture of science at the beginning of the
twentieth century that Marinetti’s concern with the sense of touch, his
commitment to the exploration of experiences produced on the skin
when it is brought into contact with other surfaces, and his aesthetics
of tactile theatre have an important objective correlative in the
contemporary discourse of advanced scientific research. Long
regarded as the primordial human sense, the sense of touch was of
great interest to many scientists, but in the theoretical disciplines, it
was a special concern of physical geometry, which found it necessary
to return to this sensorial phenomenon again and again in its
reorientation away from the Euclidean concept of flat space. As a
point of access to various aspects of the physical interpretation of
geometric space, the human sense of touch became almost a
compulsory topic of investigation in the theory of space and hence a
commonplace in the intellectual and artistic activities that gravitated
around it. The most illustrious figures at the centre of the discussion
were, in chronological order, Ernst Mach in Germany, Henri Poincaré
in France, and Federigo Enriques in Italy. All agreed that the sense of
sight appeared to have much more to contribute to the geometry of
space than the sense of touch. Accustomed as we are to a
predominantly visual culture, we find nothing unusual in this: the
telepathic nature of vision endows the eye with a more precise spatial
sense than our fingertips. Yet, the sense of space that we derive from
our sense of touch is more complex than optical space and more
radically different from the space of classical geometry (Poincaré
1905: 55). Mach explained that the human skin is the analogue of ‘a
two-dimensional, finite, unbounded and closed Riemannian surface’,
that is to say a closed surface whose intrinsic attributes, such as the
degree and orientation of its curvature, are not everywhere the same
(Mach 1988: 9). Straight lines in flat space are not straight in the
geometry of the human body. A piece of wire stretched in the air is a
thin straight line marking the shortest distance between two points in
space. However its shadow on a human body is neither thin nor
straight but variously reshaped by the local curvature of the surface.
From a geometric point of view, the surface of the earth is quite
similar. Marinetti must have been thinking along these lines when he
said that, in order to move swiftly over the curves of the earth, which
is to say in order to follow the shortest route, one has to go through
tortuous paths, ‘along the uneven backs and bellies of the mountains’
(Marinetti 1916b: 254). If we augment the geometry of the surface of
the body with the movement of its limbs, which can offer us an
analogue of the third dimension of depth, we have a tactile geometry
of the physical world of sensuous experience (Mach 1988: 9). Add to
it still the fourth dimension of time, and the result is a working model
of the Riemannian geometry that is at the basis of Einstein’s theory of
general relativity and his interpretation of gravity as a field.
At the University of Bologna, a blind man’s understanding of the
Euclidean axioms and definitions was studied experimentally, in
relation, we may assume, to Mach’s theory that ‘the most powerful
experiences of geometry are just as accessible to the blind man,
through his sense of touch’ (Mach 1988: 82). The sense of touch gives
rise to a metrical geometry, while the sense of sight gives rise to a
projective geometry of the same continuum. In the ordinary geometry
of space they are united, and we are so accustomed to their union that,
according to Enriques, enormous effort is required to disentangle
them. When this is done, it turns out that the tactile understanding of
parallel lines (as equidistant lines) and their visual definition (as lines
that do not intersect) lead to different conclusions regarding the
necessity of Euclid’s fifth postulate and hence to the possibility of a
non-Euclidean understanding of space (Enriques 1914: 227 – 230).
Marinetti was much indebted to the culture of tactilism developed
by geometers and physical scientists. It introduced a new sensibility in
a simple vocabulary, and it created a conceptual readiness for the
aesthetic exploration of the sense of touch with scientific rigour.
Marinetti’s writings on tactilism do not deal openly with the issues of
geometric and scientific research involving the sense of touch, but
they are thoroughly permeated with its themes and vocabulary.
Marinetti’s aesthetics of tactilism appears to have been based on two
hypotheses: that tactile perception has cognitive possibilities
analogous to the sense of sight, and that the sensations produced on
the skin by intended contact spontaneously generate ideas. The first of
these principles is very closely related to scientific culture. When we
begin to educate our minds to respond consciously to our sense of
touch, we discover immediately that a different visual sense is
developed ‘at the tips of fingers’ (Marinetti 1923: 378). A blind man’s
cane, we may add, is a mechanical extension of the index finger
designed to increase his geometric understanding of tactile space –
straight lines, angles, curves, orientation, surfaces, solids – during
locomotion in an erect position. Marinetti recalls that his first serious
reflection on tactilism took place when, walking down a trench in total
darkness, he could not rely on his sense of sight, and had to navigate
through bayonets, mess tins and sleeping soldiers like a blind man,
using only his sense of touch to determine his location and to identify
the objects that stood in his way. When it dawned on him that in the
sense of touch lay the possibility of a hitherto unknown aesthetic, he
theoretically tested his postulate by hypothesizing a world without
light: he imagined that the sun flew off into deep space leaving the
world in total darkness. In this fictional world, human beings quickly
train themselves to open wide the eyes in their fingertips in order to
gain a precise spatial sense of their environment. When they discover
that they are also able to see geometric splendour in total darkness,
they will have crossed the boundary into the tactile space of aesthetic
experience.
In the interdisciplinary scientific discourse of early twentieth-
century Italy, the sense of touch was regarded as the primordial sense,
from which the body’s specialised ways of perceiving external reality

developed by evolutionary differentiation (Enriques 1914: 211).
Marinetti’s observation that ‘everyone feels that sight, smell, hearing,
touch and taste are modifications of one very active sense, namely the
sense of touch, split in different ways and localized at different
points’, reflects the scientific principle and attests to its wide diffusion
in popular culture (Marinetti 1923: 378). In the field of geometry, the
sense of touch was sufficiently varied and precise to give rise to exact
notions of the fundamental definitions of all geometry. Enriques
explained that a
point passing over the skin, or a knife-blade laid quietly upon it, give us two
tactile images of a line. The first gives us the genesis of the line, the second the
completed line. If the blade passes over the skin scraping it lightly, we have the
idea of the genesis of a surface. The idea of the completed surface, distinct from
the former and only connected with it by association, corresponds to a strip of
metal, of a certain length, laid upon the skin. (Enriques 1914: 212)
When these elementary sensations of tactile space are enriched

with a curving of the hand to perceive the external structure of objects,
the geometry so developed is sufficient for the perception of very
complex shapes. In an article by Mario Recchi on the aesthetic
potential of the senses of taste and smell, published by Prampolini in
the January 1919 issue of the Futurist review Noi, the sense of touch is
compared to the other senses, including, of course, the sense of sight.
With respect to those aspects of space that involve the metric values of
geometric figures – distance, thickness, degree of curvature – the
comparison is favourable to touch: the correct visualization of
architecture and sculpture is achieved thanks principally to the
mediation of tactile perception.6 Marinetti’s tactile panels, his
qualitative scale of tactile values and his conveyer-belt of tactile
surfaces for a blindfolded audience are all based on the principle that
physical differences, straight lines, angles and curvature can all be
conceived through the sole agency of the sense of touch (Marinetti
1921: 372). In his own effort to disseminate the results of recent
research in the field without diluting away their scientific content,
Enriques had put together a list of facts about tactile sensation that are
especially relevant to an aesthetics of tactilism. Among these we find
6
Cf. Recchi 1919: 22: ‘Che forse la scultura e l’architettura non si percepiscono del
resto sin d’ora più con l’epidermide che con l’occhio?’
that our awareness of the distinction between the location of

sensations varies with distance between them on the epidermis, that
the length of an object is perceived as unequal on different parts of the
body, and that the dimensions of a moving object are perceived more
clearly than stationary ones. Marinetti was concerned with, and further
explored, each one of these scientific facts. Carrying one step further
the metaphor of eyes on fingertips, he observes that the knee, the
elbow, the abdomen can all see, although, presumably, each in its own
way (Marinetti 1923: 378).
Marinetti departs from contemporary science and geometry when,
moving one step further in his metaphorical train of thought, he
claimes that there are many other senses, all founded on the sense of
touch, that need to be identified. Among these is the ‘shoulder sense’,
or the tactile sense of vision centred in the shoulders, which, Marinetti
claims, can operate telepathically, as an optical sense of touch. That is
why, we are told, a cat in a darkened room raises its back to sense the
presence of danger. Among human beings, thieves and people fearing
arrest or assassination have a tactile sense so highly developed in their
shoulders that it can operate without actual contact (Marinetti 1923:
378-79). The double metaphor involved in the argument – of sight as a
species of touch, and of touch as a species of sight – leads to a
mysterious domain of thought generated by the juxtaposition of
language and bordering on the immaterial and paranormal. Marinetti
was not content with the self-imposed material limitations of
contemporary science and was persuaded that tactile art could go
further in the intuitive understanding of matter. When the fingers
touch a piece of iron, the mind, trained by culture, identifies the metal
and comes to a full stop on that finding. But perhaps, Marinetti
suggests, ‘there is more thought at the tips of the fingers and in the
iron than in the brain that arrogantly observes the phenomenon’
(Marinetti 1923: 378). If tactilism can be developed to make manifest
the thought in the fingers and to interpret the thought in the iron, it can
bring us closer than science to the essence of matter.
It may be of interest to reflect for a moment on Marinetti’s fiction
of a world enveloped by total darkness. We may be tempted to dismiss
his fantasy of the sun flying off into deep space as an instance of crude
fantasy calculated to jolt the imagination of shallow readers. We can
be sure that in Futurism there is much that can be so classified, but
this is not an instance of it. In the last decades of the nineteenth and in
the early decades of the twentieth century, space fantasies of this type
played an important role in the cultural progress of science. As
temporary hypotheses, they had a function comparable to the notion of
thought experiments rendered famous by Einstein. They show how
significant is the contribution of the imagination to the development of
even the most exact science. Marinetti’s most illustrious precursor was
Henri Poincaré who, in order to explain that it is not possible to
become aware of uniform expansion in isotropic space, imagined that
suddenly all the dimensions of the universe are expanded a thousand
fold, so that everything, including all measuring instruments, becomes
a thousand times larger, and concluded that the expansion would go
unnoticed.7 Marinetti’s fantasy is of the same type. It is a temporary
hypothesis designed to eliminate the possibility of a sight-based
perception of the universe in order to asses the cognitive potential of a
touch-based perception in relative isolation. It represents an attempt to
disentangle the union of sight and touch described by Enriques. That
Marinetti is able to do this also shows his ability to understand that, in
our efforts to grasp the meaning of reality, we can use different sense
data, and that the categorical apparatus to which they give rise as
functional vocabularies, is not extrinsic to nature itself but capable of
revealing different aspects of her essence.
In this cognitive claim on behalf of tactilism, Marinetti wanted to
be taken seriously. His manifesto gives a clear indication that he was
familiar with scientific hypotheses concerning the nature of matter. He
asserts that he felt prompted by nothing other than the atomic theory
of matter as ‘electronic systems operating in harmony’ – a theory that
he regarded as thoroughly convincing – to reject the traditional
distinction between spirit and matter. The atomic model in question is
that of Rutherford’s theory of atomic structure of 1911, although
Marinetti’s expression suggests that the model also included the
element of stability (harmony) introduced by Niels Bohr’s
quantization of electron behaviour in 1913. Marinetti does not say
how the Rutherford-Bohr atom led him to the idea that in matter, as
perceived by the sense of touch, there was something that he could
metaphorically call ‘thought’. But it would be difficult to avoid the
inference that he acted under the influence of discussion generated by
7
The geometric significance of Poincaré’s space fantasy is discussed by Jammer
1993: 168-169.
Bohr concerning the inability of classical logic to grasp the idea of a

quantized atom (Pullman 1998: 267). Logic had until then governed
human understanding of all aspects of reality save the world of the
spirit, which was purported to be beyond our grasp. It is more than
likely that the analogue of human capacity for thought presumed to be
found in a piece of iron was for Marinetti something akin to a spiritual
dimension of matter. On that interpretation, however, tactilism was
entrenched by its founder in the nebulous region between physics and
metaphysics.
Summary
Although it borders on it, the region of thought and art represented by

this version of tactilism is beyond the concerns and the grasp of
science. When classical logic failed before the prospect of explaining
the ultimate nature of matter, the scientific reaction was to denounce
the insufficiency of logic as a tool for understanding matter and to
suggest that a new approach to the logic of nature was in order.
Marinetti’s reaction was quite different: instead of suggesting that the
rules of the logic ought to be changed so that they might conform to
nature, he proceeded to alter the received idea of nature by giving it an
immaterial dimension. By this gesture, Marinetti took Futurism into a
domain in which the geometer and the scientist had nothing to offer
for the Futurist imagination.
Marinetti remained anchored to a vision of logic that had
served him well in the past, when one of his chief concerns was to
expose the arts to the liberating contagion of science, however
irrational and inartistic such an objective may have seemed to the
defenders of tradition. By permeating itself with science, especially
with the geometric underpinnings of the physical interpretation of
reality, from the theory of the electron to that of the cosmos, Futurism
had enabled itself to invent other forms of art, offering the public a
provocatively new perception of the idea of aesthetic experience.
Science had helped the Futurists dream of freeing the wings buried in
the finitude of men and of giving artistic expression to the desire to
disappear violently into the infinite vibrancy of the cosmos. It had also
enabled Futurism to fashion for itself a distinctive vocabulary, at once
common and technical, and to justify its rhetoric of disrespect for all
inherited forms of thought. Emboldened by this aesthetic attitude,

Futurism had separated the ideal of artistic beauty from all traces of
academism and had freed it of the burden of tradition, only to discover
that beauty had thereby become the geometric splendour of reality,
both visible and invisible. Tactilism was one of the most courageous
attempts of Futurism to achieve this ideal but also the one that
ultimately undermined the consilience of art and science on which its
adventurous leap into the future was based. By grounding tactilism in
an imaginative metaphysics, Marinetti fell prey to the illusion that art
was itself capable of science and could therefore posit with confidence
that matter had an immaterial base to sustain it and to explain it. On
this ground, science and art could have little to say to each other.
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The ‘Futurist Sensibility’:
An Anti-philosophy for the Age of Technology
Serge Milan
Abstract: It was a salient and original feature of Italian Futurism that it sought to
modernize the form and content of arts and literature and to make them suitable vehicles
of expression in the Age of Technology. Futurist theorists considered this desire to be an
inevitable and necessary consequence of the changes brought about by the Industrial
Revolution. But Futurism did not restrict itself to seeking a renewal of the arts; it aimed at
nothing less than a ‘Re-fashioning of the Universe’, as they put it, that is: a complete
renewal of human society and its physical environment. The two complementary aspects
of art changing life and life changing art, which at first glance may appear like a circular
argument, have been elaborated in many manifestos and articles, particularly those of
F.T. Marinetti and Umberto Boccioni. They tried to solve the apparent paradox by taking
recourse to the romantic notion of sensibility (sensibilità) and by assigning it a central
role in the movement’s propaganda concerned with a new artistic system and the birth of
a new humankind. In this chapter I should like to demonstrate how the highly ambiguous
notion of sensibilità was elaborated by the Futurist avant-garde in order to overcome a
fixation on the faculties of reason, memory and perception, – faculties that have been
defining European philosophical discourses from Plato to Descartes. I shall also show
how this notion of sensibilità allowed the first avant-garde movement to establish
conceptual links between its aesthetics and gnoseology, physiology and ethics, and in
doing so, to propose a broad and Utopian anthropological project.
The concept of sensibilità first appeared on the scene, around 1910, in

Futurist conceptualizations of the role of the artist as an intermediary
between a new life and a new art. It was used in essays and manifestos
that were widely disseminated not only within Futurist circles, but also to
artists in other avant-garde movements. Sensibilità was at the heart of
one of Futurism’s main ideological objectives: the constant elaboration
of a New Man, one who would be fully adapted to a new world
transformed by science and technology. Futurist artists were proposing a
‘re-fashioning’ of humankind in all its spiritual and physiological
aspects, through a remarkable project that was not only aesthetic but
profoundly ethical, political and anthropological.
As we shall see, sensibilità was a key concept in Futurism, but it can
also be found in other artistic movements of the period. For example,
when André Breton presented Surrealism in a radio broadcast of 1952, he
summarized his movement’s contribution to modernity as follows: ‘I
64 Serge Milan
don’t want to be vain about it, but it is generally acknowledged that

Surrealism contributed in large measure to the shaping of a modern
sensibility.’ (Breton 1952: 216)
My investigation began with a study of the recurrences of the term
sensibilità in approximately 500 manifestos, proclamations and
theoretical articles produced by the Futurist movement from 1909, the
date of the publication of the founding manifesto, to the late thirties,
when Futurism gradually died out as a movement, despite the remarkable
persistence of its founder, patron, publisher and organizer, Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti.
‘We are the Primitives of a new, entirely transformed sensibility’, the
Futurist painters wrote, again and again (Boccioni et al. 1910b: 29;
Boccioni et al. 1912: 49; Boccioni 1914: 176). Defining the artist as
‘primitive’ was clearly a polemical stance – it challenged the label
‘baroque’ which the young Roberto Longhi, in one of the first significant
articles concerning Futurism, had stuck on the painters. However, the
new world was not just concerned with progress. When Marinetti used
the term progresso – and he did so only sparingly – he managed to empty
it of any positivist teleological content. For him, ‘progress’ was an
absolute value that was synonymous with continuous struggle and
dynamic élan vital, combined with the ‘delirium of Becoming’ (Marinetti
1914: 137). This ‘grand religion of the New’ (Prampolini et al. 1923: 2)
was in the first instance a religion of ‘all those things that formerly did
not exist’ (Sant’Elia 1914: 170), or even the ‘absolutely different’
(Pratella 1911: 37 §6).
Related to the question of novelty was that of genius, that is, the
radicalization of an individualism with no classical Subjet carrying it. It
expressed itself most clearly in the movement’s ideology of ‘mysticism
in action’ (Marinetti 1924 [1968: 427; 1983: 491]) which, in the field of
art, manifests itself in the form of a creation-as-conquest. Here, the
genius plays a mediating role between art and Nature. On the one hand,
Futurist art ‘draws its life from the surrounding environment’ (Boccioni
et al. 1910: 25) and on the other hand it extends itself, through the artist’s
creative act, into the social environment. The Futurists conceived of art
both as a ‘natural’ creation and as a ‘natural’ reflection of a civilization
in a state of constant transformation (‘una forma di civiltà che si va
plasmando sotto i nostri occhi’, as Boccioni wrote; Boccioni 1914c: 23)
Marinetti illustrated this idea in many mythological prologues, in which
he described Futurist art and literature in the very process of its
generation, e.g. in the city late at night, in a flight in an airplane or while
The ‘Futurist Sensibility’: An Anti-philosophy 65
standing aboard a battleship (Marinetti 1909, 1912, 1914). In Boccioni’s

texts – which show a more historicist perspective than Marinetti’s
writings – the will of the genial artist is projected onto the environment
by heroically moulding it through works of art that stand outside of any
established categories (‘There is neither painting nor sculpture, neither
music nor poetry: there is only creation!’ he wrote in 1912 (Boccioni
1912: 64). The continuity among the various arts and the reciprocal
influence between the genius and his milieu (ambiente) is thus
guaranteed by the new sensibility. It contributes to a redefinition of the
human being and occurs just as well by means of a new physiology, a
new political organization or a new form of universal creativity (outlined,
for example in the manifesto Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe
[Balla and Depero 1915]).
From 1910 onwards, the still undefined term sensibilità began to play
an ever greater role in the texts of the movement, not only in manifestos,
but also in other, more general texts, sometimes even in articles that were
not concerned with artistic issues at all. Marinetti himself contributed
towards a definition of this sensibility when he adopted it for the first
time in a conscious manner in his Technical Manifesto of Futurist
Literature:
Being understood is not necessary. In any case, we did without it when

we were expressing fragments of Futurist sensibility by means of
traditional, intellective syntax. […] In all of this, there is nothing
absolute, nothing systematic. Genius experiences sudden flurries and
muddy torrents. Sometimes it demands slow analyses and explanations.
No one can suddenly revitalize his own sensibilities. Our dead cells are
all mixed up with the living. Art is the need to destroy and scatter
oneself, the great jet of heroism that floods the world. Microbes – and let
us not forget it – are necessary to the health of the stomach and the
intestines. There is also a kind of microbe that is necessary to the health
of art, this extension of the jungle of our veins that pours forth from our
bodies into the infinity of space and time. (Marinetti 1912: 112-13)
The new art arising out of a new physical environment and a new
sensibility
The appearance of a ‘Futurist sensibility’ thus corresponds to a

fundamental aesthetic option taken by Marinetti for his movement.
66 Serge Milan
Pausing a moment to consider its genesis, we note that this sensibility

appears, chronologically speaking, before the Futurist movement itself,
because rather than being a Futurist ‘invention’, it was in fact a by-
product of a world that was ‘continually and splendidly transformed by
victorious science’ (Boccioni et al. 1910a: 26). Marinetti dwelled on this
idea even more extensively in one of his most forceful texts, Destruction
of Syntax – Untrammeled Imagination – Words-in-Freedom, in which he
wrote:
Futurism is based on the complete renewal of human sensibility brought

about by the great discoveries made by science. Anyone who today uses
the telegraph, the telephone, and the gramophone, the train, the bicycle,
the motorcycle, the automobile, the ocean liner, the airship, the airplane,
the film theater, the great daily newspaper (which synthesizes the daily
events of the whole world), fails to recognize that these different forms
of communication, of transport and information, have a far-reaching
effect on their psyche. An ordinary man can be transported by a day’s
train journey from a godforsaken little town, on whose deserted squares
the sun, the dust, and the wind silently amuse themselves, to a great
capital city, bristling with lights, action, and noise . . . The inhabitant of a
mountain village can each day follow with trembling anxiety the
newspaper reports on the Chinese in revolt, the London and New York
suffragettes, Dr. Carrel’s experiments, and the heroic sleighs of the polar
explorers. The faint-hearted, stay-at-home citizen of any provincial town
can indulge himself with the headiness of danger at the cinema, watching
a big game hunt in the Congo. He can admire Japanese athletes, Negro
boxers, indefatigable American eccentrics, the most fashionable Parisian
women, just by spending a dime at the music-hall. And when finally he is
lying down in his bourgeois bed, he can enjoy himself listening to the
costly, far-off voice of a Caruso or a Burzio. (Marinetti 1913a: 120-21)
The Italian version of the first line (‘lI Futurismo si fonda sul
completo rinnovamento della sensibilità umana avvenuto per effetto delle
grandi scoperte scientifiche’) confirms a causal relationship between
scientific discoveries, the renewal of human sensibility and the birth of
the Futurist movement. To be more precise, it is the repeated
instrumental use of the modern forms of communication, transportation
and information that modifies ‘our spirit’ in a decisive manner. But it is
equally important to take note of the social dimension which Marinetti
highlights in this text: the ‘stay-at-home citizen of any provincial town’
or of the ‘inhabitant of a mountain village’ develops a changed
sensibility because even as an ordinary man (un uomo comune) he now
has access to the new and ubiquitous technologies (queste possibilità
diventate comuni) or, as Boccioni writes, to technological means and
inventions that have become ‘natural elements’ of our modern

environment.1
Marinetti predicted for the lower middle classes a profound
modification of their psyche due to the effects of mass media and modern
means of transportation. It is above all this ubiquity of the media that
produces the uomo moltiplicato (man extended) whose central
characteristics Marinetti sketches out in his eponymous manifesto. Here,
he depicts the emotional relationships that emerge between the common
man and big-city life styles, scientific expeditions and exotic safaris.
Even when the more rational aspects of the media are alluded to (e.g., the
Boxer Revolution, feminist political demands, anthropological
reflections), Marinetti appears to be mainly attached to their emotive and
spectacular dimensions, introducing ideas here that some fifty years later
Guy Debord was to elaborate in his Société du Spectacle. The ‘Futurist
sensibility’, therefore, ends up recasting phenomena that have their origin
in separate human faculties such as instinct, reason and perception.
This is confirmed by Destruction of Syntax – Untrammeled
Imagination – Words-in-Freedom, in which Marinetti draws up a list of
seventeen points regarding ‘significant phenomena’ created by ‘our
[modified] sensibility’. Starting with a general observation about the
quickened rhythm and pace of our life that creates multiple and
simultaneous consciousnesses within a single individual (§1), he goes on
to list new ‘feelings’ that have emerged:
x love of the new and the unforeseen; of danger; speed, abridgment
and synopsis;
x horror of anything old or well known; of the quiet life, of nostalgia,
of the world hereafter;
x depreciation of romantic and sentimental love; of slowness,
minutiae, of analyses and detailed explanations;
x new ‘aptitudes’, ‘tastes’ and ‘passions’, e.g., for heroic deeds,
sports, business deals or financial investments;
x new ‘idealizations’: everyday heroism; patriotism, war,
individualism;
x new ‘senses’ and ‘knowledges’: awareness of machines, a fusion of
the instincts with what the engine gives us and with its harnessed
power; understanding of the world and of contemporary affairs.
More generally, Marinetti underlines the ‘manifold increase in, and
1
Boccioni refers to the gramophone as an example of the new ‘natural elements’, in his
essay Pittura e scultura futuriste (Boccioni 1914c: 22).
68 Serge Milan
removal of, all limitations set on human ambitions and desires’ (§ 5) and
concludes: ‘These are some of the elements of the new Futurist
sensibility that have generated our pictorial dynamism, our antigraceful
music devoid of rhythmic framework, our Art of Noise, and our Words-
in-Freedom.’ (Marinetti 1913a: 122-123)
Sensibility is difficult to define in this new context using traditional
psychological categorizations. It corresponds simultaneously to tastes
and emotions, desires and values, as well as to instincts and vague
sensations in any given person. For this reason, Marinetti speaks of
‘concept-feelings’ (concetti-sentimenti) (Marinetti 1920: 341). Sensibilità
is a constitutive element of perception and cognition; it is intuitive rather
than discursive, but emotive and pulsating as well, coming only partly
from consciousness and depending above all on the conditions of life and
the milieu in which the sensing individual is at home. The new Futurist
sensibility redefines the Subject as he or she evolves as a product of the
modern condition. In We Renounce Our Symbolist Masters, the Last of
All Lovers of the Moonlight, Marinetti explains:
Indeed, our Futurist sensibility is no longer moved by the dark mystery

of an unexplored valley or of a mountain gorge which, against our wills,
we imagine. Instead, they are traversed by an elegant ribbon of white
road where, all of a sudden, coughing and spluttering, an automobile
comes to a halt, gleaming with progress and full of civilized voices – like
the corner of a boulevard set down in the middle of nowhere. (Marinetti
1911b: 44)
Similarly, Boccioni was of the opinion that ‘for those of us who want
to live the dynamic conception of life, it would be a beastly and suicidal
error to transport our sensibility into a fixed and enclosed space’
(Boccioni 1914c: 19). With the ubiquitous presence of the new
technologies, the new sensibility marks a multiplication of desires and
consciousnesses within a single individual. It therefore produces two
contradictory effects: on the one hand, a disintegration of the individual
as a reasoning and responsible Cartesian Subject; on the other a
strengthening of singularity and of consciousness of the self. In fact,
Marinetti’s ‘living one’s own life’ (Marinetti 1912: 121) is a direct
allusion to the words of Jules Bonnot, an anarchist and public enemy,
great lover of cars, eventually killed by the police in 1912 (see Marinetti
2006: 447).
Mechanical instinct, simultaneous consciousness, sense of the world:
all this participates in a blurring of the Subject, just like the unrestrained
development of desires and dissolution of boundaries and the weakening

of discursiveness in favour of intuitive synthesis.2 Marinetti’s
sconfinamento elaborates an idea which in nuce can already be found in
earlier texts, such as The Variety Theatre; Extended Man and the
Kingdom of the Machine; Against Sentimentalized Love and
Parliamentarianism). Once the notion of sensibility takes on deeper
meaning, then novelty itself ceases to be a purely formal literary or
painterly value and becomes a conceptual centre of Futurist poetics in the
broadest sense of the word. For this reason, we need to interpret the list
of seventeen points in the manifesto, Destruction of Syntax–
Untrammeled Imagination – Words-in-Freedom, referred to above, not
only with regard to artistic creation, but also to psychological, social,
cultural and political issues. Marinetti evokes several new ‘senses’
(senso, sentimento, sensibilità) in relation to danger, war, business, sport,
tourism, urbanism and speed; at the same time, other ‘senses’ disappear,
such as the sense of the beyond, of nostalgic solitude, or of the bucolic
countryside. Knowledge of the past and the memory of our ancestors are
replaced by the need to explore the contemporaneous world. For this, the
cognitive point of reference is the totality of feelings rather than a totality
of culture. Although Marinetti admitted that ‘we are the sum total and the
extension of our forebears’ (Marinetti 1909: 16), he still attempted to
replace the study of history with an exploration of the unlimited and
undiscovered realms of the cosmos.
These new structures of perception, induced by the totality of new
tastes, sensations, values and conceptions of a new humanity engendered
a Futurist art which Marinetti outlined in a list of ‘elements of the new
Futurist sensibility’ in the manifesto, Destruction of Syntax –
Untrammeled Imagination – Words-in-Freedom (see above, pp. 67-68).
In a similar vein, Carrà wrote in a slightly later manifesto: ‘Imagination
without strings, words-in-freedom, the systematic use of onomatopoeia,
antigraceful music without rhythmic quadrature and the art of noises […]
have been derived from the same sensibility which has generated the
painting of sound, noises and smells.’ (Carrà 1913: 112) In Geometric
and Mechanical Splendor and Numerical Sensibility, Marinetti deepened
this genealogy even further by reinforcing the link between the new
sensibility and the new beauty:
2
For example, in Destruction of Syntax – Untrammeled Imagination – Words-in-
Freedom he calls for a ‘manifold increase in, and removal of, all limitations set on
human ambitions and desires.’ Marinetti, 1913a: 121.
70 Serge Milan
Out of the chaos of new, conflicting sensibilities, a new beauty is born

this day, which we Futurists will substitute for what went before and
which I name GEOMETRICAL AND MECHANICAL SPLENDOR. Its
essential characteristics are: a healthy forgetfulness, hope, desire,
unbridled strength, speed, light, the will, order, discipline, method; a
feeling for the great city; an aggressive optimism stemming from a
passion for sport and the toning of muscles; untrammeled imagination,
being here, there, and everywhere, brevity and simultaneity derived from
tourism, business, and journalism; a passion for success, a pioneering
instinct for breaking records, the enthusiastic emulation of electricity and
machines; an essential conciseness and compactness; the sweet precision
of machinery and of well-oiled thought; the harmony of energies
converging in one victorious path. My Futurist senses became aware of
this geometrical splendor, for the first time, on the bridge of a
Dreadnought. (Marinetti 1914: 135)
A brief glance at the Italian text allows us to clarify a few important

points. The new beauty, whose essential elements are described here, is
born dal caos delle nuove sensibilità contradittorie. Thus, once again, a
genealogical link appears between the new aesthetic and its matrix, the
new sensibility. Elsewhere, Marinetti describes art as something that
‘must totally eradicate everything that does not aspire to express the
fleeting, mysterious Futurist sensibility by means of this most innovative
geometrical and mechanical splendor.’ (Marinetti 1914: 138) Sensibility,
after having been intimately linked to the notion of novelty on the basis
of a historicist aesthetic discourse – according to which the new artistic
production is born from the new conditions of material life – was used in
other contexts, which we might call more ‘romantic’. Sensibility came to
be envisioned as a middle path between material life and artistic
production. Boccioni expounds on ‘two fundamental principles of
Futurist sensibility’ in his polemical article The Circle doesn’t Close! and
confirms the historicist aesthetic already considered:
1. The artistic means of expression that have been transmitted to us by

culture are worn out and ill adapted to perceive and render emotions
which come from a world completely transformed by science.
2. The new conditions of life in which we live have created an infinity of

completely new natural elements, which have never entered the domain
of art and for which the Futurists propose to discover new means of
expression, at all costs…(Boccioni 1914a: 68) 3
But, at the same time, he introduces in this article a new link between art
and sensibility: ‘We Futurists have created a movement that radically
transforms Italian sensibility; we have introduced a conclusive formula
into the research that occupies the minds of all young European artists.’
(Boccioni 1914a: 68)
A new physical environment arising out of a new art and a new

sensibility
So far, I have shown a development progressing from ambiente via

sensibilità to works of art; here, in an opposite direction, artistic
production generates a new sensibility which, in turn, appears to produce
new bodies endowed with new senses that affect the new material world
and influence artistic production in an unpredictable manner. This is the
red thread that runs through Futurist Painting and Sculpture, Boccioni’s
fundamental essay published in 1914, where he evokes all the French
artists who, ‘from Delacroix to today, have paved the way for the advent
of a sensibility completely unknown in Italy,’ a delirious and ecstatic
sensibility which ‘imparts to our senses the power to perceive what up to
now had never been perceived’. (Boccioni 1914c: 25)
Soffici picked up this link between art and sensibility, deepened it and
gave it a personal dimension. In his First Principles of a Futurist
Aesthetic, published in 1920, he entitled one of his central chapters ‘The
End of Art’, and tried to define the destiny of contemporary art by using
the notion of sensibility. Here, the influence of the conditions of life on
sensibility cedes to the following premise, reiterated three times on one
page: ‘the function of art is that of refining and sharpening the
sensibility,’ so that in the end ‘art tends fatally towards its own
abolition’. (Soffici 1920: 241) Soffici’s perspective possesses an overall
‘artificiality’, according to which nature and artefact tend to merge. He
avoids any reference to ‘Nature in its natural state’ and imagines a world
3
The circle mentioned here concerns ‘art which becomes once again raw nature’ for
Papini, while for Boccioni art is ‘a new reality’ and ‘raw nature’ is a mere cultural
concept.
72 Serge Milan
in which Nature on the one hand and artistic or industrial productions on

the other have equal ontological value. They are thus entirely equivalent,
and this equivalence is expressed with the term ambiente, the milieu, also
regularly called vita, life, by other Futurists. This double dynamic is also
used in a very interesting way by Luigi Russolo, who applies it quite
specifically to his ‘art of noises’:
This musical evolution […] goes towards rhythms increasingly

complicated, chords ever more complex and dissonant, and towards
orchestral colorations ever more strange, is convincing proof of an
absolute need our sensibility has to modify the sensations given to our
ear.
This continuous and necessary effort towards modification has been
constant in its search for an ever greater complexity. […] Our acoustical
sensibility is continually struck by much more dissonant chords and
much more complex timbres found in the noises of life and nature. […]
Consequently, music wouldn’t have been able to evolve so promptly
towards Dissonance if our ear had not been accustomed to the complex
racket of our fervent, rapid, intense modern life. […] But these timbres
and these noises must become abstract matter, so that we can extract a
work of art from them. Actually, noise, such as it comes to us from life,
calls us right back to life itself, forcing us to think about the things that
create it […].
Noise must become a primary element in shaping the work of art. It
must therefore lose its quality of contingency and become a sufficiently
abstract element to be able to achieve the transfiguration necessary to any
primary natural element acting as an abstract artistic element. (Russolo
1916: 89-91)
At the end of the chapter, Russolo illustrates the multi-faceted spiral

of the Futurist ‘madness of Becoming’ that fuses nature, art, sensibility
and life, and shows how sensibility modifies perception, so that urban
noises and dissonance eventually become music. Russolo’s text also
elaborates on the role of the artist-as-genius, so often invoked in Futurist
manifestos, and presents him as a person who introduces a further degree
of liberty into the chaotic universe, experienced as a complex and
dynamic sum of live-forces in his local environment. This extreme and
heroic figure – a romantic individual similar to the one envisioned by
Kant – becomes for the Futurists the architect par excellence of the New.
To paraphrase the famous Kantian definition according to which ‘genius
is the innate disposition of the mind through which Nature gives its rules
to art’ (Kant 1990: 160),4 one might even say that Futurist genius is the
innate sensibility through which Nature and art impart their mutual rules
to each other.
Genius and environment
At this point we understand one of the principal links between romantic

and Futurist aesthetics. Genius is certainly the site in which Nature is
turned into art, and art is turned into Nature; but this site of encounter is
exceptional and rationally incomprehensible to Kant, whereas to the
Futurists the areas of encounter are as vast, innumerable and intuitively
comprehensible as our new bodies. Marinetti conceives of genius in
vitalist terms: the flux of moving is at the heart of the Futurist sensibility,
and it does not require the intervention of reason or of any other faculty
traditionally employed to define the Subject.
One must indeed note that it is through this first and fundamental
refusal to posit an apriori Nature that the Futurists commit themselves to
an ideology that is simultaneously exceptional and intoxicating. This
refusal of the very idea of Nature (or of God) as an ontological authority
is one of the aspects that I consider to be among the most characteristic
of avant-garde ideology. Whereas in the beginning of the 1910s, the
Futurist concept of sensibilità was universalist and tinged with Utopia, in
the late 1920s and 30s, it appeared in semantic fields that were more
related to art and the human body. This modified concept of sensibility
was propagated in a particularly forceful way by Benedetta and Fillìa.
Benedetta, a student of Balla’s and, from 1923, Marinetti’s wife,
addressed the topic in her presentation to the Futurist congress of 1924,
in which sensibility was accorded a central position in the movement, no
doubt in order to reactivate it as a vital source of aesthetics, but also of
ethics and of the gnoseology of the movement (Benedetta 1924).
Fillìa employed the term in several manifestos, notably in Mechanical
Sensuality (1926), and Futurist Spirituality (1931). In these two texts, he
introduced a spiritual and religious perspective into the very heart of
Futurist ideology, but in a manner that was also forcefully anticlerical.5
4
‘Genie ist das Talent (Naturgabe), welches der Kunst die Regel gibt. Da das Talent, als
angeborenes produktives Vermögen des Künstlers, selbst zur Natur gehört, so könnte
man sich auch so ausdrücken: Genie ist die angeborene Gemütsanlage (ingenium),
durch welche die Natur der Kunst die Regel gibt.’ Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft § 46.
5
Fillìa also wrote L’arte sacra meccanica, in 1926, with P. Curtoni and A.C. Caligaris.
74 Serge Milan
(Fillìa 1926; Fillìa 1931) But like Marinetti some fifteen years earlier,
and with a very atypical perspective within Futurism, Fillìa defined the
characteristics of an anthropoid in the throes of physiological and
psychological modification. Nonetheless, this New Man is still defined
by his ‘sensibility’ towards a world that is, above all, a ‘new
environment’ (nuovo ambiente). The two notions of sensibilità and
ambiente continue to respond to one another, creating an individuality
that Futurists will call ‘lyrical’: it is both permeable and dynamic, and
nonetheless unique and singular, and, above all, autonomous.
In conclusion, Fillìa, in his own way, illustrated the central premise of
the Futurist anthropological project: the creation not only of a new art, a
new society and a new world, but also and above all the creation of a
New Man, and even of a new anthropoid. This perspective is explicitly
Darwinian6, although today we would probably call it ‘posthuman’. It is a
vision of a ‘mechanical man’, a ‘man extended by a machine’, ‘fed with
metal’, who develops new senses, new organs, new instincts, new
languages and new, non-Aristotelian, logics. Futurists considered
traditional human faculties – perception, feeling, knowledge, body, soul,
reason, instinct and so forth – to be obsolete. Instead, they defined the
changes that humans impose on themselves as a species by taking
recourse to the term sensibilità – which has hardly been examined in
classical philosophy because it transcends all traditional categories.
This Übermensch sensibility, as Nietzsche would say, to whose
elaboration we are all contributing as ‘Futurist geniuses’ – for each of us,
we must never forget, is a potential genius according to the Futurist
Gospel – is a vital factor in Marinetti’s attempt to re-conquer the freedom
that was taken away from us by scientific determinism. In Marinetti’s
anthropology, ‘to create’ means ‘to control the future of the world around
us’. It therefore affects the future of our sensibility, of our deepest self,
and allows us to overcome both cultural and genetic determinism, this
burden from our ancestors which otherwise would condemn us to be ‘the
living buried by the dead’ (Nietzsche 1876: cap. 2, § 2).
Translation from the original French and Italian by Joanna Dezio
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The Multiplication of Man:
Futurism’s Technolatry Viewed Through the Lens of
Modernism
Roger Griffin
Abstract: Having highlighted the passage in Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism

describing an impromptu nocturnal joy-ride in the country lanes near Milan, the
chapter focuses on the epiphanic nature of this experience as the revelation not just of
a new aesthetic but a new moral universe and a new secular mysticism. It argues that
the Nietzschean bid to overcome nihilism has been projected by Marinetti onto the
latest technologies of speed to the point where they are identified with the capacity to
overcome the conventional bounds of time and space. This is followed by an excursus
on modernism which interprets it in the light of social anthropology as a mythopoeic,
life-asserting response to the threat of radical anomie posed by secularizing
modernity. The thesis explored is that such a response is driven by the primordial
human need for a ‘sacred canopy’ which is the wellspring of all culture. In times of
crisis this need can manifest itself in the form of a revitalization movement following
a shamanic propheta who enacts a process of ‘ludic recombination’ in creating a new
tablet of values or ‘mazeway’. In the light of this analysis, Futurism’s technolatry
emerges as an outstanding example of programmatic modernism, and the composition
of the first Futurist manifesto is revealed to be a typically modern act of ‘mazeway
resynthesis’ carried out by Marinetti as a later-day propheta. The chapter ends by
contrasting Marinetti’s fanatically cultic vision of the motor-car with the no less
ecstatic one experienced by Toad in The Wind in the Willows, which Kenneth
Grahame presents as a pathology to be cured.
Transports of delight
Students of early modernism only familiar with such figures as

Nietzsche, Ibsen, Wagner, or D’Annunzio could not fail to be struck
by the new theme announced so vigorously in Marinetti’s Foundation
and Manifesto of Futurism: the ecstasy induced by the modern
technologies of locomotion. A century on, the eleven programmatic
assertions that make up Marinetti’s mission statement – not a Biblical
Decalogue but a secular ‘Hendecalogue’, promulgated from not from
the slopes of Mount Sinai but from the ‘last promontory of the
centuries’ – have become famous to the point of cliché in the orthodox
history of modern art (a situation not without its irony for a Futurist
78 Roger Griffin
manifesto), dissipating much of the original ‘shock of the new’.

However, the comparatively neglected preamble (Marinetti 1909a: 11-
13) still provides kernels of insight into the genesis of the Futurist
gospel of automotive speed which have so far escaped forensic
examination, offering valuable clues to how the original Futurists
persuaded themselves they held the key to the redemption of humanity
within secular time.
The manifesto opens abruptly with the high-flown description of
Marinetti and his friends suspended in a state of ‘atavistic ennui’ in a
room overlooking a city street in Milan, staying up far into the night
talking and writing feverishly in the manner of fin-de-siècle aesthetes
who have cut themselves off from ‘ordinary’ humanity and nature in
order to cultivate a refined sense of the sublime. The stars are
‘hostile’. Creatively and ontologically they have lost their way. What
jolts the friends out of their tormented, self-induced reverie is the
sound of trams followed by the ‘famished roar of automobiles’ from
the street below.
In a trice the baleful enchantment of decadent Aestheticism is
broken. ‘Mythology and the Mystic Ideal’, staples of the Symbolist
imaginaire, are ‘defeated’, and it is the external world, both natural
and artificial, that suddenly intrudes into their consciousness. Thus the
break of dawn, which would before have marked just one more banal
turn of the earth on its axis, is transfigured into a palingenetic
moment: ‘the splendour of the sun’s red sword slashing for the first
time through [their] millennial gloom’. Existentially revitalized, and
intoxicated by this new revelation of the numinous quality of urban
modernity, Marinetti and his entourage then hurl themselves into three
cars – now animized and eroticized into ‘snorting beasts’ with ‘torrid
breasts’ – and race off into the night in a manic, macho – some would
say psychotic – state of mind. They charge recklessly down country
lanes until Marinetti swerves to avoid two cyclists. The car overturns
and ends up in a muddy ditch. Far from humiliated by his experience,
the poet is elated:
When I got myself up–soaked, filthy, foul-smelling rag that I was–
from beneath my overturned car, I had a wonderful sense of my heart
being pierced by the red-hot sword of joy! (Marinetti 1909a: 13)
The Multiplication of Man: Futurism’s Technolatry 79
Ripping asunder Maya’s veil
In this passage Marinetti is describing something reminiscent of what

is known in Christian theology as an ‘epiphany’, or in Hindu
philosophy as the moment of moksha when the veil of illusion (Maya)
woven by the phenomenological world is pierced to disclose a higher
reality. But this is no traditional moment of mystic liberation from the
Cloud of Unknowing when the safety curtains of the ephemeral
mundane world part to reveal an eternity bathed in an ethereal
limelight, whether the metaphysical Truth lies ‘beyond the world’
(theist) or is immanent within it (monist). Nor is it one of those special
states of consciousness familiar from the world’s poetry and
associated in the West with ‘Romanticism’, when the individual
communes with nature and knows that ‘everything is in everything
else’, described by the British historian of religions Robert Zaehner
(Zaehner 1973) as a ‘panenhenic’ experience. Here it is the dynamism
of the technologically modified world – modernity itself – that is
transfigured, as if the secret goal of homo faber had been to evolve as
tool-maker to the stage where the means were invented to experience
reality from the seat of a plane, train, car or steamer thus allowing its
ultimate reality to become manifest.
By suddenly ceasing to flee modernity into the artificial world of
the poetic imagination and instead ardently embrace the
unprecedented experience of motion and speed – a reversal known in
German as ‘Umschlag’ (Klieneberger 1979: 361-7) – the poetically
and mythopoeically self-conscious car-driver becomes zealot of
modernity, and Marinetti its Zen master or Big Chief, the shaman of a
technocratic future. The culinary equivalent of this transformation of
perspective would be for an organic food junky to suddenly be
converted to the belief that GM crops have finally made it possible for
the human palate to taste the ultimate flavours and so discover the true
meaning of eating, agriculture, nature, and hence of life itself. For that
small group of proto-Futurists closeted in the urban den they had
transformed into an inner sanctum for the worship of Art, the spell of
Symbolist metaphysics woven from the heightened use of language
has been rent to reveal the previously disdained material world of
transportation in all its wordless whirring, vibrating, pumping,
rhythmic mechanical vitality as a source of wonder in its own right,
80 Roger Griffin
the manifestation of energy in perpetual, artificially accelerated

motion.
Far from plunging them into an abyss of nihilism, the puncturing of
Aestheticism’s hot-air balloon by the clanging of trams and the roar of
engines has made them ready to soar aloft once more. They are
inspired by ‘the first flight of Angels’ evoked by the rising sun, but
this is the powered-flight of pistons and combustion chambers, not of
bone and sinews. In the gushing torrent of turbocharged prose it is
easy for the post-classical or post-modern mind to miss the deeper
significance of the cryptic allusion to the phrase ‘Centaur’s birth’
(though a generation devouring Hollywood versions of the Narnia and
Harry Potter sagas may need less prompting). In this context, the
hybrid of human being and horse conjures up the symbiosis of ‘man’
with a motor-car no longer a ‘dead’ object of steel, wood, leather, and
rubber, but metamorphosed through the primordial mythopoeic power
of animism into a living creature, its ‘horse-power’ not merely
metaphorical. It is a fusion which is the key to the rest of the prelude.
The artists, no longer sitting restless and disaffected in some
fashionable mansarde, have become embodiments of a reckless,
amoral, motorized élan vital speeding along the highways heading out
beyond good and evil. Abandoning any attempt to be guided by the
sense data supplied by their optical nerves, they trust instead ‘the
scent’ that is enough for their ‘beasts’. Like latter-day cyborgs of the
sort that, thanks to CGI technology, populate so many fantasy and
horror films, Marinetti’s effete gang are now reborn as ‘young lions’,
their quarry the ‘dark pelt of Death’ as it ‘escape[s] down the vast
violet living and throbbing sky’.
It is from this (heavily mythologized and aestheticized, even
fictional) phenomenological experience of a night drive in Lombardy
high on an adrenaline-fuelled lust for life that the third article of the
Futurist Tablet of the Law is distilled, announcing a new aesthetic in
words which have become duly famous:
We believe that this wonderful world has been further enriched by a

new beauty, the beauty of speed. A racing car, its bonnet decked out
with exhaust pipes like serpents with galvanic breath … a roaring
motorcar, which seems to race on like machine-gun fire, is more
beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace (Marinetti 1909: 13).
A new religion
What Marinetti’s account of the ‘Founding’ of Futurism makes clear

is that the manifesto is for him and his first apostles far more than the
promulgation of a new aesthetic. It is a new form of religion. This is
why we find interpolated into the formulation of the aesthetic creed
that occupies the first seven and last three articles of the new faith one
that is of an overtly mystical character. It links the new artistic axioms
to a revolution in the way the physical universe is to be experienced
and hence in ‘reality’ itself. By positioning Futurists on the ‘last
promontory of the centuries’, bent on breaking down the ‘mysterious
doors of the impossible’, and already living in ‘the absolute’ after the
death of ‘Time and Space’, the eighth declaration ensures that the
artistic cult of mechanized dynamism acquires connotations of
metaphysical transcendence.
In the terminology used by Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the
Philosophy of History, the secular epiphany triggered by the roar of
cars from the streets has caused the ‘continuum; – the meaningless
flux of ‘homogenous’, ‘empty’ time, or the anomic, eternal clock-time
of chronos – to be ‘exploded’ by a charge of ‘Messianic time’, the
special time of creativity, fullness, or kairos. (Benjamin 1973: 252-5)
The creatively destructive mythic energy for this explosion has not
been purloined from the memory vaults of Roman antiquity as it was
for Robespierre, nor even from Nietzsche’s own plentiful supply of
home-made ‘dynamite’ available for the transvaluation of all values.
Instead, it draws on new experiences made possible for the very first
time in human history by spectacular revolutions in the technology of
transportation.
Thus the Futurists have no need to undertake a ‘tiger leap’ into the
past deemed necessary by Benjamin in order to find the mythic energy
needed to transform the present into a new future. Instead, it is by
defiantly turning their back on the past that they feel empowered to
break with the otherwise ineluctable logic of the present order of
things and the apparently inevitable continuum it dictates which
stretch inexorably into the future. By zooming in on the enhanced
velocity of communications and transport and the new means to
capture it made possible by technology, early Futurists convinced
themselves that the momentum and direction of History itself could be
changed, the tram of Modernity surreally jumping the tracks and
82 Roger Griffin
lurching onto a new route with no terminus. By jettisoning the past as

a source of value or meaning, their lion’s leap onto the flanks of the
present hurled them to the very cutting edge of time as it dynamically
unfolds, the point where the prow shears through the ocean waves.
The result was a heady, visionary perspective on time that if it were
generalized would, according to Marinetti’s alternative creative and
metaphysical logic, regenerate society as a whole.
This is at the opposite pole from the contemplative mysticism
invoked by William Blake when in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
he talks of the ability to ‘see infinity in a grain of sand’. Rather it is
the anti-contemplative, activist, earth-bound mysticism of the
Expressionist dancer, the mountaineer, or the test pilot, one which
after the First World War found enough resonance with the public for
a cult of Charles Lindbergh to sweep across the West after his solo
flight over the Atlantic with a force that the era of mass-produced
heroes can only dream of (Friedman 2007). The Futurists’ terrestrial
ecstasy stemmed from the intuition that the external senses can be
harnessed to the imagination to internalize the point of view of a high-
speed camera or the mathematical vision of reality delivered by sub-
atomic physics. At this point the artist becomes capable of freezing in
a single frame the constant flux of reality, and the sensory illusion of
matter’s solidity dissolves. In this ‘moment of Being’ (as Virginia
Wolf put it) the all-devouring flux of modernity is transmuted to an
eternal present, a process that endows time with a previously
unrealized redemptive dimension. The dynamic metamorphosis of the
world through technology which was shattering traditional
metaphysical European realities – and the aesthetics that articulated
them – at the turn of the century, was looked to by the most
metaphysically demanding Futurists as the source of a new type of
eternal present, a nunc stans captured in the midst of the dizzying flow
of modern phenomena now accelerated to the nth degree through the
power of technology. Within the Futurist vision the ultra-ephemeral is
absolutized, the past and future are abolished, and a new type of
transcendence is revealed.
Zarathustra gets wheels
Significantly it is the promulgation of this new secular, this-worldly

source of anomie-defying transcendence in point eight of the
manifesto that precedes its last three articles of faith. They call for the
glorification of war, patriotism, and misogyny, the destruction of
museums, academic learning and feminism, and the celebration of
exemplars of modern industrial technology evoked with lyrical
intensity: arsenals, shipyards, railway stations and factories, bridges,
steamers, locomotives, and aeroplanes. These are not just symbols of
technological modernity, but icons of a new secular religious
consciousness. By 1909, science, industrialization, urbanization,
secularization, revolutions in communications and the infrastructure,
the raiding of colonies and the pillaging of the planet for raw materials
on an unprecedented scale had created a critical mass within the
technological revolution that was transforming the experience of time
and space not just for the intelligentsia but for society as a whole.
Now, in the Futurist mind-set, the explosive, transformative
momentum of technological modernity is not only aestheticized, as in
Expressionism, but apotheosized.
In Nietzsche’s universe there were no longer gods for Prometheus
to steal fire from. His skies were metaphysically empty. This created
the possibility, first fully articulated by Marinetti, not only that ‘Man’
himself can become the Superman, but that the ‘man-made’ future can
be something infinitely more than just a realm of limitless technical
potential for ‘mastery’ over nature. Properly perceived through the
creative imagination of the poet, the technocracy itself becomes a
hitherto untapped source of metaphysical potential for reinvesting the
human cosmos with transcendence. At this point, technology ceases to
be, as it was for Nietzsche, one of the assassins of life-giving myth
and hence of higher meaning, but the creator of new myth and
meaning. Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’, his solution to the problem of
contemporary nihilism, was predicated on his vision of the ‘world’ as
‘a monster of energy, without beginning, without end […] a sea of
forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally
flooding back’. His ‘Dionysian’ world was one of ‘the eternally self-
creating, the eternally self-destroying’. It was ‘beyond good and evil’,
and ‘without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal’. As such
‘This world is the will to power – and nothing besides! And you
84 Roger Griffin
yourselves are also this will to power – and nothing besides!’

(Nietzsche 1968: para. 1067: 549).
With the foundation of Futurism, Marinetti enthusiastically
embraced Nietzsche’s thermodynamic, monistic perspective on
reality, which has been seen as anticipating the cosmological
implications of quantum physics (Plank 2003). However, he
transmutes it alchemically into a palingenetic vision by celebrating
technology as a means both of enhancing the perception of the
dynamism that produces the phenomenal world and of allowing
human beings to experience that dynamism directly ‘on their skin’.1 It
is as if Dionysus has suddenly been teleported from the realm of
Greek mythology to find himself the controls of a speed-boat, or
Zarathustra has been beamed out of his peripatetic existence in the
mountains as the John the Baptist of a this-worldly Evangelium and
rematerialized in the engine-cab of an express train steaming through
the night to one of the world’s metropolises. Prometheus is now
tapping not into fire, but into the primordial energy that drives the
universe itself, a power more electric and atomic than combustive.
That the revelation of the metaphysic of technology-assisted speed
was no passing fad for Marinetti is made clear from his essay written a
year later (although published only in 1915), Extended Man and the
Kingdom of the Machine (Marinetti 1915a: 85-88).2 It announces the
1
On the day I was writing this passage (11/09/2008), the Large Hadron Collider went
into action at CERN in Switzerland. At one point, the scientist described what the
reporter was seeing on the computer screen in one of the Control Rooms as ‘what a
“cosmic” (a particle making up a cosmic ray) would see passing through the
detector’, a way of visualizing an aspect of the greatest experiment ever undertaken
to force nature to disclose the secrets of its primary particles which surely would
have thrilled Marinetti. Inevitably, some theologians would still see God as the
primum mobile of whatever subatomic world is revealed. Thus, Richard Swinburne
in his modern theodicy writes that ‘it is only because electrons and bits of copper
and all other material objects have the same powers in the twentieth century as they
did in the nineteenth century that things are as they are now’ (Swinburne 1996: 2).
For a gleefully atheistic refutation of this ‘creationist’ argument see Dawkins 2006:
176-7, a position far closer to Marinetti’s own perspective, but, as is to be expected
from a skeptical Oxbridge humanist, lacking the vitalistic monism that infuses the
poet’s writings.
2
Berghaus translates the Italian ‘moltiplicato’, ‘moltiplicazione’ with ‘extended’,
extension’ etc. However I prefer retaining the original even though it sounds
awkward in places since in the Futurist imaginaire technology not only an extends
and enhances human strength and faculties but raises them to a higher power, and
thus in a sense multiplies them as when the exploit of a single human being is
imminent evolution of human beings into a hybrid of ‘man and

motor’, thereby externalizing his ‘will’ (women do not play an active
role in this cosmos). Thus ‘multiplied’ his ‘Dream and Desire’ will
conquer ‘Space and Time’. Henceforth the age of Romanticism and
Eroticism will be transcended and vanquished, since the new race of
‘dynamic beings do not have any sweet lover to go to at night, but
instead prefer to attend with loving care to the task of starting-up their
workshops’. That Marinetti is more interested in the metaphysical
implications of the new bionic Man than the physical implications of
his technologically enhanced powers is underscored by the fact that
the ‘optimism’ of his vision is contrasted with the ‘pessimism of
Schopenhauer’, its vitalism a sure antidote to the ‘sickness of Love’.
Echoing the Second Futurist Manifesto of 1909 the essay ends with
the threat to turn a revolver on ‘the great Romanic moonlight’.
Enrico Cavacchioli’s poem Let the Moon Be Damned (Cavacchioli
1914), which takes up this theme, encapsulates the new Futurist
metaphysic of speed. He describes the new century as afflicted by a
‘grey disease’ that predisposes people to thirst for infinity and
succumb easily to unhealthy fixations, while mendacious politics and
religion continually attempt to seduce them. As a result, instead of
being fully alive, they just ‘go on dying day by day’, genuine joy
blocked by its Ersatz, an ungrounded frivolity that ‘sears their hearts’.
The solution for those determined to live is to get themselves ‘a
mechanical heart’, to ‘shoot a million volts into [their] system’ and
‘make of life a computed dream/triggered by levers, the contact of
wires’. The poem ends with a prophecy:
If, now, the cold machine surpasses man,

in its perfection brutal and precise,
that day will come we rule the brute machine,
lords of the finite and infinite.
This is not the infinity of a divine realm, but of the Second Law of
Thermodynamics.
transmitted simultaneously all over the world, or when a man or woman can orbit
the world and photograph the whole planet from space in a few hours..
86 Roger Griffin
The re-sacralization of the world through the cult of speed
Should further corroboration be required for the proposition that

Marinetti’s original purpose in founding Futurism was less to launch a
New Aesthetic than a New Religion, this aspiration becomes explicit
in his 1916 manifesto, The New Ethical Religion of Speed (Marinetti
1916: 253-59). He declares traditional theology to be a bankrupt force:
‘Christian morality served the purpose of developing man’s inner life,
but today it no longer has any purpose, since the Divine is utterly
finished.’ Whereas ‘Christian morality protected man’s physical self
from the excesses of sensuality […] Futurist morality will protect man
from decrepitude brought on by lethargy, nostalgia, fastidiousness,
inertia, and custom. Human energies, increased a hundredfold by
speed, will command Time and Space.’ This passage is followed by
an alternative narrative of human evolution which celebrates the
increasing power and pace of technology, and equates speed with not
just modernity but with cleanliness and moral health, suggesting a
puritanical and biopolitical component in the Futurist purge of
decadence.
We have seen that Marinetti’s first manifesto announced the creed
of the new Futurist religion. The purpose of this one is to announce
the spaces, entities, and experiences now sacralized by the cult of
speed: railway stations, racing car circuits, cinemas, electric power
stations, the congested streets of a modern city (e.g. London’s Strand),
hydro-electric power plants and battle-fields are some of the new sites
continually being manufactured by modernity in which it is possible to
commune with the Absolute. Marinetti prophesies that the religion of
speed will soon be creating vast new spaces for its liturgies to be
performed: ‘Before long comes the destruction of houses and cities to
create huge meeting places for cars and airplanes.’ The new religion
automatically confers sanctity on a host of entities previously thought
of as secular: combustion engines and rubber tyres are divine, but also
machine guns, cannon, and shells. This is not to forget the subatomic
world in which energy and matter become interchangeable: ‘Our
saints are the innumerable particles that penetrate our universe at an
average speed of 42,000 meters per second.’
There are new ways of worship too. Driving fast is obviously one
of them: ‘The exhilaration of high speeds in a motor car is simply the
joy of feeling oneself made one with the one divinity.’ Yet there are
more contemplative modes of becoming one with the ultimate reality.

To kneel on a railway track or before a spinning gyrocompass is a
prayer for divine speed. Simpler tasks can also acquire a devotional
aspect: ‘I pray every night to my little electric lamp, for it has a
formidable speed at work within it’. Simply participating in sport
energetically is a devout act, since ‘sportsmen are the first neophytes
of this religion’.
A whistle-stop tour of Futurist Modernism
For a Futurist mind-set repelled by the routinized perception

epitomized in what Gustave Flaubert called disparagingly idées reçues
there would be something nauseatingly ‘passatista’ to observe, as, one
on-line art journal tells us, that ‘Futurism was the quintessence of 20th
century modernism’.3 However, there may hopefully be something
fresh to observe in its technolatry by focusing on the movement’s
relation to modernity from a sociological and anthropological
perspective.
That Futurism was the self-conscious, precocious child of the
technological revolution is clear from such declarations as the one
Marinetti made in his influential manifesto, Destruction of Syntax –
Untrammelled Imagination – Words in Freedom of May 1913:
‘Futurism is based on the complete renewal of human sensibility
brought about by the great discoveries made by science’ (Marinetti
1913: 120). It goes on to explain how the combined effect of such
inventions as the telegraph, telephone, gramophone, train, plane,
cinema, newspaper, tourism, ocean liners, and mechanized war is that
‘the Earth [has] grown smaller through speed’, an event that has
revolutionized the psyche and created the potential for an
unprecedented symbiosis between inner and outer worlds. What
results is a new lyricism, a new poetic consciousness and aesthetic
articulated for the first time in Futurism.
A century on, the originality of such pronouncements has faded
like the perfume of pressed flowers. The idea that accelerating
technological modernity in the Europeanized world had by the turn of
the nineteenth century triggered a revolution in the human perception
3
http://www.fluxeuropa.com/futurism.htm (14/09/2008).
88 Roger Griffin
of time and space has been thoroughly explored by such sociologists

as Marshall Berman (1982), Stephen Kern (1983), David Harvey
(1990), and Anthony Giddens (1990, 1991). Less hum-drum insights
into Futurism’s cultic aspect begin to emerge, however, when it is
considered in the context of the pessimistic analyses of the effects of
this modernity offered by classical sociologists (e.g. Max Weber and
Emile Durkheim) and their modern counterparts (e.g. Anthony
Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman, and Fredric Jameson) when in the 1990s
they concentrated on its devastating consequences for tradition as a
source of values and identity, and hence for the human sense of being
‘at home’ in the world. Thus Giddens (1990) analysed in depth the
‘disembedding’ mechanisms of modernity, and Bauman (1991)
explored the irreducible ambivalence that arises from the modern
condition (Bauman 1991). Fredric Jameson (1994: 84) went even
further when he described modernity as a ‘catastrophe’ that ‘dashes
traditional structures and lifeways to pieces, sweeps away the sacred,
undermines immemorial habits and inherited languages, and leaves
the world as a set of raw materials to be reconstructed rationally’ –
and, I would add irrationally.
It is against the backdrop of such analyses that the conceptual
framework Peter Berger created in The Sacred Canopy (1967) for
understanding the origins and function of religion assumes particular
resonance with modernist and Futurist studies. In it he expounds the
thesis that an innate terror of the void stemming from human beings’
unique reflexivity – or rather the awareness of personal mortality it
alone makes possible – generates a constant need for projecting a
totalizing, self-transcendent, meaning-giving nomos onto an
essentially meaningless cosmos. The function of the ‘culture’ that
results is to overcome the anomie that would be induced by an
experience of existence bereft of what Nietzsche (2000: 122-3) calls in
The Birth of Tragedy ‘a horizon framed by myth’, an experience
graphically described in the famous scene in Jean-Paul Sartre’s
Nausea when Antoine Roquentin is sitting in the park and the
linguistic coating of reality that endows it with an illusory sheen of
familiarity and meaningfulness dissolves before his eyes, stranding
him in a world of nameless, revolting ‘things’. The bewildering
variety of ‘pre-modern’ or ‘pre-Western’ religious traditions studied
by cultural anthropology in its pioneering phase can be seen as
different ‘sheltering skies’ protecting human beings from the
instinctive realization that the heavens are not just infinite, but empty:
devoid of an objective source of transcendental meaning.
At first, Futurism may seem anomalous. It seems to ardently
embrace technology – for many the very wellspring of
disenchantment, of anomie, of eviction from our cultural homes – in a
giant bear hug, to celebrate the liquefaction of the previously solid
facticity of our world. Yet closer examination reveals it to be more
like the smothering ‘clinch’ used in martial arts as a last resort to
neutralize the opponent’s potential for aggression at least long enough
to recover the initiative. Futurism attempted to parry the body blows
dealt by technology to the human identity and psyche through a self-
conscious act of ‘re-enchantment’, nomization, and Nietzschean
transvaluation which endowed the man-made vehicles of the sensation
of speed with a numinous aura (a process similar to what Benjamin
calls ‘auratization’). The countervailing, defensive-aggressive
mechanism involved in this process becomes more intelligible when
considered in the light of the anthropological study of societies in
crisis.
The modern mazeway
One of the crucial distinctions introduced by social anthropologists in

understanding how societies accommodate the process of change is
between liminal and liminoid situations. In the rite de passage the
transitional period between two stages of individual, communal, or
natural life is described as liminal: it is collectively experienced not as
break-down, but as the phase of break-through to a new stage in the
cycle. However, when a previously stable tradition-bound community
undergoes a crisis in which its social fabric threatens to disintegrate
and its institutions fail to redress the situation in an adequate manner,
then it enters a liminoid condition which can only be solved by the rise
of a new society phoenix-like from the ashes of the old (Turner 1982).
Throughout human history, ‘revitalization movements’ have
spontaneously emerged from periods of decay or exposure to military
or natural disaster when the old nomos no longer provides an adequate
basis for society’s ritual and political cohesion, and from their midst
emerges the nucleus of the nomos of a new society if it is able to re-
establish itself. The revitalization movement often gives rise to a
90 Roger Griffin
propheta figure who becomes the focal point for the charismatic
forces integral to the rise of a new community and who embodies the
nomos of the new culture, and may even do much to formulate it. The
nomos itself, though, cannot be created ex nihilo, and may well
contain a blend of old and new, traditional and original elements –
both cosmological and ritual – melded in an act of syncretism (‘ludic
recombination’) which gives rise to a ‘mazeway resynthesis’, the
founding myth of a new nomos and a new order (Wallace 1956).
An outstanding feature of modernity is that its constant
intensification and acceleration under the impact of continual
technological and socio-economic change prevents the emergence of a
single, cohesive new culture under a homogeneous nomos. Once the
West entered a period of ‘high modernity’ in the late nineteenth
century, the permanent liminoidality that was its hallmark precluded
the creation of a unified sacred canopy or a single standpoint from
which to observe the dynamic process of historical change itself, since
the not only was the ground perceptibly shifting, but there was a
proliferation of competing values from which to evaluate it. Nor was
there any prospect of ‘going back’, of restoring a (highly mythicized)
golden age of a consensual world-view, a dilemma vividly conveyed
in Walter Benjamin’s image of the Angel of History (Benjamin 1973:
249). The result was not a single cohesive ‘revitalization movement’
to reverse the decadence, but a proliferation of them, each seeking to
diagnose or articulate the literally soul-destroying anomie of
modernity in the conviction that some sort of self-transcending vision
could be achieved in fleeting glimpses of a higher realm of meaning,
Being, or beauty, in a modern, this-worldly epiphany.4 The spate of
original aesthetics that poured forth in every sphere of art in pursuit of
such epiphanies is familiar to cultural historians as ‘Modernism’.
However, there was another mode of modernism which is less well
recognized by academics. Not just in art, but in philosophy, social
Utopianism, technology – notably in architecture, town-planning,
social medicine and eugenics – and politics, movements arose that
strove to realize and institutionalize a new society based on an
alternative modernity that would overcome decadence and anomie by
offering the individual a sense of purpose under a new nomos, a new
overarching canopy. The new sky would once again be sacred even
4
The term used by James Joyce for such a heightened state of consciousness.
though the source of its sheltering sacrality now derived not from
established religion or traditional hierarchies, but from the power of a
Utopia to be realized within historical time, a temporalized Utopia, to
generate of sense of this-worldly, metaphysical transcendence and the
numinous. This is a form of modernism can be called ‘programmatic’
since it offers not only an exploration and diagnosis of decadence, but
a cure (even if in the event the cure sometimes proved to be lethal).5
Futurism’s modernist sacralization of technology
From the artificially ‘fixed’ conceptual standpoint we have

constructed within the flux of time, Futurism can be seen as an
outstanding and – though the term’s ‘pastist’ connotations would
doubtless have incensed Marinetti – ‘classic’ example of
‘programmatic modernism’. In the early twentieth century, at the very
point when the West had entered a point of ‘high modernity’ and
hence high anomie, it sought to reinvest with meaning a world
experienced as decadent and soulless by disseminating the axioms of a
new nomos. These were announced in a series of ecstatic manifestos
stretching over two decades addressing the need for a radical
transvaluation of values in various spheres of art, social policy, and
politics (Apollonio 1970; Mitchell 1996; Schultz 1981). It is an
interpretation that helps account for a number of the movement’s
outstanding features.
First, all early Futurists join this particular variant of modernist
revitalization movement on the assumption that the root cause of
contemporary of decadence is its loss of a unifying, animating,
energizing nomos, resulting in a habituated fixation with the past
achievements of culture masking the moribund state of the present
one. The ensuing mood of inertia, stifling convention, and decay was
for Marinetti and his most ardent followers inextricably bound up with
the failure of the Risorgimento to make Italy a dynamic, young,
forward-looking nation, injecting into the movement a chauvinist
element that conflicted with its universal spirit of emancipation.
5
For a full exposition of this account of the ‘anthropology’ of the experience of
modernity and the distinction between epiphanic and programmatic modes of
modernism see Griffin 2007, Part I.
92 Roger Griffin
Second, the Futurist attempt to fuse the love of art with the cult of
speed, to combine aesthetics with technophilia (and in Marinetti’s case
with a bellicose patriotism) was for its protagonists far more than the
attempt to launch a new art movement. It was, at least in the case of
the ‘First’ Futurism, a bid to precipitate society’s total palingenesis
through an art capturing the essence of modern dynamism, thereby
turning art into a defibrillator to administer a shock to a dying patient
that would not merely re-establish a regular heart beat, but make the
heart beat to a faster, healthier, more powerful rhythm. The paradox of
Futurism was that in contrast to most modernisms, it saw in
technology not the source of society’s decadence, but its salvation
from decadence, on condition, that is, that human creativity prevailed
over ‘Man’s’ tendency to be enslaved and robotized by the machines
‘He’ had made (a dilemma explored famously in Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis). In Benjaminian terms, it wanted to combat the ‘storm of
progress’ not by providing a refuge from it, but by harnessing its
energy in the shaping of a technocratic future. This alternative future
was not, however, running amok but was planned and controlled by
visionaries and had its lightning bolts channelled into a source of
sustainable energy.
Third, Futurism’s variant of programmatic modernism vividly
demonstrates the process of ‘mazeway resynthesis’ at work,
hybridizing elements of old and new values into a temporalized
Utopia in which the membranes which separate art, philosophy,
culture, society, and politics in times of stability had become porous.
Moreover, for some Futurists at least, Marinetti himself assumed the
role of the propheta, the embodiment of the charismatic, shamanic
energies unleashed by a revitalization movement in the process of
casting a new society out of the melt-down of the old.
This approach also helps explain the elective affinity many
Futurists felt with two other Italian revitalization movements, both of
which originated in the sphere of politics rather than art, the short-
lived Interventionist campaign and the much more durable Fascism,
both of which they looked to as the vehicle for the realization of the
Futurist revolution. As the founder of Futurism, Marinetti himself
displayed a ‘love/hate’ relationship with the Duce, like Lenin and
Stalin the propheta of a radical form of political modernism, unsure
whether he was to be treated as the betrayer of his revolution or the
ultimate incarnation of the New Man.6 Treating Futurism as a bid to

restore the sacred canopy to an entire society thus underscores the
need to see the involvement of some of its most creative artists with
Fascism not as a result of miscalculation or opportunism, but the
manifestation of a deep-seated genuine elective affinity between two
modernisms. It also sheds light on features of the Futurist mission
which doomed it to failure from the very start.
Inferences drawn by a professional passatista
The Futurist project for the regeneration of society was structurally

flawed, and deep blemishes already run through the pearls of
rapturous revelation contained in the founding manifesto that launched
it a century ago in Paris. For one thing, the Futurist slancio vitale
towards a regenerated nation was doomed by the ‘chronic’ nature of
the human history. This conditions the parabola leading from manic
certainties to dystopian travesty and self-destruction common to all
totalizing Utopian projects devised by visionaries under the seal of
modernity. Second, the Futurist project utterly rejects the past, a
proposition which logically entails a continuous process of selective
amnesia in which the slate of collective memory and tradition would
be constantly erased like the doodles on a child’s plastic slide-eraser
board. To disenchanted eyes this is the stuff of science-fiction and not
of history.
Another harmatia in the unfolding drama of Futurism – at least in
the dialect spoken by Marinetti – lies in the cosmological flaw of
celebrating ruthless violence directed against demonized Others as
integral to regeneration. In contrast to Cavacchioli’s poem cited
earlier, Marinetti does not just want to damn moonlight, but shoot it,
or in Mafia terms, ‘whack it’ with a revolver. This could, of course, be
construed as a childlike image taken from a game of Cowboys and
Indians to emphasize Futurism’s radical rejection of the (neo-)
Romantic urge to escape into a world of powerful human emotions
and pre-industrial idylls. Yet it acquires less playful, more sinister
connotations in the broader context of Marinetti’s work. The founding
6
See, for example, Marinetti’s portrait of Mussolini as the Futurist New Man in his
appendix to Beltramelli 1923: iii-vi.
94 Roger Griffin
manifesto famously celebrated the revitalizing, ‘hygienic’ aspect of

war and the ’pulsating ardour of arsenals’. His 1915 essay on the
‘multiplication of man’ through technology (Marinetti, F.T. 1915a) is
more forthcoming about how deeply the project of becoming
symbiotically one with technology so as to become ‘Lord of the
machine’ was for him inextricably bound up with the cult of war, and
the brutalization of human beings. The hybridization of body and
machine, he claims, will not just produce a ‘non-human, mechanical
species built for constant speed’, but beget a creature who is naturally
‘cruel, omniscient, and warlike’.
The theme of the dehumanization of Man through fusion with
machine technology emerges with even more gruesome– not to say
psychotic – force in Marinetti’s Birth of a Futurist Aesthetic
(Marinetti 1915b: 249-52) where the precondition for the ‘new sun’ to
rise is identified not just with an unsentimental, ruthless discarding of
the past, but a contempt for human life reminiscent of Aztec blood
sacrifices (which were also to the sun). To convey just how ruthless,
Marinetti proceeds to explain – in what appears to be some macabre
variant of urban myth – that the Japanese have developed a new
explosive for artillery shells ‘deadlier than any other known hitherto’
whose principal ingredient is the ‘carbon from human bones’, leading
‘countless Japanese merchants’ to go ‘rooting about the battlefields of
Manchuria’. As a result the children of heroes grind down their
fathers’ skeletons in mortars so that they can then be ‘brutally vomited
out by cannons against enemy armies in distant lands’.
To sum up, seen through the lens of modernism that I have
deliberately manufactured elsewhere (Griffin: 2007) for identifying
basic patterns in the evolution of Western modernity, three aspects of
Marinetti’s technophilia are thus thrown into relief with that
heightened, slightly surreal three-dimensional clarity familiar to those
who try on new spectacles with a corrected prescription (that is until
the brain adjusts to and normalizes the new perception). First, the
Futurist cult of the new age of speed made possible by modern
technology was the fruit of the human imagination’s in-built
compulsion to create a ‘mazeway resynthesis’ in order to re-enchant
and resacralize reality now that traditional or hegemonic sources of
nomos had broken down. Far from being driven by primarily artistic
considerations, it was one of countless bids to overcome an era of
permanent liminoidality and achieve a fresh source of transcendence
through a new aesthetic vision of reality collectively familiar to

cultural historians as ‘modernism’.
Second, Marinetti’s modernism was an outstanding example of
what I have called ‘programmatic modernism’. The 1909 manifesto
announced that his personal epiphany about the ethical and religious
implications of the new age of speed had been transformed into a
panacea for the ills of modernity which from the outset reached
beyond the sphere of culture and aesthetics towards the creation of a
sacred canopy for Italian society and politics as a whole. This
predisposed it to become a major factor in the Interventionist
campaign of 1914 and 1915, and subsequently gave it an elective
affinity with Fascism (Mosse 1990), a revolutionary form of political
modernism that easily accommodated Marinetti’s particular brand of
Futurism within its ‘hegemonic pluralism’ (Stone 1998). It thus
suffered the same fate as so many forms of pre-1914 ‘modernist
nationalisms’ which started out as rebellions against the decadence of
Italian culture and the struggle for a new modernity (Gentile 2003),
notably the Florentine avant-garde (Adamson 1993) and D’Annunzio
(Ledeen 1977), only to become hitched to the doomed wagon of
Fascism.
Third, as the careers of some Futurists who did not get embroiled
in Futurism suggested (Berghaus 1996), the celebration of violence,
male chauvinism, patriotism, military technology, modern warfare,
battle, and mechanized slaughter was not a necessary component of
the synthesis of technophilia with aestheticism and mysticism into a
New Religion. After all, it would be absurd to suggest that the sense
of wonder and ecstasy induced in a latter-day Futurist by the Large
Hadron Collider going live in the CERN project on the seventh
anniversary of 9/11 should also be felt at the launch of a Cruise
Missile or the ‘Shock and Awe’ tactics applied in Iraq by the invading
US forces. What stands out about the misogynist, ultra-chauvinist,
bellicose variant of Futurist technolatry promulgated by Marinetti and
his most ardent neophytes was that the destructive moment of the
Nietzschean principle of ‘creative destruction’ assumed a (neurotic)
life of its own – in Freudian terms thanatos prevailed over eros. This,
in a fateful manner, dictated the political affiliations of his faction
which was destined to sacrifice vitalism on the bloody altar of military
power, thereby gutting Futurism of its emancipatory, joyful élan while
also betraying the Nietzschean axiom of Lebensbejahung.
96 Roger Griffin
The poetry of motion and the loss of the ludic
The structural failure of modernist mythopoeia in Marinettian

Futurism is illustrated by comparing Umberto Boccioni’s 1915 canvas
The Cavalry Charge,7 with Paul Nash’s 1918 painting We are Making
a New World.8 The first aestheticizes an engagement between human
and animal flesh and blood with exploding steel to the point where all
terror and suffering is conjured away through the magic of art. The
second depicts the utter desolation wrought by the many palingenetic
myths that sustained war on all sides for four terrible years, imbuing
the title with a bitter irony and flooding the composition with a
countervailing, pacifism that angrily casts out militarism from the
temple of humanity. The sect of Futurists who followed Marinetti
metaphorically and sometimes physically into war had lost touch with
the playful component of ‘ludic recombination’ which was so
prominent in the theory formulated in Giacomo Balla and Fortunato
Depero’s manifesto ‘The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe’
(Apollonio 1970: 197-200) and in the ballet sets, marionettes, and toys
designed by Depero thereafter. Marinetti showed in his Futurist
Cookbook of 1932, written at the height of the Fascist regime’s
success in gaining consensus, that he never completely abandoned the
spirit of childlike playfulness that emanates from the ludic principle.
Yet too often the rhythmic creaking of the hobby horse (‘dada’ in
French) is drowned out in his poetry by the musique concrète of the
Villar Perosa machine gun and the ‘tumb tumb’ of heavy artillery. It
was the fatal attraction between Marinettian Futurism and Mussolinian
Fascism that was the seed of its corruption through association with a
totalitarian political regime, and its eventual self-destruction as a
sustainable movement of liberation from modern anomie.
A year before the publication of the Founding and Manifesto of
Futurism a work had appeared whose evocation of the thrill of speed
afforded by the combustion engine was no less poetically charged. In
Kenneth Gahame’s The Wind in the Willows – one of the immortal
classics of English children’s literature along with Peter Pan and
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – a key passage (Grahame 1908:
33-4) depicts the moment when Toad succumbs to a coup de foudre
7
The picture can be seen at http://digilander.libero.it/debibliotheca/Arte/boccioni/
page_01.htm (13/09/08).
8
See http://www.tate.org.uk/magazine/issue6/nash.htm (13/09/08).
for the motor-car, even though, in contrast to Marinetti’s joy-ride, it is

he and his horse-drawn caravan, not the car and its anonymous driver,
that end up in a ditch. The experience triggers an obsession which will
ruin him financially and eventually land him in jail:
In an instant (as it seemed) the peaceful scene was changed, and with
a blast of wind and a whirl of sound that made them jump for the
nearest ditch, It was on them! The ‘Poop-poop’ rang with a brazen
shout in their ears, they had a moment’s glimpse of an interior of
glittering plate-glass and rich morocco, and the magnificent motor-car,
immense, breath-snatching, passionate, with its pilot tense and
hugging his wheel, possessed all earth and air for the fraction of a
second, flung an enveloping cloud of dust that blinded and enwrapped
them utterly, and then dwindled to a speck in the far distance, changed
back into a droning bee once more.
Toad’s epiphany is no less intense than Marinetti’s. Speed will release

him from the anomie that plagues him:
‘Glorious, stirring sight!’ murmured Toad, never offering to move.

‘The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel!
Here to-day – in next week to-morrow [sic]! Villages skipped, towns
and cities jumped – always somebody else’s horizon! O bliss! O poop-
poop! O my! O my!’ […] ‘And to think I never knew!’ went on the
Toad in a dreamy monotone. ‘All those wasted years that lie behind
me, I never knew, never even dreamt! But now, but now that I know,
now that I fully realise! O what a flowery track lies spread before me,
henceforth! What dust-clouds shall spring up behind me as I speed on
my reckless way! What carts I shall fling carelessly into the ditch in
the wake of my magnificent onset! Horrid little carts – common carts
– canary-coloured carts!’ (my emphasis)
The fantasy of thrusting carts (and their occupants) into ditches and
the reference to driving as a ‘magnificent onset’ (a battalion’s assault
against enemy positions) underscore the potential for pathological
violence intrinsic to Toad’s love affair with technology. But the rest of
novel narrates how he is spared Marinetti’s fate of sacrificing himself
to a futile cause.
What Grahame’s un-Futuristic tale unwittingly suggests is that,
putting the considerations of Art and History to one side, on a human
level Marinetti’s personal tragedy was that he had no Rat or Mole in
his life to rescue him from his addiction to speed, no one to free him
from the prison of belligerent male and nationalist chauvinism through
98 Roger Griffin
the power of friendship – another, more abiding source of

transcendence in a godless universe. Thanks to them, the Weasels and
Stoats that had taken over Toad Hall were ousted.9
By contrast Marinetti – the childlike in him as dormant as Mole in
hibernation – actually formed a common front with their human
counterparts in Mussolini’s regime, his most ardent supporters
proving to be more sycophants than friends. None of them, it seems,
had the honesty or insight required to prick the bubble of his
monomania by taking him to one side and yelling, in Mole’s immortal
words, ‘O stop being an ass’.
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In Terry Jones’ 1996 film version of Grahame’s novel, the Weasels and Stoats are
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A Futurist before Futurism:
Émile Verhaeren and the Technological Epic
Vera Castiglione
Abstract: Until now largely unexplored, the many correspondences between

Verhaeren’s œuvre and Futurist literature raise important questions regarding the
origins and identity of Futurism. The invention of a new mimetic language free of
syntax and metric constraints is often recognized as one of the most distinctive
features of Futurism. This is partly justified by the prominence given to literary
techniques in the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature as well as by a number of
futurist poems which apply these techniques. However, like the case of the Belgian
poet Emile Verhaeren shows, the Futurists did not consider these aesthetic features as
paramount and had no hesitations in branding as ‘Futurist’ the fairly traditional free
verses produced by Verhaeren. In this chapter I shall examine the reasons behind this
apparent contradiction through an historical and comparative analysis. After
considering the place of Verhaeren’s œuvre within the history of Futurism, I shall
then highlight the numerous correspondences between his oeuvre and futurist thought
and sensibility. In the light of my findings, I shall suggest that the Futurists’
perception of the movement’s identity was in reality much far-ranging than is
conventionally accepted. I shall therefore argue for a critical re-engagement with the
concept of ‘Futurism’, using an inclusive approach that would enable us to cover
under one umbrella both Verhaeren’s Futurism – which I shall call ‘epiphanic’ – and
Marinetti’s Futurism – which I shall call ‘programmatic’. Such approach will
ultimately allow us to make sense of the particular paradox of a Futurist literature that
had made its breakthrough before Futurism was founded.
The ‘Marinetti of Belgium’
Like France, Belgium did not develop a Futurist movement as such.

The painter Jules Schmalzigaug was the only Belgian-born artist to
fully embrace the movement and take part in Futurist exhibitions.
Also the writer Henry Maassen responded enthusiastically to the
Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism and even drafted a ‘Call to
Belgian Futurists’; but he remained a solitary voice in the battle for
Belgian Futurism and soon turned his interest towards Paris, where he
died at the age of 20. As Hadermann put it, ‘he had time to call
himself a Futurist but hardly any time to show it’. (Hadermann 1982:
288) Despite the ‘success by scandal’ of the 1912 Futurist exhibition
in Brussels, the only Belgian writer directly associated with Futurism
102 Vera Castiglione
throughout his career was Georges Linze, founder of the revue

Anthologie (1920-1940) and of the Groupe moderne d'art de Liège that
tried to create a synthesis of Futurism and Unanimism. Clément de
Pansaers was another writer sympathetic to the Futurist cause and
published several of their works in his review Resurrection from 1917
onwards. But neither Linze nor Pansaers can be said to comprise a
group of Belgian Futurists. They both belonged to the second wave of
Futurism, when other movements, above all Dada and German
Expressionism, were also exerting an influence in Belgium, often in
conflict with Futurism, as the poetical development of the foremost
Flemish poet, Paul Van Ostaijen, exemplifies in many ways.
Illustr. 1: Linze’s Méditations sur la machine (Liège: Éditions "Anthologie", 1931)

with a dedication to F.T. Marinetti: ‘Amicalement au poète F. T. Marinetti qui sait
bien que la poésie comme toute verité n’a pas de frontière. G. Linze.’ Coll. Luce
Marinetti.
Yet, Belgium was hardly an isolated country, nor was it an

unwelcoming place for progressive ideas and radical conceptions. On
the contrary, by the end of the nineteenth century Brussels had
become a sanctuary for exiled free-thinkers of Europe such as Victor
Hugo, Baudelaire and Karl Marx. Many international congresses were
organized in the Belgian capital, including the second congress of the
Second Socialist International in 1891. To name the most famous of
the associations and movements founded throughout the country: the
Émile Verhaeren and the Technological Epic 103
Cercle des XX (Group of the Twenty), a circle of avant-garde artists at

odds with academic art, whose members included James Ensor and
Fernand Khnopff and the Art Nouveau movement, arguably the first
important designers group of the machine age. By the beginning of the
twentieth-century, the industrial world had also entered the realm of
literature through the works of Émile Verhaeren, a Flemish-born
French-speaking poet who, after having turned his back on
Symbolism, joined the modernist trend and achieved as much
international fame as the Art Nouveau movement.
It is precisely Émile Verhaeren’s overwhelming success that could
provide an explanation for the limited fortunes of Futurism in
Belgium. (Hadermann 1982: 287) When the first Futurist manifesto
was published in 1909, Belgium had already found in Verhaeren its
own prophet of the future, a poet of the modern age paying tribute to
the rise and advance of the industrial civilization. His success as the
‘poet of modernity’ had been immense within and outside Belgium. In
1903 he had received the prestigious Five-Yearly Prize of French
Literature and since 1909 he was touted as a candidate for the Nobel
Prize. As a result, he dominated the pre-war literary scene in his
country while also allegedly becoming ‘the most widely translated
poet of his time’ (Jones 1957: 9).
Therefore, it should not come as a surprise to us that, at the
breakthrough of Futurism, comparisons with Verhaeren were quite
common and that Marinetti’s originality was frequently questioned by
readers familiar with Verhaeren’s œuvre. René Ghil, for instance, was
quick to challenge Marinetti’s claim of having been the first to glorify
the industrial world by reminding him of Verhaeren’s poems: ‘You
claim that ten years ago, you yourself published the first books that
glorified factories and the machines that were used across the cities.
But already before you, Émile Verhaeren played to the same tune’
(Ghil 1909: 170). The Nicaraguan-born poet Rubén Dario suggests the
same parallel from the Buenos Aires daily La Nacion (Dario 1909: 28)
whilst in Italy, Ardengo Soffici, in his La ricetta di Ribi buffone (The
Recipe of Ribi the Buffoon), satirized the new movement and named
Verhaeren as one of its key forerunners: ‘Here we go: Grab a kilo of
Verhaeren, two-hundred grams of Alfred Jarry, one-hundred of
Laforgue, thirty of Laurent Tailhade, five of Vielé-Griffin, a handful
of Morasso – yes even some Morasso – a pinch of Pascoli, a little
phial of Nunzian water’ (Soffici 1909: 63).
Such comments must have become so commonplace that, in 1920,

the journalist and literary critic Dominique Braga felt the need to put
an end to these comparisons and underline instead the differences
between the two writers:
Marinetti still deserves the title of ‘great inventor’. All that is viable in
today’s experiments are things that he was already working on in his
time [...]. One should not say that this route was already opened up by
Verhaeren. Verhaeren only enlarged the scope of lyricism, while
Marinetti intends to substitute one lyricism for another. Verhaeren
offers him the topic of industrialism, but as far as inspiration and
method is concerned, he remains a traditionalist (Braga 1920 [1979:
31-33]).
Indeed, Verhaeren’s celebration of the industrial world was expressed

in free verses that did not contain much formal innovations. However,
this did not seem to matter to the Futurists. On the contrary, they very
much considered Verhaeren as one of them. Raphael Barquissau
reported, in 1911, that Marinetti at his conference at the Maison des
Étudiants in Paris, referred to Verhaeren as ‘a great Futurist poet’
(Barquissau 1911 [1980: 200-201]), and Papini, in his mémoir of the
movement, did not hesitate to call Verhaeren ‘the first great Futurist
poet’ (Papini, 1919 [1981: 152]).
In a study on Futurism and the technological imagination, we must
ask ourselves why Verhaeren’s celebration of the technological world
was so widely regarded as “Futurist’ when, in actual fact, the Belgian
poet’s attempts at revolutionizing literary forms were only rather
timid. In ‘Authors and Writers’ Roland Barthes describes the societal
practice of ‘sacralizing’ ‘the author’s struggle with form’ as a way to
‘distance the work’s content when it risks becoming an
embarrassment’ (1972 [2000: 189]). This sacralization, insists
Barthes, neutralizes a work’s subversive content, as a result ‘every
author is eventually digested by the literary institution’. Was
Verhaeren’s poetic expression more ‘Futurist’ than it appears at first
glance or have we, in our accounts of Futurism, emphasized its formal
achievements at the expense of content, and thus censored, as Barthes
would put it, its most revolutionary ingredient? Given the Futurists’
‘appropriation’ of Verhaeren, how do we place his œuvre in the
panorama of Futurist literature? Answering these questions will aid
our understanding of what Futurism stood for and of the extent to
which Verhaeren’s literary works really were ‘Futurist’.
Illustr. 2: Marinetti's letter to Verhaeren, relating the ‘Poesia’ group’s enthusiasm for
Verhaeren’s ‘vehement genius’. The letter is undated, but it says that it was written
about twenty days before the publication of the first 1908 issue of ‘Poesia’.
Manuscript FSXVI 148/773, Bruxelles, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Archives &
Musée de la Littérature, fonds Emile Verhaeren.
Retrospectively, it can be said that Verhaeren’s technological

imagination offered to the Futurists more than a source of inspiration.
It marked a shift in the history of European literature from Romantic
to Futurist sensibility. Even at the beginning of Verhaeren’s career,
trains and machines were not a new subject matter, as the works of
many French Naturalists testify. However, in these works, scientific
progress and capitalist industry were presented as forces exerting
power over the individuals, determining their sentiments, desires,
virtues and vices. Machines were depicted as both beautiful and
destructive; more importantly, human beings were often portrayed as
victims rather than beneficiaries of technological progress.
Illustr. 3: Brussels, end of 19th century. Belgium played a leading role in the
development of urban transport, a sector closely connected with its thriving steel
industry. From a contemporary postcard.
The shift to a Futurist sensibility entailed a reversal of perspective.

It was humankind that took possession of an increasingly mechanized
world and enjoyed it as a ‘biophilic’ force. As Giovanni Recupero
summarised, Futurist man places himself ‘at the centre and at the top
of the world as a dominator, full of strength, love, courage,
intelligence and hard will’. (Recupero 1959: 42). Such a shift is also
evident in Verhaeren’s representation of the newly born industrial
cities. If previous representations of the modern city had emphasized
anxiety, terror or ambiguous fascination, Verhaeren’s poetry, by
contrast, was about sheer empowerment:
O the huge city […]!

Strong ardours, gnarled hopes, logical forces,
Which are flog with the will that feeds each spirit […]
And the marvellous trains on their iron tracks,

their thrusting motions plumed with pallid fumes,
were rolling on, and vibrating, and whistling […]
New rhythm, feverish and panting rhythm,

Dominating rhythm which took possession of the whole soul
And in its fury conquered the pace of time!

(‘Attractions’, The Supreme Rhythms)
Like Marinetti, Verhaeren reacted against his own Symbolist

masters and broke the tradition of urban melancholy and moral decay,
which had characterized so much of Symbolist literature. Instead, he
unleashed the positive energy of the urban space and sought to depict
the Big City as a place of life, a centre of energetic forces and a glory
of the industrial world:
And it’s you, you cities, […]

Who have concentrated in yourselves enough humanity,
Enough red force and new clarity,
To ignite with fertile fever and rage
The patient or violent brains of those
Who discover the rule and hold
the world within themselves
(‘Into the Futur’, The Tentacular Cities)
In this poetry, the city is no longer a distressing space inhabited by

alienated crowds, nor is it a purely aesthetical experience as in the
polychromatic street-spectacle conjured up by Gustave Kahn (Kahn
1900), who had also in other ways been an important source of
inspiration to Marinetti. Like the spectacle of the frantic machines, the
city stands as a reminder of human dominance and a rejection of the
Naturalist denial of free will: ‘Man is the master at last / of both
himself and the earth’ recites ‘The Future’ (The Tumultuous Forces).
Analogous to this ideological reversal was an aesthetic
development that also coincided with the propagation of the first
Futurist manifestos. Convinced that modern art had to abandon
Romantic passéism as well as the splendid isolation of the Symbolist
ivory tower, Verhaeren formulated the concept of an outward-looking
art that was rooted in the present while also projecting ‘thoughts of the
future‘ (Verhaeren 1903: 323). He inaugurated the Futurist battle
against the lovers of the past as well as the ‘lovers of the moon’, as
Marinetti had characterized the Symbolists, and called for an anti-
academic approach to poetry based on sensualist enticement rather
than intellectualization. The powerful sense of elation which radiates
from the spectacle of modernity must be a shared experience between
the author and the reader so as to reach out to the masses:
Tell! The docks crammed up to their tops

And the mountains and the desert, and the forests,
And their centuries captured as in traps;
Tell! […]
(‘The Port’, The Tentacular Cities)
By doing so, Verhaeren also marked the shift from Romantic

contemplation to Futurist intermingling (‘interprenetrazione’), from
an individualistic lyricism to a poetry that demands the active
participation of the reader. ‘For us’, explains Boccioni, ‘the picture is
no longer an exterior scene, a stage for the depiction of a fact. A
picture is not an irradiating architectural structure in which the artist,
rather than the object, forms a central core. It is an emotive
architectural environment which creates sensation and completely
involves the observer.’ (Boccioni 1914 [1973: 177]). A work of art
becomes an open emotional space that erodes the divide between the
artist and his public so that the sense of elation can be transmitted to
the reader or, in the case of paintings, to the viewer. Verhaeren’s
ability to open up emotional space through a compelling depiction of
the modern world made a great impression on his contemporaries. For
Albert Mockel, author of one of the first monographs on Verhaeren,
he was nothing less than ‘the poet of energy’ (Mockel 1917), and for
Jouve he was the ‘mighty and noble poet’ (Jouve 1910 [1996: 59]). If
Marinetti was the ‘caffeine of Europe’, Verhaeren was, in Marinetti’s
words, ‘the vehement genius’ (Marinetti s.d.) that he likened to a
‘volcano’ (Marinetti 1908: 35).
Lamenting a lack of ‘teachers of enthusiasm’ in contemporary
culture (Verhaeren 1903: 323), Verhaeren became himself one of
them. The most theatrical testimony is found in a letter Rainer Maria
Rilke wrote to Verhaeren, in which he recalled how he had received a
parcel with Les Rythmes souverains (The Supreme Rhythms) and
how, on his way home, he had to restrain himself from reading the
poems aloud in the street. (Rilke 1910 [1955: 32-33]) Perhaps nobody
has summarized better than Rémy de Gourmont the effect Verhaeren
had on the literary scene of the time: ‘In Mr. Verhaeren’s works,
novelty and intensity are turned into beauty. He is a great poet and,
ever since his Tentacular Cities emerged on the scene with the force
of an earthquake, no one can deny him the status and the laurels of a
great poet’ (De Gourmont 1896: 36).
Predictably, Verhaeren’s idiosyncratic style did not please

everybody. Just like Marinetti later on, his vehemence prevented him
from conquering the heart of French readers, who considered him a
‘barbarian’, a ‘Viking’, a ‘Germanic writer’. This ‘Man of the North’
wrote with a fierce Flemish temperament and not at all like a
measured and composed Latin soul (Heumann 1913: 60-62). To such
criticism, Verhaeren would reply that an ‘inharmonious’ society could
only give rise to an ‘inharmonious’ art (Verhaeren 1897: 89), thus
reaffirming, again, his ‘Futurist’ intoxication with the modern,
industrial world.
The urban and technological epic
If there is a literary genre that traditionally embeds concepts of power,

energy, enticement and celebration, it is the epos. The conventional
epic has been shaped over the years by the war-oriented model which
in Western literature was established in ancient and medieval times.
Since then, writers of all cultures have reinterpreted this genre in a
variety of ways. When Verhaeren wrote his collections of poems, the
epic genre had been considerably transformed by the Romantics, who
saw in it a model for a literature of pathos. In France, Victor Hugo had
modernized both the structure and the themes of the epic tradition
through short epic poems (petites épopées) that celebrated the history
of humanity from the Bible to his days and thus captured the
splendour of mankind’s long journey from the ages of darkness to the
radiant wonders of the present time. It is only natural that Verhaeren
would turn to this genre in order to express and exalt the energy of the
industrial world which, for him, represented yet another stage of
human progress. The poet himself recalled the moment of revelation
when observing the building works for the 1900 International
Exhibition in Paris:
It is the magnificent, the powerful, the immense, which must seduce

us. It is youthful exuberance, boldness and even madness which must
tempt us. Once a goal has been set, our mind must stray beyond this
goal itself, otherwise it becomes sidelined. When, on the eve of the
fifteenth of April, Paris quivered from a frightening fury of work,
when all construction sites of the Champ-de-Mars and the Invalides
howled and the night seemed to be ablaze with fire, who could call
himself a poet and not be swept away by these maelstroms of
labouring, sweating, shouting and panting masses towards a new and

profound art? And what wonderful songs of heroic deeds this has
conjured up in his dreams, songs in which swords will be turned into
hammers? (Verhaeren 1900: 460).
Illustr. 4: The giant telescope, the centrepiece of the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition
that Verhaeren visited as a Mercure de France writer. From Illustrated London News,
5 May 1900, p. 600.
The feverish activity of the building sites recalled in Verhaeren’s

mind nothing less than the heroic deeds of ancient warriors and
prompted him to make comparisons that mythicized the reality
represented. His collections of the so-called Cycle universel –
comprising Les Forces tumultueuses (The Tumultuous Forces: 1902),
La Multiple Splendeur (The Manifold Splendour: 1906) and Les
Rythmes souverains (The Supreme Rhythms: 1910) – , as well as the
collections of Les Villes tentaculaires (The Tentacular Cities: 1895-
1912) and Les Flammes hautes (The High Flames: 1914-1917)1

represent Verhaeren’s attempt at a technological epic that re-
contextualize concepts such as conflict, hubris, heroism and grandeur.
Such features are however modified in order to adapt the epic formula
to modern times. For instance, the industrial setting is taking the place
of war scenes:
The coal is being exposed and all of a sudden, in blocks,

The marble and granite are extracted from the rocks.
And up there in the sky, rise structures
Of broad winches putting the earth to torture.
(‘The Machines’, HF)
The hero of these epics is homo faber as the architect of the depicted
marvels, the warrior who inflicts his will on nature:
Layer after layer, he searched the funeral soils,

He probed the depths of seabed and darkness,
He rebuilt everything […]
(‘Madness’, TF)
The heroic act performed with hammers in the place of swords is

implicit in the industrial setting itself, as it constitutes and reflects the
accomplishments of homo faber and visualizes a modern grandeur that
is both physical and moral:
And slowly, after a thousand years of darkness and struggle,

Man, in the mirror of the universe, has appeared.
He became the master

Who, all of a sudden,
With his straight torso, with his straight forehead,
Asserted himself as such - and isolated himself from his ancestors.
(‘The World’, MS)
Within this setting, it is the urban life itself that provides that quality
of energy that was paramount to epic forms of narration:
1
The Collection Les Flammes hautes, though published posthumously in 1917, was
written during the first half of 1914. From now on, I shall use the following
abbreviations: TC for The Tentacular Cities, TF for The Tumultuous Forces, MS for
The Manifold Splendor, SR for The Supreme Rhythms and HF for The High Flames.
Oh works which come together to create the future!

Marvellous thunders of orderly force
(‘The New City’, HF)
As to the machines, they are humankind’s allies in the battle to

conquer and change the environment, so that ‘everywhere [is]
ironwork’ and the mountain being tunnelled is like ‘a huge factory’
(‘The Tunnel’, HF).
The epic intertext of this industrial poetry did not pass unnoticed
by Gide, who, since the publication of the Tentacular Cities, had
hailed Verhaeren as the only epic poet of his time (Bronne 1955: 50).
As the excerpts from the other collections show, Verhaeren essentially
never abandoned the formula of a modern epic to capture the heroism
of the modern world. Like a modern Virgil, he provided the newly
born industrial civilization with the epic poetry that both defined and
celebrated its identity. Based on human progress rather than national
achievements, this identity coincided with the material and cultural
advances underway in the so-called ‘Banquet years’ of pre-war
Europe. By doing so, Verhaeren not only gave the epic genre new life
through a re-contextualization of its typical features within the context
of twentieth-century reality, but also insinuated the perpetuation of
myth into modern culture, since epic is as much about the
extraordinary as it is about ordinary things. We see trains ‘devouring
space and air’ (‘Forward’, TF), cranes rivalling the sky (‘Gold’, SR),
and banks being transformed into beasts with feverish and golden eyes
(‘Europe’, MS).
Illustr. 5: Brussels, 1835. The inauguration of the Gare de l'Allée Verte, the first
railway station in continental Europe.
It is easy to imagine how this mythology of modernity would

inspire and attract the Futurists throughout the years. Like Verhaeren,
the Futurists exploited the mythopoeic character of the technological
imagination, begetting the myth of speed, of the machine and of the
new man. Nevertheless, one wonders why they would call
Verhaeren’s epic poems ‘Futurist’. At first sight, Futurist literature
seems far removed from the epic tradition. The need for succinctness
expressed through the technique of Words-in-Freedom was antithetic
to epic rhetoric and one might conclude that there could not be such a
thing as a Futurist epic. But this is to forget that Marinetti had
favoured the epic genre in his early career, namely in La Conquête des
Étoiles (1902), Destruction (1904) and Mafarka le futuriste (1909).
Though the former can be said to belong to the prehistory of Futurism,
Mafarka fully represents Futurism and Destruction in its 1911 Italian
edition was entitled Distruzione. Poema futurista. As to Mafarka le
futuriste, its epic character has often puzzled critics precisely because
it contradicts the Futurist technical manifestos as well as their
underlying principle of antipasséism (Miretti 2006). Yet, the epic
genre remained present in Futurist works throughout the years, both
conceptually – in the celebrations of heroism and fight – and
aesthetically – in the representations of energy and dynamism.
Perhaps it is in Marinetti’s critical writings that we can most
appreciate this presence, since the invigorating prose adopted to
propagate the Futurist creed clearly borrowed from the epic tradition.
However this is no less true for many literary works as well. Can we
really read collections such as Zang Tumb Tumb (1914) or Canto eroi
e macchine della guerra mussoliniana (1942) without the word ‘epic’
hovering over our mind? Furthermore, how do we account for
Marinetti’s self-conscious claim to be a ‘Motorized Homer’ (Marinetti
1942: 26)?
Verhaeren made the link between the mechanized world and the
epic. Marinetti took it a stage further, not without first paying homage
to his precursor. In his medallion to Émile Verhaeren, published in the
first 1908 issue of Poesia, it is to Verhaeren, the epic poet, that
Marinetti addressed his opening line: ‘C’est bien toi le rapsode’ (It is
indeed you who are the rhapsode) (Marinetti 1908a: 2). His
admiration was undiminished by the years despite the fact that
Verhaeren, though reciprocating Marinetti’s consideration, never
joined the movement.
The transformation of the mind: daring, fear and the death of

God
The epic rendering of the modern world went hand in hand, as we

have seen, with the creation of new myths, linked to such things as
trains and machines. Allusions to old myths, however, were also
present. The new urban centres were not only utopian realizations of
the cosmopolitan city but also reminders of the biblical Babel.
Similarly, the homo faber of the modern world acted out the story of
Narcissus by admiring himself through the mirror of his own
manufactured world. What both the tales of Babel and Narcissus in
Verhaeren’s poems have in common – and also with the Futurist
allusions to the myth of Icarus – is that they do not have a tragic
ending.
This removal of the tragic element from the myth of Narcissus can
be attributed to the fact that his gazing upon himself was portrayed as
an act of collective self-realization rather than one of self-admiration.
It has been noted that, by rejecting love from others, the transgression
in which Narcissus indulged was that of self-sufficiency (Pietrini
2000: 39-40). By relocating Narcissus in society, Verhaeren was
removing the very reason for the punishment:
I love and admire myself in that ardent act

That a man like me
In his passage on earth makes.
Just like him, I possess Spirit and will,
And what he does, I can do it.
(‘Pride’, HF)
But this stratagem does not automatically question the reason for
Narcissus’ punishment or the principle of divine punishment per se.
Yet, we know that Verhaeren’s poems were meant to be ‘songs of
elation about man and the earth’ aiming at exalting rather than
denigrating human achievements: ‘They exclude humility, either
imposed by religious doctrine, or advised by science, for which,
confronted by the infinite greatness of the worlds and worlds, man is
just a minuscule animal or a speck of dust’ (Verhaeren 1914-1915
[1928: 205]).2 Moreover, Verhaeren’s eradication of the reason for the

punishment is not a stratagem found in his appropriation of other
myths or biblical tales. The metropolis is a modern Babel where, like
in the original source, different peoples are united in one place
speaking one language. The ‘sin’ has not been removed:
[The city] is the gold inferno of human disputes,

It is the reservoir of unique wealth [...]
O the Babels finally realized!
And a hundred peoples melted together in the common city;
And languages dissolving into one;
And the city like a hand, fingers open,
Closing upon the universe!
(‘The Port’, TC).
The reason for Narcissus’ fate in finding a ‘happy ending’ must

therefore lie elsewhere. It rests in the complete absence of a divine
control over human fate. Without a God, no divine punishment can
occur. In a quasi-Futurist vein, Verhaeren points out that machines
have deeply transformed mankind’s hearts and brains (‘Les
Machines’, FH), and in an industrialized world, God has been
replaced by a human supreme being: ‘Gods or God become useless.
Western man tries to do without them. This is the most important
intellectual evolution in a long time.’ (Verhaeren 1907: 615). Here we
see once more a fundamental shift, from a Romantic to a Futurist
sensibility, particularly as technology plays an important role in the
realization of the demise of God. In the Futurist kingdom of machines,
as described in Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine
(Marinetti 1915 [2006: 85-88]), machines constitute the
externalization of human will and symbolize the liberation of
humanity from the restraints of religion. ‘Io = Dio che ha rifiutato il
D, nel peso del suo nome, per esser più veloce’ Mario Carli wrote in
one of his untranslatable3 poems (Carli 1916). What Sharkey, in his
discussion of the role of technology in Futurism, describes as both a
means to liberate humanity from the chains of religion and a symbol
2
Although this comment referred to the collection La Multiple Splendeur (Manifold
Splendour), essentially it is applicable to the other ‘epic’ collections as well, since
they all oppose a morality of humility.
3
The pun ‘Io = Dio’ without a D means that once humans have rejected the divine
they have removed the obstacle to becoming more mobile.
for a new Promethean sensibility (Sharkey 1980: 187) is also true for
Verhaeren’s technological imagination. This is evident in Verhaeren’s
secularization of the Christian principle of analogy widely used in
patristic literature. According to this principle, by admiring nature’s
beauty and grandeur we implicitly contemplate God as its creator.
Conversely (and similarly) technological advances are instead in
Verhaeren’s epic a reflection of human grandeur and announce, as a
result, the advent of a secular society.
This emancipatory discourse underlying the technological
imagination in the works of Verhaeren and of the Futurists deserves
more attention than it has received so far. Industrial progress was not
simply a new source of poetic inspiration suitable for modern times,
but also an opportunity to rethink the future of humankind and its
creative achievements: ‘Art will live in tune with the present and as
close as possible to the future, we will write with audacity and no
more with caution and we will cease to be afraid of our own
intoxication, or of the flaming and fervent poetry into which it will be
translated’ (Verhaeren 1905: 258). This interconnection between the
aesthetical, the ethical and the social was exactly the aim the Futurists
had in their sights. Lista recalls how partial Cubists’ account of the
modern world was in the eyes of the Futurists precisely because it
lacked moral tension (Lista 1980: 32). No futurist work can be
comprehended in the light of exclusively aesthetic conceptions, as we
are constantly reminded throughout the movement’s critical writing:
‘If our pictures are Futurist’, the preface to the catalogue of the first
Paris exhibition states, ‘it is because they are the result of absolutely
Futurist conceptions, ethical, aesthetic, political, social’ (Boccioni
1912: 46).
In Verhaeren’s modernist poems, technology was instrumental in
the process of modernising the arts as well as society and mankind
altogether. Particularly, it was important in redefining the
relationships between humankind and a changing environment:
The order imposed upon the world by force or audacity

Has suddenly changed appearance for the people,
And the crowd gets up and speaks and shouts and wants.
(‘My City’, HF)
Illustr. 6: Brussels’ Stock Exchange in construction, 1871. The country’s rapid

economic growth during the second half of the 19th century led to a demand for
bigger stock exchange premises. The new building also completed the capital’s major
urban renewal designed by the architect Léon Suys, the Belgian ‘Haussmann’.
This new order brings about important religious and cultural

upheavals. In the poem ‘The Plain’ (TC), ‘evangelic wheat’ is being
harvested by ‘diabolic machines’:
Formidable and criminal,

The arms of the diabolical machines,
Mowing evangelic wheat,
Have frightened the old melancholy sower
Whose gesture seemed in accord with heaven.
Wheat is ‘evangelic’ in as much as it is a product of the countryside;

that is, of a society organized around religious beliefs:
The spirit of the countryside was the spirit of God;

It feared research and revolts,
It fell; and it is dying under the axles
And under the carts burning with fresh harvests.
(‘Into the Future’, TC)
Like the Futurists, Verhaeren did not find modern machines

terrifying or a threat to humanity. In fact, they rejected the concept of
fear altogether as this was considered to be a pillar of the old morality
based upon religious values. It is worth remembering that this position
is typical of the secular emancipation discourse. Bertrand Russell,
author of the seminal paper Why I am not a Christian, considered fear
as the very foundation of religion. Religion, Russell felt, derives from
and promotes the fear of death, of defeat and of the unknown. A
‘fearless outlook and a free intelligence’ is instead what Russell
envisages for a new emancipated world (Russell 1927 [1992: 597]).
Similarly Nietzsche, who formulated the very idea of the ‘anti-Christ’,
had suggested that the death of God would free mankind from the
‘slave’ mentality, that is, from a morality of fear and humility
endorsed by religion.
The same opposition between fear and audacity is prominent in
Verhaeren and Futurism. The celebration of the ‘love of danger’ and
the ‘habit of energy and fearlessness’ is, significantly, the first point of
the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism; in a similar vein,
Verhaeren wishes to sing a song dedicated to ‘youthful exuberance,
boldness and even madness’ (Verhaeren 1900: 460). Since technology
is both the externalization of a daring attitude that rejects fear, be it of
change or of the unknown, and the realization of human beings’
Promethean power likening them to a modern god, it is easy to see
how quintessentially anti-Christian this celebration of technology was.
The decriminalization of the ancient sin of pride (hubris) in
Verhaeren’s versions of the myths of Narcissus and Babel (but also, as
other poems show, of Adam and Eve and Perseus and other more or
less religious figures) results in a celebration of this transgression that
had previously been held to be the most fundamental of all sins in
both Christian and Greek religion:
O this bitter and ever constant fury [...]

It alone composes hope and faith
And the modern pride of men [...]
It is their new being, fierce and starved
By the new necessity;
It is their tough strength, it is their heart formed
By the frenzies of their brain
(‘The New City’, HF)
The industrial world, with its constructions, technological

inventions and fearless domination of nature is ultimately the
spectacle of a modern hubris performed by an emancipated homo
faber freed from the bondage of religion and obsolete morality.
Paraphrasing Alain Touraine, for whom the identification of the social
actor with his work is a fundamental feature of modernity itself
(Touraine 1992), one may deduce that Verhaeren’s urban and
technological epic is not only instrumental to the birth of a Futurist
art, but also a testimony to the beginning of modernist thinking.
Though Verhaeren was neither a philosopher nor a politician, the
realization that a mechanized world would endorse a new secular
morality based upon pride further assimilates him into the Futurist
fold. Ultimately it shows how, in the same way as there was a
connection between Romanticism and mysticism, there was a
connection between Futurism and secularism.
This is not to suggest that the technological imagination displayed
in Verhaeren’s œuvre or indeed in Futurist works stands as a denial of
spirituality. Far from it. But the sense of spirituality derived from the
contemplation of man fused with the mechanical world is one that
actually reaffirms humankind’s ‘humanity’ in a remarkably modern
way. Instead of returning to religious values, Futurism marks the
development from the secular rationality of the Age of Enlightenment
towards a twentieth-century secularism that accepts the irrational side
of human beings, and seeks to integrate it into a modern morality
(Janne 1979: 322).
Epiphanic Futurism versus programmatic Futurism
I have so far highlighted the numerous convergences of Verhaeren’s

technological imagination with that of the Futurists, whose
uncompromising attachment to modernity led to the creation of new
artistic forms of expression as well as to a radical rethinking of all
spheres of human existence, including ethics, politics and religion.
However, at the same time one should not ignore their dissimilarities.
There were differences in the literary forms adopted, which we have
already discussed, as well as in the subject matter – Verhaeren
privileging, for example, the power of the train over the speed of the
car. There was a difference in their approach to militancy, since
Verhaeren never used manifestos, soirées or any other avant-garde

means of provocation, although he did participate in the attempts
undertaken by the Belgian Socialist Party to ‘educate’ the masses.
More importantly, it must be underlined that whilst Marinetti’s
Futurism was national and programmatic, Verhaeren’s ambitions were
‘cross-cultural’ and less concerned with a programme for modernising
society than with the recognition and celebration of the modernization
that was already underway.
This fundamental difference was a reflection of two national
realities. The industrial modernization which Verhaeren referred to
was very much part of his contemporary world. Unlike Italy, Belgium
was a highly industrialized country, which since the early 1800s
formed part of the global process of modernization. By 1840, Belgium
had become one of the foremost industrial nations in Europe, selling
steel and iron all over Europe. Industrial power had become a potent
source of economic and national identity for the country. In 1880, at
the fiftieth anniversary of Belgian independence, a large public
exhibition was organized in which Belgian industry and commerce
were displayed as a glorious patrimony. Verhaeren's challenge was
therefore not so much concerned with the foundation of a modern
society but with the ways this could be represented in literature.
Instead of starting a cultural revolution, he wanted to explore and
celebrate the complex network of cultural and moral consequences of
the changes that had already taken place. In other words, his
enthusiasm for the future and for modernity must be understood in the
context of an epiphanic rather than programmatic Futurism.
The different degrees of aggression and poetic innovation in the
works of Verhaeren and Marinetti, as well as the differences in the
choice of literary techniques, were the result of these two Futurisms,
which, it is worth underlining, the Futurists may not at all have
perceived as being fundamentally different, especially during the first
years of the movement, when they were glorifying modern life in a
manner that was very similar to Verhaeren’s works.
The first ‘Futurism issue’ of Poesia4 is a precious testimony to this.
It contains the first self-avowed Futurist poems, but none of them
4
The issue vol. 5, nos. 3-6 of April-July 1909 carries the subtitle ‘Il futurismo’ and
prints, amongst others, the full and uncensored text of the Foundation and Manifesto
of Futurism, an interview with Marinetti and excerpts from the international press
reaction to the manifesto published in Le Figaro.
flaunts a typographical revolution. Nonetheless, they all celebrate the

modern world and its spirit in verses that are all but ground-breaking,
e.g., Marinetti’s Hors du possible noir en plein azur absurd (chant
futuriste) and Libero Altomare’s two Canti futuristi. Similarly, Marie
Dauguet’s poem, Futurisme, is composed in the most classic of
prosodic forms, the sonnet. A few years later, Marinetti unequivocally
wrote to his friend Mac Delmarle: “The word Futurism contains the
widest possible formula for renewal: one which, being both hygienic
and exciting, simplifies doubt, destroys scepticism, and gathers all
endeavour into a powerful sense of elation’ (Marinetti 1913: 105). In
the same spirit, the exhibition on Futurism that took place in Venice in
1986 was appropriately entitled Futurismo & Futurismi, as was the
special number on Futurism of La Quinzaine Littéraire that was also
issued in 1986.
The suggestion made here is that when it comes to Futurism it
might be equally accurate to talk about ‘Futurisms’. Geographical
divisions – not just internationally but also within the Italian
movement itself (Florentine, Turinese, Neapolitan, and so on) – often
coincided with inherent divergences rooted in the movement’s
ingrained pluralism. Perhaps it is only through adopting the same
inclusive approach that we can understand the many paradoxes that
have shaped and defined Futurism, from its collusion with a
reactionary regime as a means to modernize and revolutionize Italian
culture to its nationalist agenda despite an international appeal. It is
with this in mind that I have attempted at making sense of the
particular paradox of a Futurist literature preceding - and
accompanying - Futurism.
Acknowledgments: I wish to express my gratitude to Sofie van den

Aemet for her willingness to share her collection of photographs of
Old Brussels, which can be found on line at <http://sofei-
vandenaemet.skynetblogs.be/archive-week/2007-15>.
Bibliography
a) Primary texts
Apollonio, Umbro (ed.). 1973. Futurist Manifestos. London: Thames and Hudson.
Boccioni. 1912. ‘The Exhibitors to the Public’, in Apollonio 1973: 45-50.
––. 1914. Pittura scultura futuriste. Milano: Edizioni futuriste di Poesia. Partly
reprinted in Apollonio 1973: 172-181.
Boccioni, Umberto, et al. 1910a. ‘Manifesto of the Futurist Painters’ in Apollonio
1973: 24-27.
Carli, Mario. 1916. ‘L’intervista con un caproni’, in L’Italia futurista 1(10): 2.
Kahn, Gustave. 1900. L'Esthétique de la rue. Paris: Société d’Édition Artistique.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. 1908a. ‘A Emile Verhaeren’, in Poesia 4(1): 2-3.
––. 1908b. ‘La Manifestation de la Belgique en l’honneur d’Émile Verhaeren’, in
Poesia 4(10): 35.
––. 1913. ‘An Open Letter to the Futurist Mac Delmarle’, in Lacerba 1(16): 174.
Translated in Marinetti 2006: 104-106.
––. 1915. ‘Uomo moltiplicato e il regno della macchina’, in Guerra, sola igiene del
mondo. Milano: Edizioni futuriste di ‘Poesia’. Translated in Marinetti 2006: 85-
93.
––. 1942. Canto eroi e macchine della guerra mussoliniana. Milano: Mondadori.
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––. s.d. Letter to Emile Verhaeren: Bruxelles: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique,
Archives & Musée de la Littérature, fonds Emile Verhaeren, Manuscript FSXVI
148/773.
Papini, Giovanni. 1919. L’esperienza futurista. Firenze: Vallecchi. Reprinted in 1981.
Soffici, Ardengo. 1909. ‘La ricetta di Ribi buffone’ in La Voce 1(16): 63.
Verhaeren, Émile. 1895-1912. Les Villes tentaculaires. First edition (1985):
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de France: 197-205.
––. 1917. Les Flammes hautes. Paris: Mercure de France.
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Barquissau, Raphael. 1911. ‘Protestation des Étudiants contre l’article du Matin’ in

Lista, Giovanni (ed.). 1980. Le Futurisme: F.T. Marinetti. Milano: Mondadori:
200-201.
Barthes, Roland. 1972. ‘Authors and Writers’, in Critical Essays (tr. Richard
Howard). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Reprinted in Barthes, Roland.
2000. A Roland Barthes Reader (ed. Susan Sontag): London: Vintage: 185-193.
Berghaus, Günter. 1995. The Genesis of Futurism: Marinetti's Early Career and
Writings, 1899-1909. Leeds: Society for Italian Studies.
Braga, Dominique. ‘Le Futurisme’, in Le Crapouillot (15 April 1920): 2-3. Reprinted
in Jannini, Pasquale A. 1979. La Fortuna del futurismo in Francia. Roma:
Bulzoni: 31-33.
Bronne, Carlo (ed.). 1955. Rilke, Gide et Verhaeren: Correspondance inédite.
Bruxelles: Messein.
Dario, Ruben. 1909. ‘Marinetti y el Futurismo’, in La Nacion (5 April 1909).
Reprinted in Poesia 5 (3-4-5-6): 28-30.
De Gourmont, Rémy. 1986. Livres des Masques. Paris: Mercure de France.
Ghil, Réné. 1909. ‘Du Futurisme au primitivisme’, in Poésie (Toulouse) 5 (31-32-33):
170.
Gobbers, Walter. 1991.‘Résonances futuristes’, in Weisgerber, Jean (ed.), Les Avant-
gardes littéraires en Belgique. Bruxelles: Labor: 173-204.
Gullentops, David. 1996. ‘Verhaeren and Marinetti’, in Forum for Modern Language
Studies 32 (2): 107-118.
Hadermann, Paul. 1982. ‘Echos du futurisme en Belgique’ in Marcadé, Jean-Claude
(ed.) Présence de F.T. Marinetti. Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme: 287-302.
Hainsworth, John B. 1991. The Idea of Epic. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Heumann, Albert. 1913. Mouvement littéraire belge d’expression française depuis
1880. Paris: Mercure de France.
Janne, Henri. 1979. ‘Spécificité de la morale laïque’, in Hasquin, Hervé (ed.) Histoire
de la laicité. Bruxelles: La Renaissance du Livre: 305-327.
Jones, Percy Mancell. 1957. Verhaeren. London: Bowes & Bowes.
Jouve, Pierre Jean. 1910. Muses Romaines et Florentines. Paris: Vanier. Letter of
dedication accompanying the copy possessed by Verhaeren. See: Gullentops,
Emile. 1996. Inventaire de la bibliothèque de Emile Verhaeren à Saint-Cloud.
Paris: Lettres modernes: 59.
Lista, Giovanni (ed). 1980. Le Futurisme. F.T. Marinetti. Lausanne: L’Age
d’Homme.
Miretti, Lorenza. 2006. ‘Un romanzo anomalo nel meccanismo editoriale di Poesia’
in Rivista di Letteratura Italiana 24 (2): 59-65.
Mockel, Albert. 1917. Un poète de l’énergie. Émile Verhaeren. L’œuvre et l’homme.
Paris: La Renaissance du Livre.
Pietrini, Sandra. 2000. ‘Realtà, immagini e riflessi. La morale dello specchio. Un

simbolo passe-partout in duemila anni di cultura occidentale’, in Etruria oggi 18
(52): 39-45.
Recupero, Giovanni. 1959. Il futurismo. Roma: De Luca.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. 1910. Letter to Verhaeren (7 April 1910) in Bronne 1955: 32-33.
Russell, Bertrand. 1927. Why I am not a Christian. London: Watts. Reprinted in
Russell, Bertrand. 1992. The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, 1903-1959 (eds.
Egner, Robert E. and Lester E. Dennon): London: Routledge: 585-597.
Sharkey, Stephan Richard. 1980. Art into Society: The Case of Italian Futurism. PhD
thesis. University of Connecticut.
Touraine, Alain. 1992. Critique de la modernité. Paris: Fayard.
Loie Fuller’s Serpentine Dance and Futurism:
Electricity, Technological Imagination and the Myth of
the Machine
Patrizia Veroli
Abstract: The American dancer Loie Fuller, muse of the Symbolists and mentioned by
Marinetti in the Manifesto of Futurist Dance (1917), was responsible for a radical,
conceptual innovation in the field of dance that exerted an important influence on the
Futurists. Her Serpentine Dance (1892) made use of artificial extensions of the
dancer’s arms, allowing her to move the hem of an enormously large costume into the
surrounding space, and employed magic lanterns that projected varying coloured
lights onto the costume’s cloth. By these means, her dance achieved the suggestion of
a prosthetic body, exploiting electricity in a phantasmagoric way. Fuller made her
costumed body shift in space as if it were a rhythmically moving shape that existed
independently of herself as an animated, chromo-luminous mechanism. Loie Fuller’s
influence, paradoxically, did not fully materialize in the field of Futurist dance, where
the model of the robot prevailed over her subtle strategy of allusive effects. The
dematerialization of physicality and the chromatic transmutation of Fuller’s dances
influenced Ginna and Corra, inspired the stage-set of Balla’s Feu d’artifice (1917) and
played a significant role in Prampolini’s staging theories.
Introduction
In his 1917 Manifesto of Futurist Dance, Marinetti makes open

reference to Loie Fuller (1862-1928), the American dancer who took
Paris by storm in 1892. After passing in review the main dancers of
the times, Vaslav Nijinsky, Isadora Duncan and Valentine de Saint-
Point, and Dalcroze’s rhythmic gymnastics, considered then a cutting
edge method for teaching music, he states: ‘We Futurists prefer Loïe
Fuller and the Negroes’ cakewalk (making use of electric light and
mechanical devices)’ (Marinetti 1917: 210)1. Loie Fuller, or the ‘fée
1
Having arrived in Paris in 1909 with Serge de Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company,
Nijinsky became famous as a dancer and choreographer, innovating the classic,
academic code of ballet which was rooted in the baroque aesthetics of the
seventeenth century. The American Isadora Duncan had instead offered a
completely different model of dance, with new, self-referential rules that shaped an
126 Patrizia Veroli
Illustr. 1: Ewald Thiel, Stage lighting used for the Serpentine Dance, from Für alle
Welt: Illustrierte Familienzeitschrift (Wien; Berlin; Leipzig), no. 1 (1895) p. 14.
Brygida Ochaim Collection, Munich.
expressive language comparable, according to Marinetti, to the one of

Impressionism in painting. On Valentine de Saint-Point’s dances see Berghaus 1993.
Marinetti recognized mechanical elements also in the cakewalk, a traditional Afro-
American dance, realized by carrying a jug of water on one’s head and proceeding
with a stiff, erected gait, in order not to spill any drop of the liquid (Fauley Emery
1988: 91-92).
Loie Fuller’s Serpentine Dance and Futurism 127
de la lumière’, as she was called in France, was bound to attract

modern-minded intellectuals such as Marinetti. Fuller had studied
ways of using lighting design, prosthetic body parts and playwriting in
order to obtain a performance with subtly mechanical characteristics.
However, Fuller was more than a dancer for Marinetti and the early
Futurists. A thorough examination of Futurist iconography and texts,
which would exceed the limits of the present study, would surely
recognize the depth and duration of the influence she exerted in a
variety of domains. Her Serpentine Dance offered a conceptual model
for the modern artwork envisioned by the Futurists: the light, colour
and the shapes created by the body in movement seemed capable of
achieving, through an inter-penetration of space and time, the
‘vertiginous movement of human life’ identified by Boccioni
(Boccioni 1911: 11). When Enrico Prampolini, in his essay From
Impressionist Dance to Futurist Dance (1931), explained the
historical importance of Fuller, he incorrectly depicted the great
impact she had on Futurism and especially on himself by placing her
restrictively within a narrative of dance history and by reducing her
formal innovations to examples of ‘chromatic ornamentation’
(Prampolini 1931: 5).
In this chapter, I intend to examine the convergence between Loie
Fuller’s and Marinetti’s artistic visions and to point out some of the
influence that her art exerted on early Futurism. The Serpentine Dance
was at the core of Fuller’s choreographic development and remains an
iconic encapsulation of her work. It transcended the traditional
limitations of specific disciplines, merging dance with optical
machinery, early cinematic and technological innovations,
esotericism, the discovery of the unconscious, early mass media and
anti-naturalistic impulses in theatre and the visual arts. As a film
scholar, Tom Gunning has recognized, Fuller constitutes a brilliant
example of the ‘pas des deux in the ideal and the material’ that
characterized the fin-de-siècle, since ‘she literally embodies the
modern enigma of the representation of motion, its attempt to define
and transcend binaries of gender material / ideal, knowledge and
mystery’ (Gunning 2002: 28).
Marinetti is very likely to have seen Loie Fuller perform at either
the Folies-Bergères, where she made her debut and was for a long
time the main star, or in other Parisian music halls, perhaps even in
the small theatre that the American artist herself had commissioned
128 Patrizia Veroli
and that had been built for her performances at the Universal
Exhibition of 1900. Filmed and hand-coloured versions of the
Serpentine Dance circulated very early. These recordings, made by
pioneers of early cinema, such as Edison, the Skladanowsky Brothers,
Gaumont and Nadar, could be viewed publicly in music halls or
privately in kinetophones, another of Edison’s marvellous inventions,
which were widely available in the amusement parks of the time.
Almost certainly, however, these early films did not portray Loie
Fuller, but other dancers who, using similar technological devices, had
been copying the Serpentine Dance after its first performance in New
York.2 Therefore, Marinetti and the Futurists did not have to travel to
Paris to watch and analyse Fuller’s dances. Images of the Serpentine
Dance were widely available to them through mechanical
reproductions, in addition to the photographs, posters and postcards
that represented her performance. At the time, when Marinetti
launched the Futurist movement, the Serpentine Dance had already
acquired a mythical status, even if Fuller herself, then forty-seven, had
almost totally stopped performing it and had shifted her focus to
teaching and creating choreographies for her students.
An icon between high and low art
Loie Fuller testifies to a fascinating kind of theatrical practice which,

first elaborated in the context of American mass culture, was
subsequently established as part of high European culture. Fuller
became the muse of the French Symbolists and, as a consequence,
aroused the interest of the Futurists who often featured her in their
works. However, in the field of dance studies, she was not given much
attention. It is not insignificant that, as long as Loie Fuller was
classified as a mass culture phenomenon, American scholars did not
2
Elizabeth Coffmann (2002: 76. 98) is the sole scholar who has identified Fuller in a
Danse du feu produced in 1906 by Gaumont. A copy of this film is at the New York
Public Library. Giovanni Lista (1994: 638-648) does not include this film in the
extensive ‘Filmographie’ of his biography of the dancer. I have not been able to see
the film in person. In France, Loie Fuller changed her name to « Loïe » for phonetic
reasons: originally it would have meant in French ‘the goose’ (‘l’oie’), an ambiguity
that anyhow gave rise to a series of cartoons. Scholars currently use both versions of
her name. In this text, I will follow the American spelling, but in quoting from
sources will adhere of the one used originally.
pay much attention to her works. It was only in the 1970s, when the
‘great divide’ between high art and mass culture had finally been
overcome, that the first serious explorations of her performing career
set in. (Huyssen 1986: 44-62).
In the postmodern era, characterized by the growing contamination
between the genres of the spectacle and the arts and by the distinct
role that temporal flux plays in the visual arts, a technological body,
dancing in close connection with a mechanical apparatus, is bound to
exert much greater influence than an expressive dance based on
psychological tensions and general humanistic concerns. While the
number of monographic studies devoted to Loie Fuller is constantly
growing (see Haile Harris 1979; Brandstetter and Ochaim 1989; Lista
1994, Current and Ewing Current 1997; Danzker 1995; Thomas and
Perrin 2002; Cooper Albright 2007; Garelick 2007; Veroli 2009), the
centenary of Futurism is now being celebrated in McLuhan’s global
village, a situation strikingly similar to the one foreseen by Marinetti.
‘All that is solid melts into the air’: the title of Marshall Berman’s
book on the effects of the technological revolution and on the
transformation of human experience brought by modernity offers a
quite fitting definition for Fuller’s dance. Fuller had been an actress
and singer in the vaudeville and burlesque theatre in the United States
until, in 1892, she invented a new kind of dance and launched a new
theatrical genre that took advantage of the growing availability of
electric illumination. Her innovative dance reworked the model of the
skirt dance, popular at the time on both sides of the Atlantic, in which
the dancers manoeuvred large gowns while acrobatically twirling
around the stage. Loie Fuller employed much larger costumes, made
of ultra-light silk. Reportedly, some of them measured up to 450
meters in width; they could be extended in any direction up to three
meters and raised upward, reaching a height of six meters. The
perimeter of the hem measured roughly 90 meters3. She used to sew
bamboo sticks inside the costume and employ them to manipulate the
3
Loie Fuller herself revealed these numbers in an interview for the periodical Blade
(11 April 1896): she had made this costume for a dance entitled Le Lys du Nil
(Sommer 1975: 65). While Fuller was a strong promoter of her shows and may not
have been absolutely precise in quoting these dimensions, the images that we have
suggest quite extraordinary widths, requiring great physical strength. Contemporary
sources testify to the physical exhaustion she experienced after her perfomance
(Lorrain 1897b: 176; Mauclair 1904: 117).
130 Patrizia Veroli
cloth and launch it in any direction, with powerful effects. She also
had a system of magic lanterns, positioned in different sites of the
theatre, project coloured light upon her. This allowed her to create
figures that evoked the flight of a giant butterfly, the blooming of a
lily, the uncoiling of a serpent, etc4. In 1895, she realized her most
sensational solo piece, La Danse du feu, executed on the notes of
Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. Moving on a transparent platform
raised in respect to the stage, she was showered with lights emanating
not only from different spots in the theatre hall, as was her usual way,
but also from underneath her feet. Thus, her dance conveyed a much
more efficient impression of the slow flickering of a fire turning into
violent flames until they covered the mass of her moving veils with a
profusion of changing colours, progressively fading one after the
other. The system of lighting placed underneath her summoned the
idea of light resulting from a process of burning logs which, in 1879,
had been supplanted by the invention of the light bulb. The dancer’s
body was almost invisible, giving way to a luminous, chromatic
phantasmagoria in constant evolution that seemed to live on its own
and within which the public might catch only a glimpse of Fuller’s
smiling face.
When, in 1894, the young Marinetti went to Paris to obtain his
baccalauréat certification, Loie Fuller was already a star. Stéphane
Mallarmé’s eulogy of 1893, in which he exalted the incorporeity and
asexuality of her performance as a new model for poetry, had helped
the American to establish the Serpentine Dance in Paris, where the
possibilities for theatrical entertainment were the largest and most
prestigious in Europe. The posters portraying Loie Fuller in the
luminous and coloured vortex of her veils, signed by famous artists
such as Chéret and Toulouse-Lautrec, covered Parisian walls, Morris
columns and playhouses. In the 1890s, following Mallarmé’s praise,
Symbolism and Fullerism became as one. For the Symbolists, as Guy
Ducrey has noted (1996: 442), the dancer seemed to offer the perfect
visual transcription of Mallarmé’s theories, physically embodying the
towering role that he assigned to poetry. The metaphors used by
Mallarmé in describing Fuller’s dance were re-employed not only in
many newspaper articles, but also in several short stories and novels,
4
She was responsible for choosing the timing, colours and projected drawings and
was helped by a team of electricians, ranging up to over thirty people.
featuring dancer-heroines that she inspired. For a public entrenched in

Symbolist culture, the American performer opened up an artificial
space that was not subjected to the constraints of everyday life. The
moral condemnation and scorn towards women in the theatre (dancers
and actresses alike), which had soared after the publication of Zola’s
novel Nana (1880), seemed to be miraculously suspended for her. In
Italy, Umberto Notari published an interview with Fuller in 1902. He
showed great enthusiasm for a woman who, although wearing ‘the
pince-nez of a fourth-grade teacher’ was ‘an aesthete, a masterful
psychologist of art, a formidable erudite [... who] is animated by a
sacred frenzy, as a celestial messenger who comes to take us away
from viewing the wounding conflicts of everyday life, with the supple
and large rhythm of her illuminated gauzes’ (Notari 1902:56-57).
Notari’s text, published in the same year of Fuller’s only Italian
tour, was largely influenced by the vision of Fuller as a regenerating
and redeeming figure popularized by Camille Mauclair, a sort of
spiritual heir to Mallarmé, in a famous article for the Revue blanche.
Mauclair’s article had appeared in the same months in which Marinetti
had started collaborating with the journal.5 In 1902, Marinetti’s
enthusiasm for Mallarmé was at its peak; in the French periodical
L’Ermitage, he had described him as his favourite poet who, in works
such as L’Après-midi d’un faune and Hérodiade, had succeeded in
creating ‘a poetic symphony, as definitive and magic as the one
created in music by Richard Wagner’ (Jannini 1983: 23). In February
1905, Marinetti, together with Vitaliano Ponti and Sem Benelli,
started editing the monthly Poesia. Works by several symbolist
writers, along with Mauclair’s, were published in the first issue of the
journal. This fact testifies to Marinetti’s deep roots in the literary
movement headed in the previous years by Mallarmé (who had died in
1898).6 In 1908, Poesia published Gian Pietro Lucini’s long poem
5
Mauclair’s article, ‘Sada Yacco et Loïe Fuller’, appeared in La Revue blanche, 15
October 1900. On 15 August, Marinetti had published a text in the same journal,
devoted to the Milanese revolts of 1898. Later, Marinetti would dedicate one of the
poems of La Ville charnelle (1908) to Mauclair. Fuller’s Italian tour (April 1902)
went to Rome, Naples, Florence, Genoa, Turin and Milan.
6
The influence of Mallarmé on Marinetti is further testified by the role that the Italian
poet assumed in diffusing the Frenchman’s work. Marinetti was the first to translate
Mallarmé’s Vers et Proses in Italian in 1916, in a series titled ‘Raccolta di breviari
intellectuali’ for the Istituto Editoriale Italiano, a publishing house owned by
Umberto Notari.
132 Patrizia Veroli
‘The Sacred Dance’, openly inspired by Georges Rodenbach’s ‘La

Loïe Fuller’, which had appeared in the Revue illustrée of January-
June 1893. Lucini was mesmerized by the chromatic metamorphosis
realized by Fuller on stage, but he still remained anchored to the
stereotype of the femme fatale, dismissed by Mallarmé in his
appraisal.
As for Marinetti’s production in those same years, I believe that a
thorough analysis of his writings on theatre would demonstrate the
influence exerted by Loie Fuller’s staged body on his interest in
electric light. The character of Sainte Pourriture in Roi Bombance
(King Guzzle; published in 1905 and staged in 1909), for instance, is a
‘big, spiral-like ghost made of light-blue mist’ with ‘elongated, limp
arms, similar to scarves made of smoke’ (Marinetti 1960: 5). The
smoke-like nature of the character, highlighted in the stage-directions,
evokes not only the image of the puff of smoke, portrayed in French,
fin-de-siècle literature as a model of the mobile and evanescent work
of art (Ducrey 1991: 55-72), but also Fuller’s dance, often described
as an artwork made of smoke7. Marinetti as well as the early Futurists
repeatedly dealt with the subject of smoke. When Boccioni theorized a
visual artwork consisting of ‘musical vortexes of enormous coloured
gasses’ (Boccioni: 11), was he not describing one of the ways in
which public and critics had perceived and described Loie Fuller’s
staged phantasmagorias?
Arts of the metropolis
Both the art of Loie Fuller and that of the Futurists were typical
phenomena of urban culture. Neither the dancer’s success, nor the
‘electric heart’ (Marinetti 1909a: 11) of the Futurists, ‘primitives of a
new, entirely transformed sensibility’ (Boccioni et al. 1910b: 29), can
be explained without ‘the intensification of nervous stimulation’ in
which Georg Simmel saw, in 1903, ‘the psychological basis of the
metropolitan type of individuality’ (1903: 175). The culture of shock,
described by Walter Benjamin while commenting on Baudelaire’s The
Painter of Modern Life (1863), led the individual to multiply
7
See, for instance, Jean Lorrain’s (1897a) comment: ‘Pouvait-on donner le nom de
femme à cette fumée d’étoffes longues et légères que le moindre mouvement
soulevait en lumineuses nuées?’.
perceptions in speed and number, with the result that ‘at dangerous
intersections, nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession,
like the energy from a battery’ (Benjamin 1969: 175). As a
consequence, we find the Big-City dweller searching for brief and
exciting experiences, unplanned and fugitive emotions. Apollinaire
and Marinetti’s aesthetic of stupor was founded on a sort of
anthropologic mutation of the metropolitan citizen wrestling with new
technologies. Loie Fuller’s Serpentine Dance functioned as one of
these experiences, similarly to the early cinematic experiments up to
1906-07, defined by Tom Gunning as the ‘cinema of attractions’,
whose public went there seeking to immerge itself not in a story but in
a total optical delight, constituted of small visual shocks and capable
of creating a self-conscious awareness of the act of vision itself
(Gunning 1995a: 121). As with the shows of Méliès’ théâtre magique
and those by the famous magician Houdini, the public sought an
experience of amazement and was anxious to see things that would
shake the rules of logic. They were not concerned with the need for
identify with a hero or heroine, which came to define the tradition of
narrative films in a later period. For Fuller’s show, we can say with
Gunning that ‘its visual power consisted of a trompe l’œil play of
give-and-take, an obsessive desire to test the limits of an intellectual
disavowal – I know, but yet I see’ (Gunning 1995a: 117). While the
public was aware of watching the dance of a woman, it also believed
to be seeing a self-generating form, vibrating and palpitating due to its
force8.
Magic shows, Serpentine Dances, early cinema: the aesthetic of
surprise presumed the decline of traditional faith and its substitution
with the cult of the wonder, in an urban setting dominated by
technology. Science was a constituent of this world of marvels. Its
social organization did not concern only small groups of privileged
intellectuals, as in the eighteenth century, but also the masses. At the
end of the nineteenth century, people had become more educated and
better informed; consequently, they had developed an interest in wider
cultural issues, and this new curiosity was catered for in universal
exhibitions, fairs and spectacles. The unexpected and hitherto
unknown life of the ‘infinitely small’ or of the stars and the cosmos
8
‘There was a sudden exclamation from the house: ‘It’s a butterfly! A butterfly!’ I
turned on my steps, running from one end of the stage to the other, and a second
exclamation followed: ‘It’s an orchid!’’ (Fuller 1913: 31).
134 Patrizia Veroli
was staged in the theatres by projecting through the magic lantern

images obtained with microscopes and telescopes. There existed at
that time a short circuit between science, imagination and literature.
The scientist and friend of Loie Fuller’s, Camille Flammarion,
described in his novels solar eclipses in terms that were quite similar
to those phantasmagorias created by the American dancer. The
interaction of forms and colours configured an abstract drama9, an
imaginative process of which Marinetti himself was very aware. The
‘lyrical obsession of matter’ that Marinetti pushed to replace human
psychology (Marinetti 1912: 111) by giving way to ‘the
infinitesimally small things that surround us, the imperceptible, the
invisible, the whiz of atoms, Brownian motion, all the enthusiastic
hypotheses and all the domains explored by the dark-field
microscope’ (Marinetti 1913a: 126), was exactly at the core of
Fuller’s shows. In Danse de la nuit, the performer, in a costume of
black gauze covered with rhinestones, by skilfully manoeuvring the
lights, made the audience believe that they were seeing the stars shine
through the clouds, then that they were imagining the rise of the
moon, and finally, when the colour of the light was changing, that
they were witnessing the arrival of the dawn. According to one of the
descriptions for the copyright of her stage set designs, which she
deposited in the United States, France, and Germany, in La Danse du
firmament she arranged for the lights of the projectors to shine upon a
backdrop, interspersed with small, reflecting surfaces, while she
herself handled a kind of net, made of crystals. This double effect had
an even wider influence on the public, who believed to see the entire
celestial vault.10 Faced with solo pieces such as L’Arc-en-ciel (The
Rainbow), Les Éclairs (The Lightening), L’Orage (The Tempest), Les
Nouages qui passent (The Passing Clouds), the spectators became like
9
See for instance Flammarion’s description of 1965 in his Les Merveilles célestes:
Lectures du soir: ‘[À] quels jeux infinis [ces] lumières mutuellement éclipsées
donnent naissance […] Bientôt le jaune s’approche sous le bleu ; déjà il entame son
disque et le vert répandu sur le monde pâlit, pâlit, jusqu’au moment où il meurt,
fondu dans l’or qui verse dans l’espace ses rayonnements cristallins » (Chaperon
1998: 178).
10
See the Nouveau Genre de décoration théâtrale composée de murailles blanches
garnie de pierreries à facettes (Brevet d’invention n. 227108, Ministère du
Commerce et de l’Industrie, République Française, 8 avril 1893, Bureau pour la
propriété industrielle, Paris). Fuller copyrighted her costume and several stage
apparatuses in the United States, France and Germany.
‘aeronauts of imagination’, who sit quietly in the theatre

contemplating ‘the fury of an unleashed hurricane, a torrent that pours
forth and boils, a flame that grows and rises into the heavens’ (Marx
1907: 94).
It is quite possible that Marinetti’s interest in properties of matter,
‘its different determining impulses, its compressive and its expansive
forces, what binds it, what breaks it down, its mass of swarming
molecules or its swirling electrons’ (Marinetti 1912: 111) had been
given further impulse by Fuller’s performances. Her personal
acquaintance with Thomas Alva Edison enabled the dancer to conduct
experiments with the fluoroscope and later with radium, creating in
1904 La Danse du radium. Loie Fuller and Marinetti are united by an
intense, almost haunted interest in seeing beyond the confines of
normal vision. With her practical education, which had not been
supported by a traditional course of study, Loie carried out her
experiments on the stage, while Marinetti quest for self-awareness
was, above all, an intellectual pursuit. Like many of Fuller’s solo
pieces, his attitude of viewing objects ‘cartographically’, i.e. ‘from a
new perspective, no more frontally or from behind, but straight down
beneath me, and thus foreshortened’ (Marinetti 1912: 112), was
probably derived from trips on dirigibles (and of their reports) and
familiarity with optical machines of the time, such as panoramas,
dioramas and the other -oramas that captivated not only the visitors of
Universal Exhibitions and travelling fairs, but also the citizens of
urban centres such as Paris and Berlin, where optical machines of all
kinds were readily available.11 The growing awareness of the
subjectivity of perception, already outlined in Goethe’s Farbenlehre
(1810), had radically modified the ‘optic regime’ (Crary), which had
characterized the common understanding of the principles of vision
until the end of the eighteenth century12. This new awareness boosted
11
The panorama was made of a canvas, lit from hidden spots, on which some historic
or geographical subjects were painted: it would be moved around the spectator,
sitting in the dark. In the diorama, mechanical elements changed the illumination of
a canvas, while the spectators sat on a moving platform. The mareorama simulated a
boat-trip: the ‘travellers’ sat in front of a series of changing views of shifting
landscapes and were invested with air currents, mimicking imaginary typhoons, and
sometimes also thunder and lightning and the smell of saltiness (Schwartz 1999:
149-176).
12
Jonathan Crary (2001: 70) has sustained that ‘from the beginning of the nineteenth
century a science of vision will tend to mean increasingly an interrogation of the
136 Patrizia Veroli
an extraordinary quantity of inventions and experimentations in the

field of visual perception that took place in Europe in the second half
of the nineteenth century and eventually, around the end of the
century, led to the creation of cinema. While sight was the sense most
involved in the technological transformation, some of the new optical
machines and procedures, such as the mareorama and early cinema,
provoked a simultaneous stimulation of other senses13. The Futurists’
ambition to create multi-sensorial experiences, while rooted in some
Symbolist precedents14, was also shaped by the attractions of the
metropolitan, popular culture of their times.
The Serpentine Dance and the concept of ‘Futurist marvel’ in The

Variety Theatre
Although Marinetti did not directly refer to her in it, the influence of
Loie Fuller’s dance on the founder of Futurism is most clearly
testified in his 1913 manifesto, The Variety Theatre. The concept of
the ‘Futurist marvel’, outlined in that text, offers some similarities to
the conceptual premises of the Serpentine Dance. With a dance
perceived by the public as a living organism presented in its birth,
development and dissolution, Loie Fuller truly visualized what
Marinetti defined as the ‘dominant laws of life’, that is ‘the formation
and dissolution of minerals and plants’15, and the ‘well-conceived
analogies between human beings, the animal kingdom, the plant world
and the world of machines’ (Marinetti 1913b: 186). With its
‘dynamism of form and colour’ (Marinetti 1913b: 187), Fuller’s
dances were a showcase of the modern gadgetry and wondrous
inventions that Marinetti defined as the core of ‘Futurist marvel’
(Marinetti 1913b: 186). An indirect reference to the American
physiological makeup of the human subject, rather than the mechanics of light and
optical transmission’.
13
In Hale's Tours of the World, the largest cinema chain in the United States, the
spectator observed views filmed from moving trains while sitting in booths that were
similar to actual wagons and was exposed to the sounds of wheels, moving trains
and whistles. (Gunning 1990: 58).
14
The Cantique des Cantiques was staged at Paul Fort’s Théâtre d’Art on 11
December 1891 with a musical soundtrack in a hall filled with incense smoke
(Robichez 1957: 129-130).
15
Phrase eliminated in later versions of the manifesto.
performer is also contained in the reference to ‘dancers en point,

whirling around like spinning tops’ (Marinetti 1913b: 187): the image
of a quick, spiral movement of a swarm of cloth in space points to the
precedent of the Serpentine Dance.
In Variety theatre, according to Marinetti, ‘it is the lively electric
light that triumphs, while the feeble, faltering moonlight is defeated’
(Marinetti 1913b: 189). Fuller was indeed the first performer who
actively made electric light a fundamental component of the way in
which she revealed herself on stage. Her glowing epiphany fed on its
own opposite, the absolute darkness in the playhouse which electric
light had made possible. The procedure of enveloping the audience in
complete obscurity, popularized by Wagner in his Bayreuth theatre16,
turned her show into a highly evocative, luminous apparition. Stripped
of any literary or psychological pretence, the Serpentine Dance sought
to demonstrate how electric light could be used in order to express
within the theatre the grandest ideas in a revolutionary way. In France,
Loie became a sort of ultra-modern Marianne.17 Her designation as fée
de la lumière (fairy of light) played upon the contemporary iconology
attributed to the new illumination technology, the fée électricité,
generally portrayed as a woman, clad in an Ancient Greek costume,
with light rays shooting from her head.18 Marinetti himself referred to
the new technology as a feminine figure: ‘unique, divine mother of
future humanity, her body glowing a vivid silver, Electricity with her
thousand flashing, violet-coloured arms’ (Marinetti 1910: 98-99).
How much is this image rooted in Fuller’s vortex of veils that she
used to move around with her long bamboo sticks?
16
When the Bayreuth theatre was opened, in 1876, the use of gaslights did not allow
casting the hall in complete darkness. Only with the use of electric lights, years later,
this effect became possible.
17
The image of Marianne – a woman wearing a Phrygian beret, like the freed slaves
in Ancient Rome – has been the symbol of the French Republic since the time of the
Revolution.
18
These kind of images were used for the covers of books such as Le Règne de
l’électricité, by Gaston Bonnefont (1895), La Vie électrique, by Albert Robida
(1892) and Les Mystères de la science, by Louis Figuier (1892). The Fée électricité
(Electricity Fairy) was also reproduced in several posters.
138 Patrizia Veroli
Illustr. 2: Aldo Mazza, Loie Fuller, from Numero: Settimanale umoristico illustrato
(Torino), vol. 2, no. 14 (29 March 1914). Collezione Augusto Traina, Viareggio.
The dance of an ‘extended body’
The animated organism that Fuller created on the stage was devoid of
any feminine features. It was an unfolding of natural phenomena in
the form of a kinetic drama, offering proof of the possibility of a
extended body in the pursuit of its own transformation. ‘What we need
are wings! ... So let us make ourselves some airplanes’, Marinetti had
summoned in 1909 (Marinetti 1909b: 29), coming back to the same
theme six years later by saying, with even more pathos: ‘We are not
joking when we declare that in human flesh wings lie dormant’
(Marinetti 1915: 86). It was the incorporation of the mechanical
devices of modernity that turned humans into modern beings. It may
seem too literal to view the rods, which Fuller used to make her
costume more flowing, as wings, even if the reference to butterflies
and birds was common among the titles of her works. However, it is
clear that a prosthetic and protean body such as hers showed within
the theatre the enormous possibilities that Marinetti attributed to

imagination, dream and desire. The identification of the human being
with the motor implied, for Marinetti, the possibility of a prosthetic
body, with the increased potential of new external organs. As a grand
visionary, he imagined the realization of a perfect synchronization
between human being and machines, in which the latter would
become additional organs whose extraneousness would be annulled by
human will power. Marinetti’s vision of the prosthetic body originated
from Darwin, Lamarck and Carrel’s theories, which seemed to
guarantee that animal and human bodies would progressively adapt to
the transformation of their living environment. ‘The human body is
the magazine of inventions’, Ralph Waldo Emerson had observed in
1870, ‘the patent-office, where are the tools from which every hint has
taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its
limbs and senses (Armstrong 1998: 80). Modernity enhanced a new
theorization of the human as machine. As Anson Rabinbach (1990:
32) has suggested, ‘science constructed a model of work and the
working body as pure performance, as an economy of energy, and
even as a pathology of work’. Anxieties regarding productivity and
hygiene, entangled with the pursuit of national organization and of
nationalistic and imperial affirmation; the apprehensive desire created
by a new perception of time, to discompose movement, registering
regularities and anomalies in the vital flow: all of these elements
suggested in those years the conceptualization of corporeity as a
mechanism. The Serpentine Dance itself, since its first staging, played
upon the ambiguity between the setting in place of a mechanism and
the emergence of a performance. When, in 1982, Loie Fuller had to
describe her own dance in order to patent it, she stressed not only the
use of light and darkness (which allowed her suddenly appearance and
disappearance on stage), but also that her movements would always
start from an initial situation of immobility, which she would call
‘picture’ and which she would maintain on stage for several seconds
before commencing her manoeuvres.19 She therefore conceptualized
her dance as the animation of a tableau vivant, as a form-producing
mechanism that is set in motion and then stopped. The public had to
remain in doubt as to whether the form dancing in front of them was a
19
Fuller’s first copyright request for her Serpentine Dance can be found in the court
records of her copyright infringement suit against an imitator, ‘Fuller vs Bemis’
(Fuller 1892)
140 Patrizia Veroli
woman or a machine. This element calls to mind, once again, the

similarities between Fuller’s performances and the early films of the
Lumière Brothers. As Gunning (1995: 118) has remarked, ‘the films
were initially presented as frozen unmoving images, projections of
still photographs. Then, flaunting a mastery of visual showmanship,
the projector began cranking and the image moved’.
For her show at the Universal Exposition of 1900, Fuller thought of
trading places with a marionette, flawlessly resembling herself. As she
personally wrote to the General Commissioner for the Exposition, she
intended to have images, taken from a microscope and enlarged,
projected upon her costume (Minnaert 2002: 56). Fuller was among
the first artists to rediscover the ‘paradox of the actor’, theorized by
Denis Diderot in the late eighteenth century in a text that was
posthumously published in 1830: the best interpretation is the least
expressive of all.20 This principle would guide a noteworthy part of
the modernist avant-garde, including Marinetti. In the late nineteenth
century, several theorists of theatre, such as Antoine, Maeterlinck and
Jarry, suggested the substitution of living actors with marionettes and
androids on the stage. Cabarets and small theatres started
experimenting in this field, using marionettes and performance
techniques taken from the shadow theatre. The popular stage was
initiating here an innovative staging method which only years later
was taken up by the legitimate theatre. Eventually, the ambiguity
between living body and mechanical object would become one of the
main features of Futurist Synthetic Theatre. Marinetti would theorize
on the ‘geometric splendour’ of gymnasts and tightrope walkers, ‘who
in the swelling, relaxation, and pulsating rhythm of their muscles
demonstrate the sparkling perfection of precision instruments’
(Marinetti 1914: 136). This mechanization of movements, along with
the techniques of estrangement that he prescribed for Futurist
declamation (Marinetti 1916: 193-199) would contribute in the
formation of an actor whose personality would be totally concealed,
similar to a marionette. The ‘mechanical man, one who will have parts
that can be changed’ (Marinetti 1912: 114), was an obsessive presence
in the anatomical and sanitary culture of the late nineteenth century
and had become an important feature of wax museums and travelling
20
The nineteenth-century fortune of the so-called ‘paradox of Diderot’ influenced,
along with modern scientific thinking, the theatrical theories of Edward Gordon
Craig and of Vsevolod Meyerhold in Russia (Roach 1985).
anatomy exhibitions, usually presented at the fairs. Again, as this

element testifies, the Futurist imaginary owed much to the mass
culture of its times.
The conception of a body made of single parts, however, was also
capable of communicating that specific sense of anxiety, which in
those years derived from the narrow relation between positivism and
mysticism, sciences and exoteric theories. This convergence had an
important influence on both the Futurists and Loie Fuller (Cigliana
2002). Fuller’s Parisian public was very aware of the association of
her performances with the occult. She would embrace the taste and
expectations of her public by giving her dances suggestive titles such
as Le Feu de la vie (The Fire of Life, 1901), L’Esprit qui se revèle
(The Disclosure of the Spirit, 1909) and Le Passage des âmes (The
Passing of the Souls, 1910). In addition, she posed for some
photographers and had herself portrayed as an emanation of luminous
fluids. In her Danse des mains (The Dance of the Hands, 1912), Fuller
gathered esoteric references while nodding to popular magic shows
and early cinema – all fields that were more interconnected at the time
than one might suppose today. (Gunning 1995b: 42-71)]. This 1912
piece also offered a significant visual model for the idea of the human
being made of inter-changeable parts, exalted, as we saw, by Marinetti
that same year. Some time later, it would have a direct influence on
Marinetti’s and Corra’s play, Le mani (The Hands, 1915), from the
Teatro sintetico anthology of 1915.
In between cinema and theatre
Futurism was an art movement characterized by contrasting

tendencies: on one hand, perceiving modernity as a flux, it exalted
velocity, mobility and ephemeral qualities; on the other, the desire to
create an aestheticized form of life anew pushed it to stress solidity of
forms and construct the model of a human being typified by an
artificial kind of vitality, an automaton. After the First World War,
this second tendency prevailed. Futurist experiments in dance did not
systematically address the kinetic laws of human movement, a refusal
probably rooted in the same cultural obstacles faced by the diffusion
of gymnastic techniques in Italy (Ferrara 1992). Concurrently, the
Italian public did not show much interest for innovations in modernist,
142 Patrizia Veroli
theatrical performances employing dance, a field still rooted in a

visual rhetoric shaped during the Risorgimento years. Thus, Futurism
was restricted to improvised experiments here and there where the
opportunity arose, and could not establish any lasting codes of
‘Futurist dance’ (Veroli 2000: 421-425).
Amy Zornitzer (1998: 99-100) has recognized the trace of Fuller’s
influence in Balla’s and Depero’s Complessi plastici (Plastic
Complexes, 1915). Their intriguing effort to create a multi-sensorial
machine that can turn, decompose, appear and disappear rhythmically,
transforming itself not only into a series of abstract figures but into
pyrotechnic fires, fluids and smokes (an entire imaginary world
suggested by Fuller’s dances with the vortex of her veils), remained a
project. The Futurists’ interest in creating an artificial being resulted
in shows that were populated by dancers encased in costumes
resembling diving suits, which impeded their movements. Examples
of this tendency are offered by shows such as Paladini and Pannaggi’s
Ballo meccanico futurista (Futurist Mechanical Dance, 1922),
Depero’s Anihccam 3000, (The Machine of the Year 3000, 1924) and
Prampolini’s Psicologia delle macchine (The Psychology of
Machines, 1924).
Fuller’s example was destined to inspire not so much dance, but
fields such as Futurist cinema and stage design. In Arte dell’avvenire.
Paradosso (Art of the Future. A Paradox, 1911) the Corradini brothers
acclaimed Fuller as the ‘unknowing forecaster of the new art’ (Ginna
and Corra 1911: 142).21 The description of one of the brothers’ first
films, L’arcobaleno (The Rainbow, 1912), cannot help but recall
Fuller’s solo piece bearing the same title and the reviews written of
her performances that highlighted their evocation of natural
phenomena (Ginna and Corra 1912: 165). The abstract, chromatic
dramatization planned by the Corradini brothers was rooted in Fuller’s
precedent. Significantly, the symphonic poem Prométhée
(alternatively titled Poem of the Fire, 1911) by the Russian composer
Alexander Scriabin, which entailed a section called ‘Light’ to be
produced with a clavecin à lumière (light-operating clavichord), drew
the attention of both the Corradinis and Fuller. The Italians tried to
21
However, I disagree with Lista (1990: 30 and 2001: 272), when he seeks to retrace
Fuller’s influence in the Dance of the Geometric Splendour in the film Vita futurista
(Futurist Life, 1916) and in a sequence of Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s film Thaïs
(1916-1917) [.
build a keyboard generating coloured lights (Corra and Ginna 1912:

160), while Loie Fuller staged Prométhée in May 1914. Her libretto
differed from the original – it culminated in a scene of fire that was
created by her pupils waving sheets of painted silk and illuminated by
spotlights.
A few days before the performance of Prométhée, Fuller had
staged the symphonic poem, Feux d’artifice, by Igor Stravinsky at the
Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, using a similar orchestration of lights and
veils moved by her pupils. Reviewing this show, the French critic
Louis Vauxcelles wrote: ‘Like jets of iridescent water, three beams of
light burst out from the ground. Suddenly, swirls, rings, spirals of fire
dance fantastically, pirouette, rise to the friezes and disappear.’22
(Vauxcelles 1914) The impact that Fuller’s chromo-luminous
orchestrations had on the world of theatre is testified by the
subsequent request for a new staging of Feux d’artifice, made by the
impresario of the Ballets Russes, Serge de Diaghilev, to Giacomo
Balla. This new theatrical event was first performed in Rome on 12
April 1917. Consisting of a landscape of colourful, geometrical
shapes, illuminated by a system of lights situated from within and
outside and by reflection on it,23 the forms themselves, Balla’s stage
design is nonetheless much more static than Fuller’s and incapable of
suggesting the metamorphoses of coloured surfaces that characterized
her show. By producing coloured, seemingly self-generating forms in
constant transformation and ‘instituant un lieu’ [‘creating a place’], as
Mallarmé (1893: 308) had written, Loie, with her Serpentine Dance,
had demonstrated to the Futurists the possibility of realizing a plastic
drama, which would be abstract as well as synthetic and draw its force
from an inner logic and necessity: an illuminating machine. Enrico
Prampolini made use of the conceptual innovations favoured by
Fuller’s examples as testified by the manifestoes that he wrote,
starting with Scenografia futurista (Futurist Stage Design, 1915). In
this text, Prampolini’s (1915: 161-162) ideas of a lighting machine
22
The Free-Word Table, Serpentine Dance, published by Gino Severini in the
periodical Lacerba (1 July 1914) shortly thereafter, was certainly realized under the
great influence that this performance had on him.
23
Virgilio Marchi (1946: 54) has clarified the original positioning of the lights in this
show.
144 Patrizia Veroli
and of an actor made of gas (attore-gas) are openly inspired by

Fuller’s performances.24
As a new dancing practice open to varied and unexpected
developments, the Serpentine Dance became an icon destined to leave
an inspiring mark on the early-twentieth century avant-garde seeking
to create artworks that would that would reveal, as Boccioni termed it
(1911:13), nothing less than ‘the mindset of the world’.
Translated by Shane Agin
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Futurist Machine Art, Constructivism and the
Modernity of Mechanization
Maria Elena Versari
Abstract: This chapter addresses the theoretical and ideological development of the
so-called ‘machine art’, which was outlined in 1922 in a homonymous manifesto by
the painters Ivo Pannaggi and Vinicio Paladini and revised later that year in a version
signed by Enrico Prampolini. While scholars have largely tackled the thematic
specificity and visual impact of this text within the general development of Italian
Futurist art in the course of the 1920s, they have failed to take up the issue of its
specific place in the ongoing construction of the European artistic framework of the
1920s. This essay aims to redefine the history of the concept of Futurist machine art
from a different perspective, by highlighting its complex and contradictory relations
with contemporary artistic practices in Europe and with the emergence of
Constructivism.
The Manifesto of Futurist Mechanical Art is in many ways a testament

to a moment of instability and reorganization that the Italian
movement experienced at the beginning of the 1920s. It underscores
the complex political reception of Futurism in those very years and the
impact that left-leaning adherents of the movement had on its
evolution, even long after the movement’s alliance with the Fascist
régime.
Quite unusual in the tradition of Futurist statements and
declarations, this manifesto was originally published in all likelihood
without the consent of the Futurist leadership in June 1922 in the first
(and only) issue of the journal La nuova Lacerba by two young artists
recently affiliated with the movement, Ivo Pannaggi and Vinicio
Paladini1.
The stance of assuming a new position and role within a
specifically ‘Futurist’, and not merely ‘modernist’, identity is overtly
1
La nuova Lacerba was conceived as a fortnightly periodical; the first issue appeared
in Rome, dated 20 June 1922. Apparently, no other issues were published.
Marinetti’s Libroni feature a copy of the journal, inserted after disparate newspaper
clippings dating from July 1922 and following the June-July issue of the Berlin
magazine, Der Futurismus.
150 Maria Elena Versari
pursued in Paladini’s and Pannaggi’s manifesto. The text begins with

a direct reference to Futurism’s legacy after the First World War.
Boccioni’s death, along with Carrà’s and Severini’s estrangement, had
radically altered the hierarchical structures of Futurism, prompting a
new phase of recruitment of young members. In the years 1918-1920,
this new generation of Futurists, which helped launch the movement’s
new political identity (Berghaus 1996), were also reflecting on their
own function within Futurism’s tradition.
Pannaggi and Paladini emphasize in their manifesto the necessity
of continuing Futurism’s destruction of the objects and mindsets of a
decaying culture. Simply put, in comparison to the pre-war situation,
the necessity of this destructive activity is now all the more clearly felt
because of the current, all-encompassing and imposing presence of
‘modern mechanics’. Therefore, the machine, ‘which characterizes our
epoch’, is the conceptual link that ideally ties Futurist ideology to the
experience of everyday realities (Pannaggi and Paladini 1922: 7).
‘What Boccioni and others had simply intuited (modernolatria)’, they
hold, ‘binds us to the new forms imposed by modern mechanics’
(Pannaggi and Paladini 1922: 7). The machine is thus an irresistible,
totalizing influence that grants an inner, timely coherence to the
Futurists’ outburst of revolt against a stale and backward aesthetics.
The young artists’ circular reasoning is particularly interesting for
the way in which it summarizes the long tradition of referencing the
modern world as both a source of new content and of historical
justification, as object and subject, so to say, for the new art, a model
instituted by Marinetti’s and the Futurists’ pre-war manifestos. At the
same time, the Manifesto of Futurist Mechanical Art operates as a
historicizing force within the stylistic tradition of Futurism itself and
inside the tradition of modernist discourse. The temporal urgency of
the new day, where the machine marks the fulfilment of the modern
Golden Age, becomes the final guarantee of the movement’s long-
expected stylistic and thematic coherence:
‘No more nudes, landscapes, figures, symbolisms – however Futurist

they may appear – but the puffing of locomotives, the screaming of
sirens, cogwheels and pinions, and that NEAT, DECISIVE
mechanical sense which determines the atmosphere of our sensibility.
The gears clear our eyes from fog and indecision; everything is more
incisive, resolute, aristocratic, distinct. We feel mechanically and
we feel ourselves built from steel, we too are machines, we too are
mechanized by the atmosphere’ (Pannaggi and Paladini 1922: 7).
Futurist Machine Art 151
The overt conflation of the acting subject, the artist, with the
product of his action, the artwork, its style and content, points to the
attainment of an ideal harmony between historicity and aesthetic
language (‘And this is the new necessity, and the principle of the new
aesthetics’, Pannaggi and Paladini 1922: 7). It is however an unstable
rhetorical balance, masking the quandaries of the quest for a definite
stylistic as well as ideological conceptualization of artistic modernity
in the early 1920s.
Cogwheeled proletarians and the search for a political

iconography
Pannaggi and Paladini add to their manifesto two small drawings: The
Proletarian by Paladini and Mechanical Composition by Pannaggi.
[ill. 1+2] The latter depicts a linear set of gears and motors. On the
right side, the letters ‘HP’, which Pannaggi will use later as a sort of
personal trademark, refer to the English term ‘Horse Power’.
Paladini’s Proletarian is likewise a conglomerate of intersecting
shadows of cogwheels, pistons and human silhouette in a flat, bi-
dimensional rendering. Interestingly,
the political undercurrent of the
drawing is kept subdued. It is
however part of a larger series.
Throughout that year, Paladini
created different images of an
industrial worker brandishing a
sickle and a hammer and published
them in several leftist journals
alongside his own interventions on
the relationship between modern art
and Communism (Carpi 1981; Lista
1988). These stylistic as well as
iconological experiments culminated
in the manifesto’s illustration.
Several critics, notably Giovanni
Lista, Umberto Carpi and Günter
Illustr. 2: Ivo Pannaggi and Vinicio Paladini, ‘Manifesto of Futurist Mechanical Art’
featuring the drawings The Proletarian by Paladini and Mechanical Composition by
Pannaggi, as it first appeared in La nuova Lacerba, no. 1 (20 June 1922), p. 7.
Illustration courtesy of Anna Caterina Toni.
Berghaus, have addressed the explicit political references of

Pannaggi’s and Paladini’s artistic endeavour, charting the emergence
and the problematic outcome of a ‘leftist’ faction of Futurism in the
years preceding the March on Rome. After his failed alliance with
Mussolini in the 1919 election, Marinetti himself had repeatedly
expressed interest for the Russian Revolution, and especially for the
status that avant-garde artists seemed to have achieved under the
Soviet government. Concurrently, a new wave of interest for the
Italian movement had spread from the leftist ranks, following
Lunacharsky’s famous reprimand of the Italian delegates at the
Second Congress of the Communist International in 1921for having
overlooked the possibility of an alliance with the sole Italian
‘revolutionary intellectual’, namely Marinetti himself.
In those years, Antonio Gramsci, reflecting on proletarian culture,
found an ally in the leftist critic and intellectual Arturo Cappa, brother
of Marinetti’s future wife Benedetta, and eventually supported the
creation of a Proletkult branch in Turin. This, in turn, gave rise to a
Futurist exhibition at the city’s Winter Club, with the corollary of a
series of party-organized visits by factory workers (Berghaus 1996:
188-89). This alliance of common aspirations, more than of
realizations, had been outlined by Gramsci himself in an article
entitled ‘Marinetti the Revolutionary?’, published in his journal
L’ordine nuovo at the beginning of 1921. ‘What remains to be done?
Nothing other than to destroy the present form of civilization’, he had
written, pointing to the Futurists’ capability of dismembering the
forms of bourgeois tradition from within and advising his fellow
comrades not to disdain innovations and audacities, or, formulated in
other terms, ‘not to be afraid of monsters’ (Gramsci 1921: 96).
Again, in Gramsci’s defence of Futurism, which is in reality more
of an apology for the desire to build culture anew, and specifically, to
use Bogdanov’s terms, a proletarian culture, the myth of the modern
epoch plays a significant role in justifying the urgency of the
endeavour: ‘They [the Futurists] have grasped sharply that our age,
the age of big industry, of the large proletarian city and of intense and
tumultuous life, was in need of new forms of art, philosophy,
behaviour and language’ (Gramsci 1921: 96). Thus, the circularity of
the references binds ‘the age of big industry’ with ‘the large
proletarian city’, which form the temporal and spatial setting of a new
cultural upheaval. The Futurists become the prophets of this new
civilization, presciently recognized by the workers themselves. When

praising Futurist art, thereby contradicting their superiors within the
Party, these workers, according to Gramsci, ‘were supporting
historicity, the possibility of a proletarian culture created by the
workers themselves’ (Gramsci 1921: 97).
Gramsci’s rhetoric masks an issue that constitutes the core of the
debate over Constructivism in Russia: the uneasy superimposition of
the figure and practice of the intellectual with that of the worker. It is
the very issue that causes in those same years the widening fracture
between some sections of the Proletkult and the avant-garde (Gough
2000). Still, in Italy, the echoes of this inner ideological combat, while
recognized early on by Marinetti (Versari 2006a: 173), had not fully
reached the world of the self-stylized artistic interpreters of proletarian
culture.
Enrico Crispolti (1968: 415) and Anna Caterina Toni (1976)
have attributed the stylistic codes of the early works by Pannaggi and
Paladini to the influence of French Purism, a step preceding
Pannaggi’s subsequent turn to Constructivist models. Although quite
accurate2, the recognition of this reference does not completely
answer the questions raised by the two painters’ struggle to define, in
1922, the specific ideology of a ‘mechanical’ language in the arts. The
wavering path of the young generation’s stylistic and theoretical
choices within the broader trajectory of Futurist art is in itself an
element worth closer attention. It testifies to a sense of urgency to
experiment with and acquire a modernist language, a language that
was up to the new task of representing the political pressures of the
time, as outlined by Gramsci. But this goal develops at first for the
two young Futurists as an accelerated exercise in the history of
Futurist stylistic grammar and theoretical terminology.
That same month, Pannaggi proudly arranged one of the exhibition
rooms at his hometown’s yearly art show, christening it as the town’s
‘First Futurist Exhibition’. He covered the walls with paintings by his
Futurist friends, intercalated with written slogans taken from a vast
array of modernist references, making the room seem like a
domesticated restaging of the Internationale Dada Messe3. But when
2
Paladini’s (leftist) Futurist friend, Antonio Fornari, refers to Paladini in those years
as ‘sleeping with the latest issue of L’Esprit nouveau under the pillow’ (Lista 1988:
27).
3
The slogans, quoted by Pannaggi in Italian and French, are from St. Augustine (‘The
faced with explaining the conceptual position of his artistic selection,

he turned, once again, to Boccioni’s authority, carefully eluding the
more recent, and potentially more fruitful – if seen a posteriori from
the perspective of a Constructivist ideology – Manifesto of the
Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe, signed just a few years before
by fellow habitués of Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s art club, Giacomo
Balla and Fortunato Depero (Pannaggi 1922)4.
In his essay ‘The Intellectual Revolution’, published earlier that
year in the Socialist periodical Avanguardia, Paladini, for his part,
outlined the goals of fabricating a new class of intellectuals to
accompany the Communist revolution of the proletariat. The
recurrence of a charged terminology demonstrates the connection
between this text and the subsequent Manifesto of Mechanical Art:
Paladini speaks of an ‘intellectual aristocracy which will soon
transform the views and the ideal aspirations of humankind in the
Communist world’ (Paladini 1922a: 201); he calls for a revolt (‘We
want a new world, not one in transition. Transitions are always
disgusting and are degenerations and perversions. Destroy everything
or putrefy in the baseness of the bourgeois intellectual prison’
(Paladini 1922a: 201); again he advocates a new soul for the artist
(‘We will work upon his soul, which will feel in a larger, more
humanly and more abstract way, and upon his brain, capable of
analyzing and of building, in a tight, harmonic and innovative
architectural style’ (Paladini 1922a: 203).
Number is All in Art’), Archipenko (‘L’Art est pour tout le monde mais tout le
monde n’est pas pour l’art’), Baudelaire (‘Nous savons que nous serons compris
d’un petit nombre mais cela nous suffit’), Boccioni (‘We will put the spectator at the
center of the painting’), Cocteau (‘L'artiste doit avaler une locomotive et rendre une
pipe’).
4
Pannaggi’s essay for the catalogue of the First Futurist Exhibition that he organized
in his home-town of Macerata retraced the postulates of Boccioni’s theories, mixing
overt citations of the deceased Futurist artist with more indirect references to current
polemical debates over the status of a specifically Italian tradition, headed by Soffici
and the Valori Plastici group. The show was part of the Esposizione Provinciale
d’Arte at the Convitto Nazionale, where the 21-year-old Pannaggi obtained room IV
for his works and those of Paladini, Enrico Prampolini, Antonio Fornari, Giacomo
Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Fortunato Depero and Antonio Marasco. Even Paladini’s
fascination with Léger seems to have been the outcome of the same pressure of
acclimatization with a tradition of modern art filtered through Futurists texts and
debates, and specifically a citation of the French artist in the 1920 manifesto Contro
tutti i ritorni in pittura (Lista 1980: 94-95).
A few weeks later, Paladini published in the same journal a

vignette in honour of Workers’ Day: his 1º Maggio (International
Workers’ Day) features the upper part of a human silhouette
brandishing a hammer in the right hand, raised over the head, and a
sickle in the left one, in the lower forefront (Paladini 1992b) [ill. 3]. In
the background, two industrial chimneys, with a flag fluttering on top,
make an open reference to the revolts of 1920 when, in Northern Italy,
workers occupied the factories and established ‘Soviet’ organizations
for a few months. The most striking feature of Paladini’s worker,
however, is the representation of the body itself. The humanoid bust is
cut vertically into two overlapping surfaces of sheet metal, joined
from the top of the head down to the waist by a row of bolts.
Moreover, this human trunk is directly slotted onto a cogwheel.
Illustr. 3: Vinicio Paladini, 1º Maggio (International Workers’ Day), illustration

published in Avanguardia, n. 16, 1 May 1922 (Illustration courtesy of Biblioteca
Universitaria Alessandrina, Roma).
Thus, Paladini reveals a fundamental feature of his vision of the

proletarian. It is a liminal creature, combining human elements with
those of machines. But the nature of this juncture, its conceptual and
ideological referentiality, is clarified only by a closer analysis of the
artistic roots of its composition. A few months later, in July, Paladini
published still another version of the same subject (Paladini 1922c)
[ill. 4]. This time, the iconographic choice is more traditional: a
humanoid figure, resembling a stuffed dummy, holds a rifle at his
right side and a hammer with his left hand5. Here, the humanoid bust
is the only visible part of the worker’s body, portrayed from head to
waist on the right side of the canvas. On its left side, the stenciled
acronym RSFSR (for ‘Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic’) in
Cyrillic is followed by a stylized emblem of the sickle and hammer.
Illustr. 4: Vinicio Paladini, Il Proletario, illustration published in Avanguardia (27) 16

July 1922 (Illustration courtesy of Biblioteca Universitaria Alessandrina, Roma).
5
The current whereabouts of this painting are unknown. It is known only through a
b/w reproduction published in 1922 in the journal Avanguardia. The canvas is
painted in two equal vertical sections, the left one is light in colour while the right
side provides a dark background for the figure of the Proletarian.
Paladini’s obsession with the portrayal of the modern icon of the

industrial worker as a faceless puppet betrays the iconographical
influence of De Chirico’s paintings of the time. To today’s critics this
conflation of machine aesthetics and pittura metafisica may seem like
a failed step, or a reactionary ideological involution, on the road to
progressive art (Buchloh 1981). Still, this sort of reasoning overlooks
the theoretical underpinnings that characterized those very years and
their specific modalities in assembling an aesthetic ideology. When, in
1920, George Grosz presented his new, metafisica-influenced style in
an article in Das Kunstblatt, he justified using this new anti-
psychological, ‘realistic’ style, in order to make explicit a vision of
humanity as a ‘collective, almost mechanical’ concept (Grosz 1921;
Wermester 1999) Therefore, as in the case of Berlin Dada, the
estranged world-building activity suggested by metaphysical painting
offered the opportunity to combine an often overtly political stance
within a visual structure that escaped the conceptual constrictions
found in what was considered by many to be Expressionism’s formal
empathy. We are not talking here about a naturalistic mode of
Realism, but a mimetic process consciously pushed to its extremes,
capable of expressing the artificial and counterfeiting essence of the
artistic process of representation per se. Thus, it is quite
understandably with surprise that Hanna Höch, during a visit to Italy
later in the year, would note in her journal that Prampolini and the
other Italian avant-garde artists scorned De Chirico, mockingly
referring to him as an ‘Akademikprofessor’ (Versari 2006b: 320; 285-
295).
This was not the case for Paladini, however, as we see him in 1922
still roaming around the metaphysical painter’s studio, assembling his
‘monsters’ in a much more literal sense than the one envisioned by
Gramsci. For Paladini, too, De Chirico’s spatial boxes were
conceptual tools used in the process of assembling a new iconography
for a new ideology. Far from the overt satire of Grosz’s puppets,
Paladini’s modern, cogwheeled centaur seems paradoxically to resist
in the end any directly political celebratory enlistment. First, we find
the rough, almost agitprop-like quality of the armed proletarian along
with the coarsely stencilled Cyrillic lettering [ill. 4]. With the foreign
script foregrounded as haughtily as the weapon, this proletarian
reveals an uneasy desire to play an active part in history’s unfurling.
The 20-year-old, Moscow-born Paladini may have viewed this right to
participate as something that he, himself, had been unjustly denied and
that he must now recapture, if only by painting tableaux that will
never find their proper agitprop setting.
Later, another painting overtly influenced by De Chirico (Paladini
1922d)6, adds an uncomfortable feeling to this exercise in progressive
iconography. Our cogwheeled proletarian, hammer and sickle in hand,
is here enclosed in a Chiricoesque room, with a door opening on the
right, framing a perspective view of the now familiar factory
chimneys. A cogwheel protrudes from the lower abdomen, which has
been cut horizontally, leaving only a statue-like torso positioned on a
square pedestal. Its shadow is fractured, the bust projected against the
back wall, the wheel casting its outline on the left side. Grimly titled
La nona ora (The Ninth Hour), this painting provides an unsettling
counterpart to the overt celebration of the armed proletarian of a few
weeks before. The disjointed shadows, almost autonomously rebelling
against their merger in a mechanical assembly, unmask the artificial
process of an ideological iconology in the making. Somehow the
setting and the shadows of the pittura metafisica seem to offer in this
painting yet another vision, a more classically ‘Marxian’ reflection of
the status of the industrial worker and his relationship with the
machine, to which he becomes ‘a mere living appendage’ (Marx 1976:
460).
This ambivalent identity of the proletarian brings us back to the
illustration that Paladini chose to insert in his and Pannaggi’s
Manifesto of Futurist Mechanical Art [ill. 1]. Here, the cogwheel is
still present, superimposed on the left side, while the worker’s head is
this time almost encapsulated in a cylindrical mould, his round left eye
offering us one last clue to his humanoid essence. The uneasy plurality
of conflicting ideological readings seems suspended and combined in
the stylization of this new visual emblem.
A similar fusion of worker and machine appeared in a show at
Bragaglia’s art club in Rome. This event, celebrated in Futurist
historiography as the Futurist Mechanical Ballet (Ballo meccanico
futurista), is generally recognized as one of the earliest appearances of
the theme of the robot in modern art and performance. According to
Pannaggi, the spectacle consisted of ‘plastic dialogues’, that is,
6
Current location unknown. A photograph of the painting has been published by
Giovanni Lista (Lista 1980: ill. 7, s.p. and Lista 1988: ill. 6, s.p.).
stylized movements performed to the sound of two roaring

motorcycles, not on a stage, but in the space of the restaurant, bar and
gallery that comprised Bragaglia’s art club at the time (Pannaggi
1966). Pannaggi designed a cardboard frame, covered with metallic
sheets that encased the Russian dancer Ikar, transforming him into a
‘mechanical man’7. The robot’s head was shaped like a truncated
vertical triangle, his right hand a pointed pyramid and his left hand a
bladed cylinder. Paladini was responsible for the costume of the
mechanical man’s fellow dancer, the ‘proletarian’. It was, according to
Pannaggi, the costume of a ‘human puppet’. A photograph published
by Giovanni Lista and attributed to the 1922 performance shows a
dark-clothed man with a sheet-metal flat hat, holding in one hand his
now famous attribute, a metallic cross-section of a cogwheel,
producing the illusion of this machine part protruding from his torso
(Lista 1988: ill. 7)8.
We might wonder about the relationship of these two characters in
their rhythmic movements. Were they portraying a harmonic
7
This particular term, ‘uomo meccanico’ (‘mechanical man’), is generally used to
define Pannaggi’s costume for the ballet. Significantly, the term is neither ‘machine’
nor ‘robot’ (a term famously created by Karel apek’s 1920 play Rossum’s
Universal Robot, where ‘Robota’ is the Czech term for ‘serf labour’. apek’s robots
are creations of biological engineering and are thus similar to humans). The name
might have been popularized by a film of the previous year, L’uomo meccanico
(1921), directed by André Deed. Whereas the automaton portrayed in the film bears
no resemblance to Pannaggi’s costume, one of the film’s scenes, in which two
mechanical robots battle in the middle of a high-society gathering at the Opera,
suggests an ironical reference to the Futurist ballet’s social setting at Bragaglia’s
club a year later, a reference perhaps consciously exploited by Pannaggi and
Paladini in staging the performance.
8
Lista’s photograph shows a woman, identified as the dancer Jia Ruskaja, standing by
the Proletarian. This has suggested to several scholars (Lista 1988: 20; Berghaus
2000: 439) the possibility of a third character in the Ballo Meccanico. As Günter
Berghaus explains, this third element, identified as ‘The Society Lady’ would create
an interference in the dual relationship of the Proletarian and the Mechanical Man.
The worker is thus given an alternative to the machine world and its dominant
influence. This interpretation is quite compelling, since it adheres to the role-playing
of the feminine characters in subsequent Futurist dramas, such as Vasari’s Anguish
of the Machines. Patrizia Veroli (2000: 439) has recently expressed some doubts
regarding the cited photograph as sufficient proof of the participation of Jia Ruskaja
in the original show of June 1922. Moreover, the fact that in his later statements
(1966: 377-378) Pannaggi did not recollect her presence in the original performance
is somewhat puzzling and denotes at least the artist’s own prevailing interest in the
dual relationship between machine and worker.
synchronization, or did their so-called ‘plastic dialogues’ embody a

sequel of dissonances? Or, even, were they chasing one another, like a
modern remake of a scene from the commedia dell’arte, appearing and
disappearing in front of the bemused Roman high society, now on the
balustrade, rushing down the entry stairs and then vanishing again up
the staircase near the bar?
We have no way of knowing the precise development of this
performance, which staged the two cult figures of the times, the
machine and the proletarian. Still, the tautological interference of
iconographies between the two – a mechanized man portraying a
machine and a cogwheeled centaur portraying the proletarian worker –
offers a peculiar clue for an understanding of the first ideological base
of Futurist machine aesthetics.
Illustr. 5: Vinicio Paladini, Proletario della III Internazionale, illustration published

in Het Overzicht 13 (November 1922). Illustration courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Eventually, in August 1922, Paladini was to return to his

proletarian icon as it appeared in the Manifesto and transform it into
an abstract composition [ill. 5], praised by the Constructivist Josef
Peeters in the following terms: ‘It should not be seen as an engineer’s
drawing or the reproduction of the cog of a machine. Forms are
instead taken from mechanical instruments, harmoniously organized
in the painting, in a constructive ensemble’ (Peeters 1922). The
assembled mechanical items, which in the drawing still only partially
conceal the human silhouette, become the sole recognizable element
of the painting. The iconographical selection is dissolved in a complex
intricacy of forms and coloured planes that only weakly refer to
specific tri-dimensional structures. We can recognize the cogwheel, a
cylinder on the right, two bolts, and a few other pieces. The human
content of this assembled machinery, however, is still present, albeit
only in the title: Proletarian of the III International. Mechanical
Composition. This ‘mechanical composition’ might seem the desired
outcome of the ‘more abstract’ sensibility that Paladini had envisioned
for the new artist (1922a: 203). But the harmonious interplay of
colours and objects ‘sublimates’, in Michael White’s terms (2004: 87),
the specific historical value of the man-machine relationship. Its
presence is no longer explicit in the visual appearance of the painting:
even the machine, fragmented and recombined as compositional
element, migrates from content to metaphorical reference for a new
style.
Metaphors of autonomy and historical efficacy: the machine as

style
Critics have generally stressed the aesthetic as well as political

involution that characterized the transformation of Pannaggi’s and
Paladini’s Manifesto of Futurist Mechanical Art into the version that
Enrico Prampolini published some weeks later in De Stijl. This latter
text was subsequently translated into English by the poet Edward
Storer and published in October 1922 in the magazine Broom. Entitled
The Aesthetic of the Machine and Mechanical Introspection in Art,
Prampolini’s essay clearly stems from the debates that had defined the
International Congress of Progressive Artists in Düsseldorf, in the last
week of May 1922. (Finkeldey 1992). The schism produced at the
Congress is seen nowadays as the affirmation of the progressive

principles of Constructivism against the models of individual stylistic
production embodied by Expressionism. A preview of this new
ideological stance had grown slowly, mixing repeated statements for
the strengthening of formal research with a new conceptual stance
toward the relationship between art and life. In the first issue of their
tri-lingual magazine Veshch (Object), El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenburg
state: ‘Object will take the part of constructive art, whose task is not to
adorn life, but to organize it’ (Lissitzky and Ehrenburg 1922: 55).
However, in the many statements that accompanied the relocation of
Russian Constructivism to Western Europe, explicit political
references became fewer and fewer; the progressivism characterizing
the new search for a constructive style ended up spinning upon itself
in a formalistic Utopian ideology of efficacy (Berghaus 2005: 180-
189).
Lissitzky and Ehrenburg had titled their inaugural editorial for
Veshch, in the Spring of 1922, ‘The Blockade of Russia Is Coming to
an End’9, suggesting the rise of a new internationalism binding the
‘young creative forces in Europe and Russia that are constructing the
new objects’ (Lissitzky and Ehrenburg 1922: 56). Still, the
fundamental ideological fracture between Eastern and Western artistic
production remained intact and was anchored to two different modes
not only of the realization but also of the conception of the artistic
Utopia: artists working either within or outside the realm of a
(supposedly) achieved social revolution. How this difference, in
reality, was the result of a trusted projection on the part of the artists
themselves was of less influence at that moment in time. Knowledge
of the internal debates (and progressive dismissal by the political
hierarchy) of the Russian avant-garde did not fully reach the West and
interfered minimally with the advance of a new formal language and
its internal, autonomous ideology in Europe (Benson 2002: 385;
Lodder 2006: 195-196). The ideological contradiction of
‘International’ Constructivism thus derived from the Utopian status of
the artist within it. It was his task to embody, with his work, the
‘fundamental feature of the present age, [that] is the triumph of the
constructive method’ (Lissitzky and Ehrenburg 1922: 55). In this way,
9
Between 1918 and 1922, Soviet Russia was subjected by the Allies to coordinated
military attacks and an economic blockade, which deprived the Russian people of
the necessary machines and supplies to rebuild its industry.
the Constructivist artist was responsible for finding an effective way

of realizing the modernization of today’s society, working from within
(and against) the current social structure. The artist’s work would
therefore mirror not so much the content of modernity (the machine),
but its internal constitutive structure (the method).
Hans Richter made this clear at the Düsseldorf Congress,
dismissing the project of an International Union of Artists that could
offer a trans-national network of collaboration, which had been
promoted by Prampolini himself (Versari 2006a: 183-184). ‘You
believe that we should choose exhibitions, magazines and congresses
as a means of reorganizing society?’ Richter asked. ‘But if we are so
far advanced that we can work and make progress collectively, let us
no longer tack between a society that does not need us and a society
that does not yet exist, let us rather change the world of today’
(Richter 1922: 67).
Faced with such a program, Prampolini suggested a slightly
different definition of the ‘fundamental feature of the present age’
envisioned by Lissitzky and Ehrenburg (1922: 55). He reverted to the
machine. In his version of the manifesto, he erased the content-driven
references to ‘sirens, cogwheels, pinions’ (Pannaggi and Paladini
1922: 7), and explained that ‘the plastic exaltation of The Machine and
the mechanical elements must not be conceived in their exterior
reality, that is, in formal representations of the elements which make
up The Machine itself, but rather in the plastic-mechanical analogy
that The Machine suggests to us in connection with various spiritual
realities. The stylistic modifications of Mechanical Art arise from The
Machine-as-interferential-element’ (Prampolini 1922: 237). For
Prampolini, the Constructivists were confusing ‘exterior form with
spiritual content’ (Prampolini 1922: 236). In other words, they
produced machine-like art, not machine-age art. Prampolini was thus
reinstating the principle of aesthetic autonomy by strengthening the
ties between style and ‘the spirit of the times’ (Prampolini 1922: 237).
The rationalization of stylistic models proposed by the
Constructivists resulted in the substitution of the principle of
‘composition’ with the one of ‘construction’, as Louis Lozowick
suggested in an article devoted to Tatlin’s Monument to the Third
International, published in Broom just a few pages before
Prampolini’s manifesto. Prampolini emphasized that this was a path
already charted by Gino Severini in 1916, but the ‘methodology’ of
this new concept of construction should refer to the primacy of the

epoch that, like a constant frequency wave, ‘interferes’ (Prampolini
wilfully employs a term taken from physics) with the stylistic
evolution of the artist. Thus, art is not ‘a universal and real expression
of creative energy, which can be used to organize the progress of
mankind’ (I.F.d.K 1922: 69), as the Constructivists had stated at the
Congress, but a process intrinsically tuned with the machine, the new
rhythmic essence of ‘human psychology’ (Prampolini 1922: 237).
Significantly, the editorial board of Broom had planned to publish
Prampolini’s manifesto together with several ‘magnificent
photographs of machinery’ and a critical essay by Paul Strand, entitled
Illustr. 6: Enrico Prampolini, Cover design for the journal Broom, (3) November 1922
(Illustration courtesy of Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale
University).
‘Photography and the New God’10. In this text, Strand closely follows
the difference outlined by philosopher Benedetto Croce between
‘intuitive’ (that is, aesthetic) and ‘intellectual’ (scientific) knowledge.
Photography becomes the ideal merger of the two fields, finally
offering to artists, ‘seekers after intuitive knowledge’, ‘the immense
possibilities in the creative control of one form of the machine, the
camera’ (Strand 1922: 253). The machine, ‘the new God shorn of its
God-hood, becomes an instrument of intuitive knowledge’ (Strand
1922: 257). Domesticated by the artist, who now masters the camera,
the force of the machine desists from its path of ‘de-humanization’,
lamented by Marx (Strand 1922: 257).
Prampolini quickly merged the codes of his and Strand’s texts in a
photographic composition for the October 1922 cover of Broom
depicting an industrial engine, partly covered and overlayed with his
own design for the journal’s title lettering [ill. 6]. The photograph
used by Prampolini, does not come from the ones sent to the editorial
board of Broom by Strand11; it portrays not a mechanical component
of a technical tool but a large industrial engine, thus, again, reverting
to the inner element of divergence that separates Prampolini’s vision
from that of the Constructivists. The machine is the new god and
imposes itself onto human development not as a fully controllable
method but as a totalizing, historical force that acts upon human
individuality.
Fillìa, Vasari and the psychological triumph of mechanization
A few months later, in 1923, Prampolini’s version of the manifesto

was to be expanded, re-titled L’arte meccanica. Manifesto futurista
and signed by Prampolini, Pannaggi and Paladini. Prampolini
published it in his periodical Noi, and subsequently the Futurist
10
An unsigned note by the editor in the last Roman issue, before the transfer of
Broom’s headquarters from Rome to Berlin, explains how Strand’s photographs
‘although they had been planned to accompany the article on Robert Coady by
Sanborn and the Machinery cover design by Enrico Prampolini’ will be published in
the next issue, due to the better photolithographic machinery offered by the journal’s
new German plant (Broom 1922: 240).
11
I am grateful to Dr. Anthony Montoya, who has provided me with this information.
The Paul Strand archive does not contain any print or negative of the image used by
Prampolini.
headquarters distributed a French translation in leaflet form.

Concurrently, charting the programme of the Futurist Union of Artists
in a leaflet distributed in 1923, the young Futurist artist Fillìa [Luigi
Colombo] superimposed Prampolini’s vision of the machine as a
psychological unifying force within human conscience with the
concepts of work and labour. He reworked Gramsci’s expectations for
the Turin Proletkult, which for the Communist intellectual were now
largely faded (Gramsci 1923: 101). Recognizing in the ‘productive
masses’ a specifically ‘modern sensibility’, Futurism confided in the
potential of ‘work to dominate all currents of life, mechanizing the
Nation in a material and moral way’ (Fillìa and Bracci 1923). Thus,
according to Fillìa, the Futurist ‘Trade’ Union had the role of
‘bringing the great productive masses (that will be tomorrow the sole
conscious, domineering force of Italy) to the core of the industrial and
metallic civilization, mechanizing every force and every thought’
(Fillìa and Bracci 1923).
Far from being a tool of knowledge and control upon the Moloch
of industrialization, conceived, in different ways, by the
Constructivists and by Paul Strand, the machine is here viewed as an
element of psychological continuity and coherence, binding (working)
man and modern society in a totalizing, powerful organism. However,
by the middle of the 1920s, the historical ideal of a specifically
modern culture constructed by and for the workers (Gramsci 1921: 97)
was discarded.
In 1927, Fillìa rewrote the codes of interaction between human
being, machine and, this time, individual conscience. While four years
before he had seen the working masses as the ‘sole conscious
domineering force of Italy’, he now stresses the hegemonic role
played by mechanization on each contemporary individual.
‘Mechanical nature, organized by man as function, is full of elements
unknown to our senses and our desires’, he maintained. ‘The Machine
has multiplied, changed and exasperated the fever of research in the
interpretation of the universe. We cannot therefore think of the
machine as a simple force, dependent upon human will. Mechanical
nature derives from human nature but will soon overtake it.’ (Fillìa
1927)
Eventually, the myth of the machine’s aesthetic efficacy to achieve
a psychological conformity of human beings with modernity was to be
reworked and used as a rhetorical weapon that sustained Futurism
itself in its constant battle to gain official recognition as the leading

artistic ideology within the Fascist State. Fillìa promoted it in the
following way: ‘Futurist art completes the new Italian citizen, rousing
in him love, lyric sensibility and taste for all the manifestations
generated by the machine. The next war will be unquestionably more
mechanical and scientific than the previous one. The people whose
sensibility today doesn’t adhere to modern life will find themselves
weakened, nostalgic and pessimistic, that is, practically useless, in the
mechanical intransigent organization of tomorrow’ (Fillìa 1927).
This triumph of mechanization, and of its cognizant followers,
envisioned by Fillìa, strikes us as an unapologetic translation of the
man-machine relationship, as it is described in Oswald Spengler’s
second volume of The Decline of the West (1922). To Marx’s social
analysis of the proletarian’s alienation in modern industry, Spengler
opposes ‘the three great figures that the Machine has bred and trained
in the cause of its development: the entrepreneur, the engineer and the
factory-worker’, all three reunited as ‘slaves to [their] own creation’
(Spengler 1922: 504). Still, it is the quiet engineer, ‘whose thought-
work [sic] forms one inward unit with the work of the machine’, that
the German writer holds as the pivotal element of the economy of the
machine-industry (Spengler 1922: 505).
Also in Futurist drama, the unstable duality between the machine-
man and the proletarian that had characterized the early stages of
Pannaggi’s and Paladini’s reflections, would subsequently be resolved
in a dystopian rendering of this psychological harmonization through
the engineer-machine relationship. Machine-man and proletariat are
reunited in the image of those ‘condemned to the machines’,
conceived by Ruggero Vasari in his drama, The Anguish of the
Machines (1923). In this play, the enslaved workers are kept under
complete control by a central surveillance device. This brain-like
machine filters the thoughts of the three dictators of the future reign
and diffuses them as orders in the form of radio waves. Humans and
machines alike react to the diktats of these frequencies. For the
‘condemned’, in particular, the guarantee of complete servitude is
obtained through a helmet, furnished with two antennae that capture
the signals and transmit them directly into the humans’ brains. I linger
on this somewhat lengthy description of Vasari’s setting in order to
underscore a noteworthy element in the evolution of the Futurists’
vision of technology. The angst characterizing Vasari’s machines is
not a specific psychological datum of the New Man, but the emotional
outcome of the constant psychological tuning and interaction between
humans and machines. The three dictators of the play owe their
Übermensch quality and spiritual detachment (and subsequent
instability and self-destruction) to their inner relation with the central
computer, in the same way as the ‘condemned to the machines’ gain
the inner source of their conscience-less servitude from it. This
psychological continuity is necessary to the functioning of an
organicist society in which they all are intertwined.
The ‘Machine’, therefore, ends up signifying both the inner force
that bestows the process of dehumanization and servitude onto the
world and its de-human, machine-like result, the ‘mechanized man’.
This convergence is quite interesting, for it inverts the myth of the
artist-engineer, the sole force capable of ‘organizing’ the new world in
the Western Constructivist Utopia.
Conclusion: Photomontages and architectures (realized and

unrealized)
It was, however, the path of the artist-engineer that at least one of the
original writers of the manifesto decided to follow. After having
studied architecture in Rome, in the middle of the 1920s, Ivo Pannaggi
progressively detached himself from Marinetti’s movement. In 1926,
he exhibited some paintings, overtly inspired by El Lissitzky, along
with the Futurists at the Venice Biennale. He occupied a remarkable
position, appearing as the only unofficial delegate of Western
Constructivism among the Futurists and consequently found some
receptive interlocutors along the way. Having visited the show in
May, Katherine Dreier contacted Pannaggi through Anton Giulio
Bragaglia and invited him to the exhibition that she was planning at
the Brooklyn Museum for the end of the year. Since the show was
going to feature Russian, German and Austrian Constructivism, she
felt that it would be a pity if ‘the Italian Constructivists’ were not also
included (Dreier 1926).
Soon after the closing of the Biennale, Pannaggi wrote to Walter
Gropius and requested some information about the Bauhaus, citing his
intention to write an article for the Italian press and to enrol in the
school (Pannaggi 1926). The following year, he moved to Berlin and
for a while took residence in the house of Leni Herzfeld, sister of the
Dada Fotomonteur John Heartfield (Crispolti 1995: 448).
Pannaggi’s stylistic embrace of Constructivism clearly testified to
his critical stance toward the political line followed in those years by
Futurism. His status as a self-defined, Constructivist presence within
Futurism was a form of resistance that had, however, limited
repercussions, given the Italian movement’s stylistic ecumenism at the
time12. Just like Paladini’s ‘Soviet’ Proletarian, his stylistic shift
exemplified his belief in the myth of the ideological ‘efficacy’ of a
style, of its capability, in Richter’s words from 1922, of ‘changing the
world of today’13.
In Berlin, his professional status became that of an architect and
designer. And it was finally as a designer that he unexpectedly
fulfilled the prospect of a direct engagement of art in politics, when
Walter Benjamin recommended him to his friend Arthur Müller
Lehning, famous anarchist and editor of the international journal i10.
Struck by his photomontages (one of which had just been published in
the popular bi-weekly Weltspiegel), Benjamin suggested using
Pannaggi’s skills to create specifically ‘political’ photomontages for
Müller Lehning’s journal (Gödde and Lonitz 1997: 435-436; 445). We
do not know what Pannaggi’s works for the journal would have
looked like; i10 ended its publication that same year, thus precluding
any collaboration.
At the end of the 1920s, the quandaries of Futurist machine art
seemed to run toward two alternative models of representation. On
one hand, Pannaggi himself proved influential in the birth of
Rationalist architecture. Reporting for the periodicals L’Ambrosiano
and later, Quadrante, he successfully diffused the modern
architectural debates taking place outside Italy. Even Fillìa, joined by
the young architect Alberto Sartoris, contributed to a similar outcome
in the pages of their journals La città futurista and La città nuova.
12
Paladini’s break with Futurism was much more overt. In the mid-1920s, he created
his own autonomous movement, Immaginismo, influenced by Karel Teige. His
painting Jonglerie (1926), published in Teige’s journal Red, along with some of his
architectural projects, aimed to express ‘a modern, clownish spirit’ and to offer a
new ‘vitality to the abstract forms of the Constructivists’, as he states in a letter to
friend and fellow artist, Antonio Fornari (Lista 1988: 67-68). Like Pannaggi, he
contributed to updating the debate on modern architecture in Italy (Martinelli 1992).
13
Russia remained a reference for him. In 1928, already established in Berlin, he
planned to visit that country (Pannaggi 1928).
This effort would gradually dissolve the definition of ‘machine

aesthetics’ into a new reconstruction of the spiritual foundations of
society through architecture. However, even among the most engaged
supporters of a progressive style in architecture, the long-time avant-
garde celebration of the Utopian role of the architect-engineer in
modern society went somewhat astray. In the debates surrounding
modern architecture in 1930s Italy, the psychological continuum
established between humans and machines through aesthetics
prepared the identification between the principles of the modernist
constructor and those of the idealized inhabitant of modern Fascist
architecture. In this framework, the latent necessities of contemporary
consciousness, shaped by the machine age, were duly satisfied by an
architecture that envisioned itself as the moral guarantee of a ‘higher
order of life’, that of Mussolini’s totalitarian modernity (Versari 2008:
87-88). Working from the margins, Benjamin’s project of the
politicization of art conceived, on the other hand, the role of the artist-
intellectual as the producer of critical iconologies that disrupt and
control the efficacy of this inherently coherent, dystopian aspiration to
totality.
‘Having passed from capitalist power to workers’ power, the
factory will continue to produce the same material things that it
produces today. But in what way and under what form will poetry [...]
be born?’ Gramsci had wondered (1921: 95). The Constructivist artists
had sought to respond to this question by imagining their art to
possess an accurately controlled method, capable of reframing, in a
progressive way, the relationship between human being and machine.
Similarly, Futurist Mechanical Art was born from the belief in an
inner correlation among modern age, modern art and the timeliness of
a social transformation. With the gradual demise of the expectations
growing from this belief, the artists’ search for an alliance with the
machine’s interlocutor and iconographical appendage, the worker,
progressively faded. For Futurism, this led, once again, to the pursuit
of its own historical validation through the celebrated efficacy of its
modernity, originally moulded upon the myth of mechanization.
In the 1930s, new Futurist trends such as Aeropittura and
Naturismo would point to a more ample vision of a spiritual
regeneration, carving new thematic fields of convergence out of the
growing apparatus of Fascist mass-culture.
Even when addressing these new references, the Futurists would

nonetheless ceaselessly reinstate the circular reasoning of the epochal,
psychological fracture instituted within contemporary perception and
sensibility by the machine, conceived as ‘cosmic necessity, inevitable
creation of nature, which integrates its creator to the point that fighting
it and dreaming of destroying it would amount to mutilating oneself’
(Marinetti 1935: 1). In this perspective, the idea of the power held by
progressive artists to operate within modernity would be absorbed by
the myth of the original, foundational role of mechanization in
guaranteeing and justifying modern culture itself. The tautology of
this reasoning, which had characterized the early debates on Futurist
Machine Art, would eventually shift the idea of art’s historical
efficacy back to the postulate of its historical timeliness.
Thus, like Spengler’s quiet engineer, the machine-age artist
embraced the task of managing, dutifully (as in the case of the
Futurists) or contemptuously (as advocated by Benjamin), a society
that was never rebuilt by the artistic tools of a Constructivist Utopia,
but had grown progressively attuned to what Fillìa (1927) had called
the ‘mechanical intransigent organization of tomorrow’.
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Günter Berghaus,

Massimo Prampolini, Anna Caterina Toni, Anthony Montoya for the
help and support that they provided in completing this essay, the
Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University for
partial financial support in acquiring the photographic material and
Laurie Klein (Beinecke Library) Enrico Cavalieri (Istituto Storico
Parri Emilia Romagna), Enrica Lozzi (Biblioteca Universitaria
Alessandrina) and the personnel of the many libraries and institutions
who helped me in locating original materials and documents.
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Lahoda, Vojtech (ed.) 2006. Local Strategies-International Ambitions: Modern Art
and Central Europe, 1918-1968. Papers from the International Conference,
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Multhipla.
––. 1988. Vinicio Paladini: Dal futurismo all’immaginismo. Salerno: Il cavaliere
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––. 1922, [Introductory Essay], in 1a esposizione futurista. Promossa dalla
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Futurism and Photography:
Between Scientific Inquiry and Aesthetic Imagination
Gerardo Regnani
Abstract: Trying to analyse the connections between Futurism and the technological
imagination is not an easy task. It is made even more difficult when taking into
consideration the technological medium of photography, and in particular, the specific
type of Futurist photography called ‘Photodynamism’. These images promoted the
idea of a dynamic world influenced by technology and as such became a meta-
discourse on the medium of photography. Futurism and Photodynamism, however,
proved to be a difficult union due to some Futurist painters’, and in particular
Umberto Boccioni’s aversion to this technological medium. Photodynamism did not
enjoy the same successful fate as conventional photography which profited from
Kodak’s promotional slogan: ‘You press the button, we do the rest’. Despite this, it is
indeed through Photodynamism, and in particular, photodynamic portraits, that it is
possible to identify an element of continuity that runs from Futurism to the present
day. As an example of this revival of Futurist photography I shall discuss at the end of
this chapter Italian NetFuturism, developed mostly on the Internet and sharing with
the historic movement of Futurism a struggle against artistic conventions and a
demand for a fusion of art and life.
‘‘The illiteracy of the future’, someone has said, ‘will be

ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography.’’’
W. Benjamin, ‘Kleine Geschichte der Photographie’
‘All media are active metaphors in their power

to translate experience into new forms.’
M. McLuhan, Understanding Media
Futurism and the photographic imagination
The intense phase of technological development that began at the turn

of the nineteenth century played a decisive role in the collective
artistic imagination. This was particularly the case in those arts in
which the modalities used to represent reality were continually being
‘contaminated’ by technology. This chapter examines the case of
photography which, in the scientific and materialistic scenario of a
178 Gerardo Regnani
modern world, affirmed itself as a peculiar mechanical ‘eye’ that was

to revolutionize existing techniques of surveying, visualizing and
reproducing the visible world. Because human sight cannot be
anything as responsive to rays of light as a photosensitive surface,
there existed a popular belief that photography could be an artistic and
scientific tool, a kind of intellectual ‘retina’, summed up by Émile
Zola in 1901 in his famous maxim that ‘you cannot claim to have truly
seen something until you have photographed it with all its details’.1
However, as only a fraction of the world can be known by
photographic means (see Lemagny & Rouillé 1986), the history of
photography is not only made up of works designed to mirror reality,
but also of others intended to critique the mythologizing
representations of the world. The consequences of this new, and
sometimes schizophrenic, ‘gaze’ amount to a fundamental distinction
between science (objective impartial vision) and subjectivity (the
imperfect and biased human act of perception). (Marra 1999:13)
Amongst the best-known critical contributions concerning this
dialectic are those formulated by Baudelaire and Benjamin. The first
was in relation to photography’s ‘encroachment upon the domain of
the impalpable and the imaginary,’ deplored in the essay on
photography in his Salon of 1859:
As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be

painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his
studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a
blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. I do not
believe, or at least I do not wish to believe, in the absolute success of
such a brutish conspiracy, in which, as in all others, one finds both
fools and knaves; but I am convinced that the ill-applied developments
of photography, like all other purely material developments of
progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French
artistic genius, which is already so scarce. […] If photography is
allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have
supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the
multitude which is its natural ally. (Baudelaire 1961: 1034-35)
1
‘A mon avis, vous ne pouvez pas dire que vous avez vu quelque chose à fond si vous
n'en avez pas pris une photograpie révélant un tas de détails qui, autrement, ne
pourraient même pas être discernés.’ Zola in an interview with the British magazine,
The King, in 1901. (Sontag 1977: 87; Zola 1979: 44)
Futurism and Photography 179
The second contribution was in relation to the utilitarian value of a

work of art in an age of infinite technical reproducibility:
With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art,

its fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the
quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative
transformation of its nature. […] By placing an absolute emphasis on
its exhibition value, the work of art becomes a creation with entirely
new functions, among which the one we are particularly conscious of,
namely the artistic function, may be recognized as incidental at a later
point in time. This much is certain: today, photography and also film
offer the most useful exemplifications of this new function. (Benjamin
1955b: ch. V)
Leaving aside the critics who have interpreted the meaning and
value of photography, this art form seemed to assert itself as a kind of
ordering device in a world that was palpably becoming more and more
complex and chaotic. What was deemed a ‘representation’ of the
visible world was in fact the creation of a new reality one degree
removed from its originating source, but to which it appeared to be
analogous. Futurist photography did not escape this representational
dilemma, in fact it became a ‘battle ground’ of a whole gamut of
tensions stemming from technological developments and cultural
transformations.
The debate about photography in the Futurist movement
The Futurists seemed to have grasped the full potential of photography

early on and made ample use of this the medium both for the purpose
of documenting and communicating their contribution to cultural life
in Italy. Marinetti possessed an acute awareness of the growing
importance of industry or, rather, of the cultural industries and,
intuitively, exploited the strategic significance of photography as the
universal lingua franca which could reach anyone and everyone.
Nonetheless, the use of photographic images as part of the Futurist
public relations machinery stood in marked contrast to the Futurists’
conflicting relationship with photography as an artistic medium. This
tension was generated by the difficulty of finding ways of using
photography as a means of intervening in a reality that was in
perennial evolution and thus difficult to be represented adequately, i.e.
180 Gerardo Regnani
in a dynamic manner. This critical stance did not, however, prevent

the Futurists from employing the medium for promotional purposes.
The divergence, on the one hand, between the photographic output
and, on the other hand, the theoretical utterances against this
technological tool made the tension even more evident.
The Futurists, who wanted to capture the dynamism of life and to
promote a complete fusion of art and life, regarded photography as a
technological device that would arrest the dynamic flux of time,
squander the energy that is inherent in a given action and condemn it
to eternal immobility. For them, the technology of photography
nurtured a symbolic universe that was static, without life, and thus the
paradigmatic antithesis of simultaneity and vital dynamism which they
promoted in their works and writings. This vitality was a typical trait
of Futurist painting and was meant to make society more attentive to
the ideals of modernity. For the Futurist project, photography, unlike
its sister art, painting, did not seem capable of capturing the
fundamental and dynamic network of human relations. The realistic
photographic image seemed to be a mere reflection of reality,
dependent on and determined by a reprographic apparatus; it thus
stood in direct contrast to the Futurist aim of transforming the world in
an outburst of unlimited creative energy.
Photography seems to historicize an action rather than make it
present; it gives it the ontological status of what Barthes termed
‘noeme’, ‘that-has-been’ (Barthes 1981: 96). Every photograph
evokes and is indelibly linked to its referent. Unlike other forms of
representation, a photographic image can never deny the object ‘that
has been’ in front of the camera. The image is a mechanical-chemical
encapsulation of rays of light emitted by that object. The referent thus
becomes part of the material substance of the photograph. Both, the
signifier (the image) and the signified (that which is represented), are
joined together in a fixed relationship from which they both benefit
and which they both suffer the consequences of. A photographic
image falls into that category of things whose components cannot be
separated. The photograph is ‘an emanation of the referent’ and
belongs to the ‘class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be
separated without destroying them both’. (Barthes 1980: 6) Barthes
sees in photography a ‘bizarre medium’, because that which has been
seen is not a real object, but a strange, eccentric entity that is similar to
a hallucination. Yet, at the same time, it is real in terms of its temporal
dimension. The essence of photography is located at the interstice of

referentiality and time: that which we see in the image has of necessity
existed. But it is now a mere ‘has-been’. For this reason, the Futurists
likened photography to Medusa’s petrifying gaze2 and deemed it
unsuitable for a dynamic exploration of reality.
The Futurists believed that, rather than being a concrete and
exemplary aid in their attempt to create a metaphorical synthesis of
life and art, photography had the potential to transmit a negative
image of their collective identity. For this reason, they feared that the
apparent ‘truth’ of a photograph could transform itself from friend into
foe. (Lista 2001: 175) The Futurists attempted to overcome this
‘structural defect’ of the photographic medium through ‘emblematic
photography’ and a movement towards ‘photo-performance’. They
tried to create true tableaux vivants, i.e. ‘living’ pictures, with
themselves as the protagonists of their images. Instead of being simply
the authors of mechanical reproductions, they acted in front of the
camera as artistic subjects. (Marra 1999: 44). It was exactly by means
of this expressive modality of creating photographic images that the
Futurists attempted to re-create reality.
Towards a dynamic concept of photography
Photography seemed to be characterized by an incurable rigor mortis

and could irredeemably compromise a vital characteristic of the
Futurist movement, namely its thirst for simultaneity and dynamism.
But in 1911, Anton Giulio Bragaglia took up the challenge and
attempted to transform the medium into a dynamic tool for capturing
and exhibiting the vibrant essence of the world. Like his
brothers Arturo, Carlo Ludovico and Alberto, he cultivated not only a
serious interest in photography, but also in para-scientific
representations of ghosts, spiritual vibration, etc. (Cigliana 1996: 249-
252). Presumably, it was this mixture of pseudo-scientific and
rationalist interests that led him, with the help his brother Arturo, to
the creation of photographs that could evoke aspects of both the
tangible and ethereal world.
2
In Greek mythology, Medusa was a gorgon, a female monster, who could use her
gaze to turn everybody who dared look at her into stone.
182 Gerardo Regnani
Anton Giulio Bragaglia had taken note of the Futurist activities in

Rome, had read and discussed their manifestos and, in 1911, had
begun a series of photographic experiments in which they had greatly
reduced the shutter speed. These prolonged overexposures of an
expressive action illuminated by a powerful concentrated source of
light allowed for a visual rendering of the object’s movement in its
relative trajectory. (Bragaglia 1913a: 14) Through this innovative and
highly controlled technique of taking photographs, a new and
revolutionary figurative expression was born in which the action was
concentrated in a unique visual manner that gave the movement
continuity while at the same time producing an awareness, or a
memory, of the phases and the shape of its trajectory.
This method resulted in images that possessed a dynamic
dimension completely different from those in chronophotography.
Whereas the latter breaks movement up into clearly divided, frozen
shots that fracture the action and fail to convey a sensation of its
essential (dynamic) values, the images of the Bragaglia brothers
offered a dynamic representation of the lyrical and plastic sensations
of the objects represented. Anton Giulio Bragaglia named these plates
‘photodynamic images’, as they presented a dynamic synthesis of life
and conjured up the incessantly vibrating universe.3 He felt that his
photographs relinquished the deterministic quality attached to the
‘canonical’ use of the medium and were pure artifice. His production,4
although being ‘polluted’ by technology, did not assume the
connotation of classic scientific studies, but rather of an experiment
that investigated new aesthetic perspectives.
The work carried out by the Bragaglia brothers offered proof that
photography could indeed ‘dematerialize’ bodies. In their hands, the
camera became a technological instrument that, in an emblematic
manner, converted static forms into dynamic images. They
3
The ‘vibrating cosmos’ is a popular topic in speculative philosophy ever since
Pythagoras. It is also a central tenet of the mystic tradition running from
Rosicrucianism to Theosophy and inspired many artists who were influenced by
occult science, para-psychology etc.
4
In 1994, a controversy arose when Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia claimed that in actual
fact he had been the inventor of Photodynamism and Anton Giulio only its
theoretician. The question was finally brought to court and decided on in favour of
Anton Giulio (sentence no. 39027/03 I Sezione of Tribunale Civile in Rome, dated
1.12.2003, available on line at http://www.photographers.it/articoli/foto1/bragaglia/
sentenza 2003/sentenza2003.PDF).
demonstrated that the photographic apparatus, generally believed to be

only able to ‘freeze’ actions with cold, mechanical arbitrariness, was
in fact able to synthesize the essential qualities of movement and to
produce – throughout the analysis of the ‘trajectory’, a synthesis of the
action – a ‘vertiginous lyrical expression of life, an animated
invocation of the magnificent dynamic feeling with which the
universe incessantly vibrates.’ (Bragaglia 1913a: 36) With these
images, they demonstrated the artistic potential of pseudoscientific
research: from the set-up of the photographic session to the use of the
lighting apparatus, from the selection of the subjects to the
organization of specific gestural performances, their images opposed
traditionalist aesthetic dogma and became one of the most
characteristic expressions of Italian Futurism in photography.
However, when the results of these experiments were made public,
the Bragaglia brothers found themselves in a situation where they had
become rivals and competitors of the Futurist painter Umberto
Boccioni. This antagonism became acute following the publication of
a series of essays in the Turin journal, Artistic Photography, in which
Anton Giulio Bragaglia once again criticized the camera’s ‘realism’
(Bragaglia 1912). For Bragaglia, the possibility that photography
could evolve from being a technical device into a vehicle of artistic
expression was unconditionally linked to a rejection of its ‘objective’
functions. He firmly believed that photography should have an
intellectual status that was not connected to the task of reproducing
reality. He suggested that photography should focus on the tangible
‘concreteness’ of the luminous traces generated by a moving body that
seemed to have been freed from the bonds of matter. Thus, the
mechanical gaze of the camera would be able to go beyond a mere
representation of the world of the senses and create novel forms of
‘reading’ reality. This new modality would then be able to dissolve the
static quality that was attached to every ‘cadaver-like’ photograph. For
him, Photodynamic images created space for a dynamic and spiritual
vision of the real, similar to the aesthetics of Futurist painting (Lista
2001: 152-167). By balancing the mechanical nature of taking
photographs with the subjective act of capturing a dynamic action –
thus moving away from the category of index to that of icon, as
defined by Charles Sanders Peirce5 – Bragaglia demonstrated the
5
Peirce made the symbol - index - icon triad a core element of his semiotics, which
184 Gerardo Regnani
capacity of photography to make a significant contribution to the

system of art (Marra 1999: 38).
Anton Giulio Bragaglia acknowledged the growing influence of
Futurist art when he explicitly declared his ‘debt’ to Giacomo Balla
and the Technical Manifesto of the Futurist Painters. (Bragaglia
1913a: 13) Another theory that probably influenced the young Anton
Giulio was Boccioni’s definition of ‘pictorial dynamism’ and
‘physical transcendentalism’, presented in a lecture on Futurist
painting at the Circolo Artistico in Rome, in May 1911. Here, the
painter had specifically judged it opportune to exclude forms of
representation that are strongly tied to the tangible characteristics of
the subject depicted. (Boccioni 1911: 231) Not by accident, then, did
Bragaglia define Photodynamism as ‘a transcendental photography of
movement’, capable of representing a dynamic action in its full
trajectory (by making certain modifications, i.e. ‘the distortion and
destruction imposed by the motion and light which translate
themselves into trajectories’; Bragaglia 1913a: 34)
In the Futurist technological imagination, speed could be
symbolized through different formal artifices, such as ‘luminous
appearances’, capable of conjuring up a dimension of ceaseless
motion (Lista 2001: 150). Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Photodynamism
went beyond the dissection of motion in chronophotography and
cinematography (Bragaglia 1913a: 28-34). His images brought about
an authentic revolution in the expressive means of the avant-garde
and, one may add, they served the political end of demonstrating the
possibility of harnessing a technological medium for the Futurist
cause. It is in this light that A. G. Bragaglia’s critique of
photography’s inherent realism can be interpreted: he employed
Photodynamism as a means of liberating photography from the
‘defects’ of its apparent scientific and non-artistic nature (Bragaglia
1913a: 18). Initially, the Bragaglia brothers were interested in the
exploration of scientific photographs, but their experiments were a
examines the relations of signs to their objects. Symbols possess a relationship with
their objects that is based on convention (e.g. a bald eagle representing the USA); an
index is directly influenced by the object it represents (e.g. a clock as an index of
time); and icons have the physical resemblance of the objects they stand for (e.g. a
drawn face of a person). Photographs have properties in common with the object
represented, and are therefore icons; but as they are also directly and physically
influenced by the object, they are also an index; lastly, they are also symbols as they
require a learned process to be ‘read’ and understood.
curious mixture of genres as different as spiritual photography and

biological and medical research. Today, science is characterized by
objectivity and rationality. At that time, it entailed a mystic dimension
that did not exclude the esoteric and the occult. The Bragaglia brothers
were attracted to these trends just as much as other Futurists were (see
Celant 1970 and Cigliana 1996). And, of course, at the beginning of
the twentieth century, the technical dimension of photography had not
yet been fully explored (Marra 1999: 30-1). It is therefore not
surprising to find Anton Giulio Bragaglia publish an essay,
‘Photography of the Invisible’ (Bragaglia 1913b), in which he
addressed the invention of an apparatus used to photograph
dimensions of reality hidden to the human eye. Making reference to
scientific experiments, he expressed his scepticism of conventional
science and instead referred to the need to explore the forces of the
ether and of the stars, ‘invisible haziness’, spiritual séances, vibrations
of quasi material substances, the materialization of emanations,
‘doublings’, phantom visions and the similarities of certain
photographs to Röntgen’s x-rays. (Bragaglia 1913a: 48, 247-255).
In 1913, the Roman publisher Giuseppe Ugo Nalato published
Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Futurist Photodynamism. Part of the booklet
had previously been circulating in hectographed form in Rome and
was not well received in Futurist circles. The Futurist Headquarters
issued a warning in Lacerba and formally declared that
Photodynamism was entirely unconnected to ‘Plastic Dynamism’,
which they had invented, and to all other ‘dynamic studies’ carried out
in the context of their artistic research (Boccioni et al. 1913). This
statement was to rule out any possibility of adding a Futurist tag to
Bragaglia’s work. Speaking in the name of the Futurist movement,
Boccioni demanded the severing of ‘any contact’ with
Photodynamism on the ground that it was ‘presumptuous and useless’
that even capable of ruining Futurism’s theoretical project (Lista
2001: 160-61). He expressed his ‘disgust’ and ‘contempt’ towards
photography and rejected any claim that it might be considered art.
This hostility was not rooted in any theoretical disagreements and /
or presumed incompatibilities between different kinds of Futurist
media. Rather, it can be interpreted as a defensive act to protect the
medium of painting and as a sign of aversion to photography tout
court. The latter is rather astonishing, given the marked interest the
Futurists had always shown towards technological progress – within
186 Gerardo Regnani
which photography certainly played a major role – and the changes it

had brought about in Italian society. (Marra 1999: 18-36) The
Futurists welcomed the multifaceted potential of technology, not least
its contribution towards the creation of a symbolic New Man fully
rooted and deeply immersed in modern visual culture. But when it
came to photography, their attitude was extremely contradictory, as I
have shown above and as can be seen again in their use of portraiture.
Portraiture and technological imagination
Portraiture possessed a long-established tradition in the visual arts and

was one of the most important modalities of representation of all time.
The Italian word for portrait, ‘ritratto’, comes from the verb ‘ri-trarre’,
meaning to ‘trace or draw again’. There are analogies to other genres
of automatic image-making, but here they are ‘limited’ to the fact that
the image ‘re-stores’ as faithful as possible a fraction of reality. Of
course, this type of representation is never neutral, as it is always
charged with dense emotive weight that comes from the person being
photographed and the specific situation in which the image is being
taken. As such, it is no different from a painting or a literary work that
borrows certain limited aspects from a given reality (Fiorentino 2007:
117-131).
Portraiture was not only a significant artistic medium, but it also
contributed to the Futurists’ theoretical speculation on what today
would be called hardware and software. Photography became an ideal
extension of the mind and, therefore, a technological ‘prosthesis’ of
the modern individual in his or her interaction with the natural, social
and technological world. (McLuhan 1964, 2002: 30) The Futurist
mechanical eye represented a potential expression of this ‘extended
mind’ as it could give tangible form to the myth of the avant-garde
artist as a young rebel: angry demeanour, crossed arms, and a
provocative gaze directed at the investigative device of the camera.
Thus, portraiture assumed, in a symbolic manner, the function of an
Anti-Hero and formed part of a confrontational agenda most
prominently displayed during the serate of the years 1910-14. The
invisible technological ‘adversary’ could ideally describe a devious
antagonist whose actions could be part of a narrative propelled by the
protagonist, who uses images (signs) produced by the camera and
appears to outline a plausible plan of action or an underlying

interaction (Fabbri & Marrone 2000: 219). It is therefore possible to
hypothesize that the photographic narrative contained a potential form
of disjunction from the object of value (Fabbri & Marrone 2000: 219)
represented by the presumed inadequacy of the camera to express a
vital artistic expression (i.e. dynamism). In this gap between the desire
to realise a dynamism representation of the world and the apparent
technical inability of the camera to make this possible (due to its
unavoidable ‘freezing’ of reality), a disequilibrium seemed to emerge.
This symbolic but dramatic defect, even from the semiotic point of
view, rendered portraiture ‘static’ and, by metonymy, photography as
a medium unsuited to Futurism.
Seen from this perspective, Futurism could be imagined as a
hypothetical intended subject who, like a classical sovereign in fables,
witnessed (apparently helplessly) a kidnapper abducting a loved child
(or, respectively, the disappearance of dynamism in a process
instigated by a technological adversary). The resulting performance
was meant to restore the vital dynamism (the equilibrium existing
before) that the technological ‘antagonist’ seemed to have dissolved.
In relation to this, photography, or Photodynamism, became like a
‘magical instrument’, a ‘weapon’ in the hands of the Futurist hero (the
photodynamist A.G. Bragaglia) making him able to combat the mortal
stasis inherent in the photograph. In such a way, through the re-
creation of a dynamic representation, the technical means was re-
converted into a tool in keeping with Futurist philosophy. In other
words, dynamism was finally restored to representation. It was
symbolically reunited with a subject/object of value from which it had
previously been separated.
The place of Photodynamism in the history of avant-garde

photography
Photodynamism represented a new chapter in the history of

photography and helped to develop the Futurists’ technological
imagination. It was a medium that attempted to interpret the world
through a series of paradigmatic images in which a multiplicity of
elements were concentrated. Despite the tangible disadvantage that
photography can only achieve a simulation of movement, this
188 Gerardo Regnani
‘disadvantage’ was turned into a positive trait, or an active metaphor

capable of translating experience into new forms, in relation to other
media, also those that preceded it. During a phase when photography
was largely concerned with the ‘conquest’ of movement, synergetic
and dialectic relationships emerged between these media. Such
interdependence was in fact the distinctive feature of the continuous
interrelations between old and new media, which became true and
proper intellectual extensions of the individual, and were capable of
endlessly creating new connections between the senses and different
artistic media.
Futurist Photodynamism created new mediatic and technological
scenarios at a time when a particular dynamism invigorated the Italian
cultural scene. This spirit of renewal was a strong influence on Anton
Giulio Bragaglia, who was tired of the ‘old forms’ that had
characterized photography until then. He was anxious to experiment
with new methods to capture movement, which, at that time, were still
rather limited due to the restricted sensitivity of photographic
materials to light and the poor optical quality of the equipment used.
Occasionally, there had been examples in which the photographic
apparatus seemed to have managed to ‘freeze’ movement, e.g. some
stereoscopic images produced after 1859 of the chaotic comings and
goings of the New York underground transit system, even during
rainy days. (Newhall 1982: 159) The impact of these images on the
collective imaginaries and discursive practices of the time, and their
implications for the scientific and technological communities were
immense.6 For however banal it might appear today, the new
technological device of photography was able to finally make tangible
a universe that previously had only been vaguely intuited. Thus,
progressively and in a series of intermittent stages, a phenomenon
emerged which Benjamin summed up in the fortunate formula of the
‘optical unconscious’.7 Also Photodynamism formed part of this
process and, in fact, assumed a ‘life of its own’. Because of the
6
For example, Oliver Wendell Holmes, a physician and volunteer infantry man in the
American Civil War, found the chronophotographic studies of men walking
extremely useful for his understanding of the anatomy of human locomotion and
used them as a basis for his design of prostheses.
7
‘It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical
unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through
psychoanalysis.’ (Benjamin 1955, 1966: 63)
technological means employed, Bragaglia’s images presented a world

that was plausibly different from the one which the artist had
perceived when taking the photograph.
When dealing with the frightful unpredictability of the
performance of the technical apparatus, the other Futurists seemed as
knowledgeable as they were vulnerable. They tried to defend the
Futurist aim of fusing art and life, and feared that this could not be
achieved by the mechanical means of photography. Paradoxically, the
medium’s potential for a truthful representation of reality (which, in
principle, they supported) could work out to their disadvantage, as the
viewer could arrive at an entirely different interpretation of the
depicted reality than they, as Futurists, had intended. Thus, they risked
irreparably destroying the idea of fusing art and life which they had
hoped to convey to the world with means of their artistic creations.
Their typical response was to control the risk by using ‘emblematic
photography’ (Lista 2001: 175). This solution allowed them to
promote their ‘authentic’ vision of the Futurist movement in a safe
manner. In those images we can discern both a ‘normal’ promotional
intent and, in nuce, a new aesthetic development. By giving life to a
kind of tableau vivant, the Futurist artist carried out a performance
that anticipated the artistic concerns of Conceptual Art, Body Art and
other artistic expressions that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. (Marra
1999: 44)
However, in the meantime, Braglaglia’s artistic efforts seemed to
have largely vanished from the artistic agendas (Zannier 1998: 281).
Photodynamic concepts briefly resurfaced in 1930, when Marinetti
and Tato8 penned the Manifesto of Futurist Photography, which
included, amongst others, the following suggestions:
1. The drama of moving and immobile objects; the dramatic

intermingling of moving and immobile objects. […]
8. The moving or static suspension of objects and their state of
equilibrium.
9. The dramatic disproportioning of moving and static objects.
8
Tato was the pseudonym of Guglielmo Sansoni. He was an autodidact painter who
joined the Futurist movement after the First World War and was particularly
interested in the border phenomena between the real and the artificial. See
Dizionario di fotografia 2001: 720-21.
190 Gerardo Regnani
The manifesto coincided with the First National Photographic

Competition and offered theoretical depth to the studies carried out by
various artists within the Futurist movement, such as Tato, Antonio
Buggeri, Ferruccio Demanins, Bruno Munari, Vinicio Paladini, Giulio
Parisio, Luigi Veronesi and Wanda Wulz. After this late recuperation
of Photodynamism one had to wait until the Neo-avant-garde re-
evaluated the technique of photomontage and of portraiture and turned
them into paradigmatic media in their own right. Consequently, the
emergence of digital photography instigated new discourses, in which
some of the Futurist ideas received new topicality. The use of the
camera as a technological prosthesis re-proposed an ideal artificial
world set apart from the reality in which we live and interact. The
‘human’ world stands in contrast to a ‘posthuman’ one. While in the
first domain our physical existence does not appear to be affected by
technology, in the posthuman world the technological devices have
invaded the human body and have become an integral part of it. The
paradigmatic expression of this biotechnological hybridity is the
cyborg, where genetic engineering and data processing combined to
give shape and substance to an artificial ‘new being’. In the
technological imagination of the postmodern world, ample space has
been accorded to this artificial dimension, but only few artists have
taken up traditional themes such as the juxtaposition of man and
machine and of an organic and inorganic world. Amongst them one
can count the Italian NetFuturists.
Futurism on the Internet
Art, photography included, began to show its disorientation in

postmodern production with a passage to the posthuman and a
resulting distancing from Humanism and the modern idea of time and
space. (Abruzzese 2003: 595-8) Photography contributed to giving
shape to the ‘tribes of the present’ that re-emerged in artificial bodies
that were progressively ‘incarnated’ in cyberspace. There, the ‘man-
crowd’ dissolved in an innumerable series of tribes within which each
individual redefined himself using expressive modalities. The events
that have been and continue to be an exception to this tendency are the
media ceremonies: for example, the funeral for Lady Diana in 1997.
During these ceremonies, and thanks to the ‘reinforcement’ offered by
Illustr. 1: Giorgetti G., gg23. Illustr. 2: Massafra S., 0??????1
the images disseminated over the web, for these communities there
seems to be a momentary kind of primordial cohesion.
NetFuturism provides an element of continuity and of cultural,
ideological, and expressive affinity with the historical avant-garde of
Futurism (see illustrations 1-7). NetFuturism was founded in Italy and
aims to distinguish itself from the various strains of Neo-futurism.
Yet, at the same time, it recalls some fundamental elements of historic
Futurism, such as breaking with the past and producing a synthesis of
art and life. These photographs employ a digital ‘brush’, as a kind of
modern equivalent to Talbot’s ‘pencil of nature’.9 The classic camera
based on mechanical and chemical principles is seemingly left
unchanged. But its new functional principles – sketched out below –
do not change the communicative principle of the portraits and make
them a vehicle for the NetFuturist cause. These images were not
created as representative signboards of NetFuturism, but rather have
become ‘ambassadors’ of the movement, probably unknowingly and
to some degree in contrast to its initial ‘iconoclast spirit’. According to
Antonio Saccoccio, one of the founders of the movement,
‘representative portraits’ can be summarized as follows: firstly, they
9
William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature: Brief Historical Sketch of the
Invention of the Art [of photography] was the first photographically illustrated book
to be commercially published (by Longman & Co., London 1844). It was the
fruition of eleven years of experimentation begun on the banks of Lake Como,
where he tried to ‘sketch’ the views surrounding him with the aid of a camera lucida.
192 Gerardo Regnani
were imagined as immaterial, ubiquitous and ‘usable’ by anybody

who uses the Internet and visits the official site of the NetFuturist
group; secondly, the choice of the technological medium has
important aesthetic and ideological ramifications. Transformative
programmes and devices are used to elaborate the images and to hide
the face of the sitter behind a technological ‘mask’. Each of the
portraits is then ‘baptized’ by attaching a name to it. The names
chosen are made up of alphanumerical characters and form a strategic
text that is fundamental to the image, as they indicate a semantic
context, orientation and interpretative ‘mooring’ within a sphere of
more or less circumscribed meaning.
As for the ideological
component, the technique of
camouflage points to a
fundamental issue: Net
Futurism’s opposition to a
system of art that is
traditionally based on a star
cult and the notion of the
artist as genius. Net
Futurism, through this pre-
text, aims to set itself apart
from such a system by
provocative and symbolic
acts of rejection, whereby
the subject in the portrait is
‘dissolved’ by means of a
digital ‘revamping’ of the
image. This intentional
choice is limited, in actual
terms, to this precise
operative environment,
because in other media or
contexts (e.g. live
performances) the identity
of the group members
Illustr. 3+4: Saccoccio A., 7tn4 would become apparent.
CC; Giannetta F., 3Pfnk mn733 This does not mean that
their identity is
systematically concealed; in fact it may be the reverse. The

communicative channels offered by the Internet serve to promote the
idea of breaking down barriers, like those between artists and non-
artists, – barriers that by now have become untenable. For the
NetFuturists, in fact, there is no clear distinction between the two
categories of ‘artist’ and ‘non-artist’, as everybody can (and should)
express himself with all of his creative ‘baggage’.
The members of the group make reference to the thinking of
Alexei Shulgin who in 1996, speaking of Net.art, affirmed that the
problem of art online is deeply connected to traditional notions of art
and the artist. He suggested that we should forget the very word and
notion of ‘art’, and those ‘silly fetishes’ that are imposed on the artist
by oppressive institutions that pay for his creative activities.10
(Shulgin 1996) Referring to the Luther Blissett Project,11 the
NetFuturists reject the concept of genius, arguing that artists are
substantially equal to any normal citizen. A further argument for this
thesis can be found on the official site of the movement, which
reaffirms that neither the names nor the biographies of the exponents
of Netfuturism will be made public. For the NetFuturists, the World-
Wide-Web is not a channel to promote the cult of a singular
personality, but rather a means to give the ideas of the group global
distribution. It is a gesture of virtual protest that polemicizes against
the ‘technological mannerism’ of so-called Web-sites which,
10
The Moscow based artist Alexei Shulgin originally worked in the field of
photography. Since founding the Moscow-WWW-Art-Lab in 1994, he moved into
the area of web-based technologies of vision. In 2003, he was co-founder of the Art
collective Electroboutique which focuses on social psychology and theories of
perception, examining our dependency on technology and suggesting methods of
creative redemption. Their critical messages are directly aimed at the viewers’
subconscious, and at the same time entertain them with vibrant and dynamic
artworks. This paradox of critiquing capitalism while at the same time producing
commercially viable works for a digital market is highlighted in Shulgin’s
manifestos distributed on the Internet.
11
‘Luther Blissett’ is a multi-use domain informally adopted in November 1994 and
named after a black British footballer who played for AC Milano. In December
1999, all ‘veterans’ (hundreds of artists poets, performers and cybernauts)
committed a symbolic seppuku (samurai ritual suicide). In Italy, the so-called
‘Luther Blissett Project’ was an organized network that shared the ‘Luther Blissett’
identity. It became an extremely popular phenomenon as a kind of Robin Hood of
the information age who waged a guerrilla war on the cultural industry, ran
solidarity campaigns for victims of censorship and repression and – above all –
played elaborate media pranks as a form of art.
194 Gerardo Regnani
Illustr. 5: Third NetFuturist Manifesto, 2008.
according to the NetFuturists, are full of aesthetics but extremely poor

on content. Analogous to what happened with Photodynamism, the
portraits published by the NetFuturists on the Internet offer not only a
succinct indicator of the ideological positions taken by the movement
itself, but also a sort of meta-discourse dedicated to the (now
predominantly digital) nature of the photographic medium. This
aspect was emphasized through the substitution of conventional titles

by apparently neutral alphanumeric codes.
To this strategy we can add the deliberate ‘manipulation’ of the
images by means of digital software. The portraits are pushed to the
limits of distortion (see, for example, the portrait entitled ‘gg23’,
ill. 3) and thus bring to mind the heredity of historical Futurism.
NetFuturism was born, according to Antonio Saccoccio, to re-engage
with the ideas of Futurism and to rekindle, by means of the Internet,
the battles undertaken nearly a hundred years ago while, at the same
time, adapting Futurist aesthetics to the technological context of the
early twenty-first century. For the NetFuturists, the most problematic
aspect of the digital culture is the widespread homogenization of the
modern individual by means of stereotyping, the exaltation of
mediocrity, the tyranny of the ‘politically correct’ and the trite
repetition of things done and seen and said a million times before. It is
a phenomenon re-enforced by the Internet, as it takes advantage of the
free contributions offered by individuals in their interactive ‘Web-
logs’ (‘Blogs’) – in particular ‘LIBERI DALLA FORMA: il primo
blog net-futurista’ (http://liberidallaforma.blogspot.com/) created on
14 May 2005.
Illustr. 6: ‘Non-Opening’ of a ‘Non-Exhibition’ of NetFuturism in Rome, 3-7

December 2008.
196 Gerardo Regnani
Illustr. 7: ‘Non-Opening’ of a ‘Non-Exhibition’ of NetFuturism in Rome, 3-7

December 2008.
NetFuturism’s first steps were marked by some uncertainties and

various desertions, as the community was partly made up of
sympathizers and admirers of historic Futurism who did not aspire to
be involved with the creation of a new avant-garde. The path of
NetFuturism was preceded by the launching, on 12 January 2006, of a
Neofuturist movement and the creation of a Website http://neofuturisti
italiani.splinder.com/. This multi-blog12 was anticipated by a public
call in the blog http://liberidallaforma.blogspot.com/, and it was
followed, in the second half of 2007, by the creation of a dynamic site
that trusts in the possibilities offered by the web 2.0 (the interactive
encyclopedia Wikipedia, internet-based personal online journals,
Weblogs, etc.) and by the presence of Groups of Permanent
12
MultiBlog is a plugin that provides the user with the ability to include templated
content from other blogs in their Movable Type installation. It also allows the user to
define rebuild triggers, as normally posts to one blog do not cause rebuild in another
that might include content from it. Finally, MultiBlog allows the user to define
access controls for the blogs in their system, to prevent one blog from accessing the
content of another.
Development of NetFuturist Thought (GSPPN) as virtual communities

of activists within NetFuturism.
This organization was not created to re-establish an art of the past.
It tries to serve the digital revolutionary cause of our time through
rhizomatic and reticular forms of communication rather than through
pyramidic (vertical) connection and unidirectional communicative
modalities, as is the case in radio, newspapers and television.13 For
various reasons, then, the photographic portraits represent a kind of
condensed meta-discourse of the NetFuturist message spread through
the World-Wide-Web. The NetFuturist aim is to create new human
beings of the twenty-first century who, finally liberated from their role
as passive web-user, have the opportunity of potentially becoming
authors and campaigners for a culture that is not based on repetition
but on creAzione (creative action). The New Humankind envisaged by
the NetFuturists is made strong by the collective synergies coming
from a ‘collective intelligence’ (Lévy 1994) that is cultivated by the
Web and will finally unleash an unprecedented creativity. The
NetFuturist movement predicts a more responsible use of new
technologies with a true concern for their effects on the real world.
For the time being, it has not has not been deemed necessary to create
other virtual worlds and avatars to promote the Futurist cause in
realms such as the one created by subscribers of the three-dimensional
virtual world, Second Life. But this being said, NetFuturism will avail
itself of the Web to stimulate through virtuality and other cyberactive
technologies a kind of ‘sensory remapping’ of the world (de
Kerckhove 1994).
Translated by Meg Greenberg
13
See the third manifesto of NetFuturism, made up entirely by the graphic synthesis,
as shown in illustration 5.
198 Gerardo Regnani
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Futurist Poetics and the Cinematic Imagination:
Marinetti’s Cinema without Films
Wanda Strauven
Abstract: This chapter discusses Marinetti’s ambivalent attitude towards the cinematic
medium as a possible explanation for the failure of Futurist cinema. Although the
leader of Futurism appeared to profoundly understand the workings of the film
language, he never fully promoted the development of Futurist cinema. Although he
practiced a kind of ‘cinematization’ of Futurist theatre, he never openly acknowledged
the inspiration of the new technology in his creative writings. He wrote a complete
screenplay, entitled Velocità, but kept it secret until after his death. In other words,
cinema played an important role in Marinetti’s intellectual and artistic formation, but
was often forgotten or repressed. On the other hand, Marinetti’s role in the field of
cinema studies has also remained undervalued. I shall demonstrate this by taking into
account not only Marinetti’s concrete filmic achievements (such as his contribution to
the publication of The Futurist Cinema and the realization of Vita Futurista), but also
his Futurist poetics as developed in various theatre and literature manifestos. It is
especially in the latter that one can detect Marinetti’s strong affinities with cinema. By
analyzing a series of key concepts, such as the Futurist analogy, the wireless
imagination, the poetry of second terms, the mechanical man with interchangeable
parts, the Futurist marvellous, and the polyexpressiveness, Marinetti’s intuitive
theorization of cinema is revealed.
I desire in moving pictures, not the stillness, but the

majesty of sculpture. I do not advocate for the photoplay
the mood of the Venus of Milo. But let us turn to that sister
of hers, the Victory of Samothrace, that spreads her wings
at the head of the steps of the Louvre, and in many an art
gallery beside. When you are appraising a new film, ask
yourself: ‘Is this motion as rapid, as godlike, as the sweep
of the wings of the Samothracian?’
Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1915)
Fast faster fastest
The pioneering American film theorist Vachel Lindsay clearly missed

the Futurist lesson about speed when, in 1915, he celebrated the
Winged Victory of Samothrace as a symbol of rapid motion. (Lindsay
202 Wanda Strauven
1915: 96) Certainly, this Hellenistic statue which is displayed at the

top of the sweeping Daru staircase in the Louvre still greets the
twentieth-first-century museum-goer in an impressive way, due to its
dynamic spiralling movement and its semblance of being ready to take
off. Yet, in 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti not only sentenced art
institutions such as the Louvre to death (‘Museums: cemeteries!’), but
also, famously, traded the classical beauty of the Samothracian
goddess for the new beauty of (mechanical) speed: ‘A racing car, its
bonnet decked out with exhaust pipes like serpents with galvanic
breath ... a roaring motorcar, which seems to race on like machine-gun
fire, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.’
(Marinetti 1909: 13) It took Marinetti some years to come up with an
original cinematic image of speed, a response as it were to Lindsay’s.
Around the years 1917-18, the leader of Futurism wrote the undated –
and until the 1990s unknown – screenplay entitled Velocità (Speed)
for a film in eleven tableaux, with speed as the unifying motif. The
screenplay proposes the following visionary image as its ending:
‘Give the vision of an excessively slow life from about 100 years ago
(diligence, province, sleep, day-dream) and have it be intersected by a
series of express trains that pass on 8 different tracks.’ (Marinetti
1995: 147)
Such an effect of intersection could be achieved through the
superimposition of two layers of images, one in slow motion
(representing the passéist life of the country), the other in accelerated
motion (to reproduce ‘speed’ one last time). The layer of the tracks
should be superimposed on the layer of lyrical-bucolic images, giving
the sensation that the trains literally eradicate passéist life by running
over it and burying it alive. One remembers that in the manifesto The
New Ethical Religion of Speed (1916), Marinetti declared slowness to
be ‘naturally unclean’ and exhorted the neophytes to venerate speed
which is ‘naturally pure’ and even divine: ‘If praying means
communicating with the divine, then hurtling along at great speed is a
prayer. The sanctity of wheel and rail track. Kneel on the track to pray
for divine speed!’ (Marinetti 1916b: 255) The ending of Velocità, with
this final image of a ‘series of express trains that pass on 8 different
tracks’ consists of the victory of ‘divine speed’ over slowness, inertia
and provincial backwardness. It is, in short, the announcement of the
end of the old world.
Futurist Poetics and the Cinematic Imagination 203
Thus, Marinetti wanted to exploit the cinema as a Futurist weapon,

as a (technological) device against passéism. Because of its essence as
‘moving picture’, its capacity to speed up motion and its mechanical
(de-humanized) language, cinema seems indeed to be the Futurist
medium par excellence. However, the encounters between Futurism
and cinema remained rather sporadic and accidental. In retrospect,
Futurist cinema can be considered to be one of the most significant
failures of the Italian avant-garde movement. An explanation for such
a failure may be found in Marinetti’s ambivalent attitude towards the
cinematic medium. Although he appeared to profoundly understand
the workings of the language of film, he never fully promoted the
development of Futurist cinema. Although he practiced a kind of
‘cinematization’ of Futurist theatre, he never openly acknowledged
the link with (or inspiration of) the new technology in his creative
writings. He wrote a complete screenplay, which he kept secret until
after his death. Velocità was one of those unrealized dreams of the
Futurist leader; an imagined film that remained a project on paper, but
nevertheless revealed a creative cinematic mind.
As I intend to demonstrate in this essay, cinema acted mostly as an
imaginary, or repressed (and therefore unconscious) technology in
Marinetti’s intellectual formation. When the Lumière brothers held the
first commercial presentation of their Cinématographe in Paris, on 28
of December 1895 at the Salon Indien of the Grand Café on Boulevard
des Capucines, Marinetti had just turned nineteen. As he regularly
visited the French capital in those early days of film history, first as a
student and subsequently as an ‘angry’ young poet, he could have
been one of the Cinématographe’s first visitors; or at the very least, he
must have been aware of the new technological marvel. However,
when he chose the ‘cradle of cinema’ to launch his Foundation and
Manifesto of Futurism in February 1909, he ostentatiously forgot
about Lumière’s device. In particular, the eleventh and last point of
the manifesto seems directly inspired by the Parisian metropolis: it
celebrates the new urban landscape and its general agitation, its
railway traffic, the attractiveness of factories and bridges ‘which, like
giant gymnasts, bestride the rivers’ (Marinetti 1909: 14). But
Marinetti failed to mention the factory of images! Yet, the eleventh
point does include some Lumière-like images, such as ‘great
multitudes who are roused up by work’, and ‘broad-breasted
locomotives, champing on their wheels like enormous steel horses,
204 Wanda Strauven
bridled with pipes’ which, respectively, can be related to La Sortie de

l’usine (Workers Leaving the Factory, 1895) and L’Arrivée d’un train
en gare de La Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, 1895).
Moreover, the image of locomotives as ‘enormous steel horses’ can be
taken as an early example of Futurist analogy, together with the
bridges that span rivers like ‘giant gymnasts’. Both figures, ‘still
masked and weighed down by traditional syntax’ (Marinetti 1912a:
109), are waiting to rid themselves of their syntactical conductors and
transform themselves into condensed, film-like, mounted metaphors,
that is, immediate juxtapositions of the tenor and the vehicle:
locomotives-horses and bridges-gymnasts.1
An aviator perceives by analogy
If we take the founder of Futurism at his word, the technological

advance that offered the most concrete contribution to the birth of the
new Futurist language of Words-in-Freedom and analogies was not
cinema, but aviation. As Marinetti explains in his Technical Manifesto
of Futurist Literature (1912), it was thanks to the experience of aerial
speed that one could develop one’s ‘perception through analogy’
(Marinetti 1912a: 108) and thus achieve a quicker and more
immediate way of observing the world. In addition, he claimed to
have understood the ‘intuitive psychology of matter’ while
contemplating the world from above, from that new perspective
afforded by the aeroplane: ‘Seeing things from a new perspective, no
longer frontally or from behind, but straight down beneath me, and
thus foreshortened, I was able to break the age-old fetters of logic and
the leaden wire of traditional comprehension.’ (Marinetti 1912a: 112)
What is being described here is a true perceptive revolution, not only
affecting the Futurist leader and his followers, but an entire generation
of aviator-poets, among them Gabriele D’Annunzio. Thanks to
aviation, humankind acquired perpendicular viewpoints offering
strange effects of depth, viewpoints with such strong oblique angles
that they became illogical. This de-conditioning of vision,
fundamental for the aerial painting and aerial poetry of the second
1
In rhetorical language, metaphors are made up of two parts: the tenor and the
vehicle. The first is the object to which certain attributes are ascribed; the second is
the object from which they are borrowed.
wave of Futurism, became an end in itself in certain avant-garde films,

from René Clair’s Paris qui dort (The Crazy Ray, 1925) and La Tour
(The Tower, 1928) to Dziga Vertov’s masterpiece, Chelovek s kino-
apparatom (The Man with the Movie Camera, 1929), thanks to the
use of the high angle shot.
Perception by analogy forms the basis of a new artistic style in
both literature and the visual arts. Gino Severini’s manifesto, The
Plastic Analogies of Dynamism (1913) is the epitome of this.
Distinguishing between two types of analogy, namely that which is
real and that which is apparent, the painter explains how the artistic
expression of the sea, which, by real analogy, evokes the vision of a
dancer, simultaneously produces, by apparent analogy, the vision of a
large bunch of flowers. A new reality follows: ‘sea = dancer + bunch
of flowers’ (Apollonio 1973: 123). Severini’s plastic analogies seem
to ask for a cinematic transposition, a montage of film frames creating
a new, almost surreal(ist), meaning. Yet, Severini insists upon the fact
that ‘although our creations represent an inner life totally different
from real life, the painting and sculpture that we base on artistic
analogies can be called painting and sculpture after nature’ (Apollonio
1973: 122). In other words, this new analogical language reflects the
change in the perceptive system and renders a faithful image of it.
Similarly, Marinetti’s literary analogy is an answer to the
revolution in perception. It is a rhetorical device that equals a ‘deep
love that connects objects that are distant in kind, seemingly different
and hostile’ (Marinetti 1912a: 108). Unlike the traditional, or
Symbolist, analogy (‘which is still, more or less, the equivalent of a
kind of photography’ [Marinetti 1912a: 108]), the Futurist analogy is
exceptionally vast and can, like film language, draw heavily on the
infinity of matter: ‘An analogical style is thus absolute master of all its
material and of its intense life.’ (Marinetti 1912a: 109) Technically (or
grammatically) speaking, Marinetti suggests that every noun (or tenor)
should be followed directly by its ‘double’ (or vehicle): ‘Therefore,
we have to suppress the “like,” the “as,” the “so,” the “similar to.” ’
(Marinetti 1912a: 108; Marinetti 1968; 47) Consequently, the Futurist
analogy substitutes the traditional relationship of comparison (the
tenor is like the vehicle) for the relationship of identity (the tenor is
the vehicle). To give some concrete Futurist examples: a man is not
like a torpedo-boat, a man is the torpedo-boat; a woman is not similar
to a bay, the woman is the bay; a crowd is not as a surf, a crowd is a
206 Wanda Strauven
surf; a piazza is not comparable to a funnel, a piazza is a funnel; a

door is not like a water-tap, a door is a water-tap.2 The underlying idea
is that the double nouns form a ‘foreshortened’, condensed or
telegraphic image, which corresponds to the new aerial perspective
and its new demands of speed. Instead of losing oneself in long
metaphorical descriptions, one must ‘fuse the object directly with the
image that it evokes, providing a glimpse of the image by means of a
single, essential word’ (Marinetti 1912a: 108).
Film-like mechanisms of thought
Marinetti’s originality lies in having developed not only a theory of

the image, but also (and more importantly) a theory of the image in
sequence. Creating analogies is not enough; it is also necessary to link
them together, ‘to shape tight networks of images or analogies’
(Marinetti 1912a: 109-110). According to the principle of wireless
imagination, Marinetti proposed selecting images from our mental
warehouse, assembling them into ‘tight networks’ in order to make
them automatically follow on, one after another. By means of such
analogical networks, he aimed at rendering the ‘successive
movements’ of objects, as he explained in the Technical Manifesto of
Futurist Literature: ‘To reveal the successive movements of an object
we have to show the chain of analogies it evokes, each one
condensed, contained in an essential word.’ (Marinetti 1912a: 109)
A succession of analogies (or all-encompassing images) is needed
to translate the movement of matter, in a manner that is similar to the
succession of film frames. It is important to mention here that
Marinetti’s Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature explicitly refers
to the filmic device as a technique for representing the ‘movements of
matter, outside the laws of intelligence and therefore of an essence
that has greater significance’ (Marinetti 1912a: 111). Marinetti gives
three examples of such de-humanized movement: a dancing object, a
backwards-diving swimmer and a fast-motioned runner. Both the
swimmer and the runner are considered as (non-human) matter.
Similarly, the Futurist poetics of analogies deprives all images of their
2
These examples are based on the ‘doubles’ mentioned by Marinetti in his Technical
Manifesto of Futurist Literature. See below.
human qualities. Futurist images can be grouped ‘in pairs’ (Marinetti

1912a: 109) to form double nouns, or be assembled into chains that
lean towards the infinitive: ‘wheels benzoin tobacco incense aniseed
village ruins burnt amber jasmine houses disembowelments abandon
terracotta-jar tumbtumb violets shadows wells donkey-foal corpse
crash penis display’ (Marinetti 1912c: 118).
Analogical writing, based on free association and the juxtaposition
of remote images, can be found in the work of Soviet film director
Sergei Eisenstein, specifically in the screenplay of Marx’s Capital,
which he developed in 1927-28 while editing Oktyabr (Ten Days That
Shook the World, 1928). For example, ‘pepper-Dreyfus-Figaro’
describes a mini-sequence that starts with the image of minestrone
soup being seasoned with pepper. This condensed chain of images,
with a distinctly ‘Futurist’3 flavour, results in a longer analogical,
logically (or metonymically) organized, network: ‘Pepper. Cayenne.
Devil’s Island. Dreyfus. French chauvinism. The Figaro managed by
Krupp. The war. Sunken ships in port.’ (Eisenstein 1973: 433) To cite
another example: a sock with a hole in it is paired with a silk sock,
which gives rise to a metaphorical chain that points towards art and
morality. We are dealing here with cinematic writing based upon
‘intellectual attraction’, which is also adopted in the famous idol
sequence of Oktyabr. Referring to this sequence, Eisenstein explained
how, thanks to montage, it is possible to logically follow ‘the
development of thought’ (Eisenstein quoted in Bertetto 1991: 305).
Just as Eisenstein’s intellectual montage set out to trace ‘the
development of thought’, Marinetti’s Words-in-Freedom aimed at
expressing ‘the continuing dynamism of thought’ (Marinetti 1912b:
116). Even the idea of being able to communicate through analogy the
‘successive movements of an object’ implies that there existed for
Marinetti a certain link between montage and thought. Intuitively, he
is hypothesizing about an internal cinema, that is, a mental system that
functions as a screen, on which successive images, representative of
the different moments in a movement, are projected.
Rather than merely reproducing the mechanism of the brain, the
intellectual montage conceived by Eisenstein endeavoured to elicit a
given thought in the spectator, to provoke a collision of ideas (through
3
Already in 1924, Eisenstein referred to an associative process that he explicitly
proposed to call ‘Futurist’ (Eisenstein 1974: 139).
208 Wanda Strauven
a collision of images), to generate in the spectator, as Paolo Bertetto

defined it, an ‘intellectual shock’ (Bertetto 1991: 306). In other words,
through the principle of intellectual montage, Eisenstein reconsidered
his own ‘montage of attractions’ of 1923.4 Eisenstein’s juxtaposition
of remote realities, based on precise calculations, was supposed to
provoke a shock (either cerebral in the case of intellectual montage, or
emotional in the case of montage of attractions), generating a
profound change in the audience’s attitude. It is also true that
Marinetti wished to evoke a given effect in the spectator with his
declamatory performances. If he resorted to tools of provocation and
scandal, it was precisely to arouse the new Futurist sensibility by
means of shock-effects. But unlike Eisenstein’s attraction, Marinetti’s
method of analogy was not ‘efficient’5. As an aggressive moment (be
it emotional or intellectual), Eisenstein’s attraction was
‘mathematically’ calculated to produce a certain number of shocks in
a pre-determined order. Eisenstein aspired to organizing associated
ideas and to orchestrating them rationally (and not intuitively), while
Marinetti specifically encouraged intuitive montage consisting in
‘orchestrat[ing] images by arranging them with a maximum of
disorder’ (Marinetti 1912a: 110).
Moreover, whereas Marinetti’s analogy gave rise to a juxtaposition
of terms, possibly joined two by two (A-B C-D ...), Eisenstein’s
cinema sought to create a completely new meaning, from two pieces
of data (or images), according to the dialectical principle (A + B = C).
Based upon the famous Kuleshov effect6, dialectical montage sought
4
Eisenstein theorized upon the ‘montage of attractions’ following the theatre
production of The Wise Man, which was loosely based on Ostrovsky’s piece Enough
Simplicity in Every Wise Man and aimed at creating an ‘emotional shock’ in the
audience. The whole performance unfolded in terms of the spectacularity of the
individual numbers and ended with twenty-five attractions. See Eisenstein 1975:
230-233.
5
See Jacques Aumont who has proposed three definitions of Eisenstein’s attraction:
attraction as performance, as an association of ideas and as ‘efficiency’. (Aumont
1979: 56-67) For Eisenstein the attraction’s effect was calculated according to
certain psychological and political laws, respectively Pavlov’s reflexology and
Marxist-Leninist ideology.
6
In 1919, Lev Kuleshov showed the effectiveness of film editing by juxtaposing
(existing) footage of the legendary Russian actor, Ivan Mozzhukhin, with three
different images: a plate of soup, a pretty girl and an old woman’s coffin. During the
projection of the experiment, these three juxtapositions conveyed different
expressions to the audience, respectively of hunger, desire and grief. Since
to create a meaning which was not only independent of the meanings

of the images taken as separate units, but which actually exceeded the
sum of the parts. The most important element, therefore, is not to be
found in the image (or film frame), but between the images (or film
frames). Eisenstein had already applied this theory to the theatre with
the production of The Wise Man in 1923. Even if considered a
separate theatrical unit, an attraction does not acquire meaning except
in relation to the other attractions in the performance. The meaning is
in the montage – in the clash with other elements. It would be possible
at this point to reduce all of Eisenstein’s theorizing to the sole concept
of collision. As defined by Nikolai Lebedev, the art of Eisenstein is
‘the art of violent collisions’ (Lebedev 1962: 190). Eisenstein’s
method of montage consisted of creating effects of de-familiarization
(or ostranenie, to use the formalist terminology), and of juxtaposing
elements that are in opposition to each other (or ‘distant in kind,
seemingly different and hostile’ to say it in Marinetti’s words). All of
this was done with the intention of throwing a ‘cine-punch’ into the
face of the audience.
As Marinetti resorts to the principle of conflict to create analogies,
one is inclined to assume that according to the dialectical principle, a
new signification is born from these conflicts. Therefore, the true
meaning is not to be found in considering the analogies separately, but
rather in examining their connections to one another. In Futurist
poetry, new images are indeed born (such as ‘man-torpedo-boat’,
‘woman-bay’, ‘crowd-surf’, ‘piazza-funnel’, ‘door-water-tap’, etc.),
but the chain that links these images does not seem to unwind in a
significant or logically meaningful manner. Marinetti himself
excluded the possibility of revealing a meaning at the structural level
in his montage of analogies when he affirmed that the analogies are
‘expressed by means of Words-in-Freedom, unencumbered by
syntactical conductors or by punctuation’ (Marinetti 1913a: 124).
Rather than dialectically organizing the new images, Marinetti wanted
to link them ‘word after word, in accordance with their illogical
coming into being’ (Marinetti 1912a: 112). Therefore, Futurist poetry
basically remained a juxtaposition of parallel images not subjected to
any process of transformation (A // B // C...), contrary to the operation
Mozzhukhin’s face did not alter, meaning was achieved by the mere effect of
montage. Or to put it differently: it was through montage that the expressionless face
of the actor became expressive.
210 Wanda Strauven
of Eisenstein’s montage that aimed at the fusion of contrasting

concepts, that is, at the synthesis of thesis and antithesis (A + B = C).
From a merely technical point of view, the operation of the poetic
language theorized by Marinetti reflects – paradoxically, better than
Eisenstein’s system – that of cinematographic language as a linear
succession of images. The concept of intellectual cinema, on the other
hand, was founded upon typically literary processes, in particular
metonymy and metaphor that favour substitution over juxtaposition.7
In other words, it seems that Marinetti grounded himself in principles
of cinematographic language in order to develop a new (analogical)
literature, while Eisenstein departed from literature in order to devise
a new cinematic style of (metonymic/metaphorical) writing.
Poetry of ‘second terms’
The idea of ‘fus[ing] the object directly with the image that it evokes’
(Marinetti 1912a: 108) and of condensing every analogy into ‘a single
essential word’ led Marinetti to theorize not only on analogies in
praesentia (that is, analogies that present both the object and the
image evoked by the object; that is, both the tenor and the vehicle),
but also analogies in absentia (that is, analogies that ‘hide’ the tenor,
presenting only the vehicle). From the very beginning, he conceived
of an analogical poetry composed entirely of vehicles or ‘second
terms’: ‘Together we shall invent what I call wireless imagination.8
We shall arrive, one day, at an art that is even more essential, when
we have dared to suppress all the first terms of our analogies so as to
give nothing more than the uninterrupted second terms.’ (Marinetti
1912a: 112) Marinetti proposed to shorten the chains of double nouns
(A-A’ B-B’ C-C’ D-D’...) into basic chains, which would contain only
the second terms of the analogies (A’ B’ C’ D’...). For example, the
analogical passage ‘battalions-ants cavalry-spiders roads-fords
7
According to Bertetto, Eisenstein’s intellectual cinema is ‘a style of writing that does
not forget the link with the models of Symbolist and avant-garde literature, from
Mallarmé’s ‘démon de l’analogie’ to Marinetti’s ‘wireless imagination’, but which
remoulds itself, especially in the elaboration of a freely coordinated semantic chain.’
(Bertetto 1991: 309)
8
I am re-instating here the term ‘wireless’. Marinetti’s ‘senza fili’ is an explicit
reference to the wireless telegraphy and should be maintained in the English
translation.
general-islet dispatch-riders-grasshoppers sands-revolution howitzers-

platforms clouds-grids rifles-martyrs shrapnels-haloes’ (Marinetti
1912c: 118; Marinetti 1968: 53), in the new kind of poetry envisaged
by Marinetti, would become ‘ants spiders fords islet grasshoppers
revolution platforms grids martyrs haloes’. Marinetti’s comment,
‘Because of this, we shall have to renounce being understood. Being
understood is not necessary’ (Marinetti 1912a: 112), is, thus, not
without foundation.
In his Answers to Objections, published three months after the
Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature to defend himself against
numerous attacks from the European press,9 Marinetti reasserted this
new poetic concept: ‘The poetic ideal I dream of, and which would be
nothing other than a continuous sequence of second terms of many
analogies, has nothing whatsoever to do with allegory.’ (Marinetti
1912b: 115) And a little further on, he continues: ‘I aspire to an
illogical sequence which is no longer explanatory, but intuitive, in the
use of only the second terms of many analogies, all disconnected, one
from the other, and very often of opposing meaning, one to another.’
(Marinetti 1912b: 115) Here one can concur with Piero Gobetti, who
in 1919 observed that ‘to apply Marinetti’s aesthetic to the art of the
screen would be a logically justified aesthetic’ (Gobetti 1919: 89).
Marinetti’s mistake was that he developed his new aesthetic in literary
terms, that is, for the written medium. According to Gobetti, ‘cinema
has all the characteristics that Marinetti would like to confer to
poetry’. And he adds: ‘There, one finds speed and variety, triumph of
the physical element over psychology, the kingdom of sensation, the
intoxication of nature. Marinetti felt all of this and believed he could
introduce it into literature. From there came a kind of external
mechanism.’(Gobetti 1919: 89)
If the ‘illogical sequence’ of analogies were to be put into images,
an excellent illustration of experimental cinema would be produced.
Gobetti is right that ‘a kind of external mechanism’ arises when this
operation of film-like montage is brought into literature and that
Marinetti’s hypothesized wireless imagination would work much
better on screen than on the page. This was subsequently
demonstrated during the 1920s by the Dadaist and Surrealist film
9
The manifesto appeared first as a leaflet and was reprinted, with the Answers to
Objections, in I poeti futuristi (Milan: Edizioni futuriste di ‘Poesia’, 1912).
212 Wanda Strauven
experiments. For instance, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalì’s Un Chien

andalou (1929) offers the spectator various analogies in praesentia
such as moon-eye, armpit hairs-hedgehog, books-pistols, breasts-
buttocks. In the same film, the piano sequence has been defined by
Jean Mitry as a ‘rather laborious assembly of analogies or associations
of ideas (piano-bourgeoisie, cattle-consumer society, seminarians-
religion)’ (Mitry 1974: 152). René Clair’s Dadaist farce Entr’acte
(1924) conveys the analogy of boxing-traffic by means of a
superimposition of boxing gloves onto the image of a traffic-filled
street. Another superimposition of hair and matches follows: the
burning of the latter seems to provoke itching in the former.
The application of cinematic analogies in absentia is more difficult
to trace, for the simple reason that the first term is omitted. One can
only attempt to guess what object evoked, for example, the image of a
goose in Hans Richter’s Vormittagsspuk (Ghosts Before Breakfast,
1927-28). The same is true of the bowler hats that fly through the air
and the twisted watering hose in the same film. Is it possible that the
first terms of these analogies in absentia are ‘birds’ and ‘grass snake’
respectively? It appears that Richter adopted Marinetti’s suggestion to
the letter, thus renouncing any attempt to be understood.
From ‘man-machine’ to the mechanical man, dismembered and

multiplied
The most Futurist, and most Marinettian, analogy is without a doubt

that which connects man to the machine. According to Roberto
Tessari, the Futurist analogy is nothing more than an instrument with
which to respond to the new conditions of life that point towards a real
symbiosis of man and machine. Thus ‘every sign related to man has
(is destined for) a soulmate, in a different and parallel sign related to
the machine or to matter’ (Tessari 1973: 232). Applications of such a
symbiosis abound in Futurist painting. Good examples are Umberto
Boccioni’s Dinamismo di un ciclista (Dynamism of a Cyclist, 1913)
that represents the human body as a synthesis of muscles fused in the
non-linear, rotational motion of the cycle, or Giacomo Balla’s studies
of ‘abstract speed’, such as Velocità astratta (è passata l’automobile)
(Abstract Speed – The Car Has Passed, 1913), in which the body of
the car-driver, whose profile is recognizable or traceable every now
and again, dissolves into the mechanical body of the car in motion.
Similarly in Carlo Carrà’s painting entitled Ciò che mi ha detto il tram
(What the Tram Told Me, 1911), the tram is anthropomorphized in as
much as it speaks, and the passengers disintegrate and merge with the
carriage.
International avant-garde cinema has also produced numerous
examples of the man-machine analogy (Strauven 2002). Fernand
Léger and Dudley Murphy’s Ballet mécanique (1924) comes to mind,
in which ‘new realism’ is applied. (Léger 1926) In this ballet of
objects (mainly kitchen utensils), human body parts are inserted with
the aim of bringing out the concordance between machine and man
and of creating the ‘machine-man’ (or ‘man-machine’) analogy.
Another example is Charles Dekeukeleire’s Impatience (1928), a
drama with four characters (the Mountain, the Motorbike, the Woman
and Abstract Blocks), in which the Motorbike’s mechanical body is
associated in quite an obsessive way with the female body, first
dressed in leather and later also naked. Through montage,
Dekeukeleire disassembles the two bodies and alternates their various
parts between them. The result is a kind of motorbike-woman /
woman-motorbike symbiosis. Lastly, Eisenstein’s filmography reveals
itself to be particularly rich in animalesque and erotic analogies. As
regards the man-machine analogy, the Soviet director produced a
notable case in Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925),
particularly in the engine room sequence, by using a cross-cutting of
metonymic images of ‘two utterly different realities, a spiritual and a
material’ (Hauser 1962: 241): hands-wheels, faces-manometer, chest-
boiler, etc.10
In addition to the rhetorical device of analogy that can be
rudimentarily defined as a montage of words, or even better, word-
images, Marinetti launched two concepts of futurological (and/or
eugenic) technology that are connected to the idea of the man-machine
analogy: the mechanical man with interchangeable parts and the man
multiplied or extended by the machine. The first is announced at the
end of the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature: ‘After the
10
Arnold Hauser describes the sequence in question as follows: ‘men working
desperately, engine-room of the cruiser; busy hands, revolving wheels; faces
distorted with exertion, maximum pressure of the manometer; a chest soaked with
perspiration, a glowing boiler; an arm, a wheel; a wheel, an arm; machine, man;
machine, man; machine, man’ (Hauser 1962: 241).
214 Wanda Strauven
animal kingdom, behold the beginning of the mechanical kingdom.’

(Marinetti 1912a: 113) The other appears in the manifesto Destruction
of Syntax – Untrammeled Imagination – Words-in-Freedom (1913) in
the context of a new (mechanical) sensibility: ‘Man greatly extended
by machines. A new awareness of machines, a fusion of the instincts
with what the engine gives us and with its harnessed power.’
(Marinetti 1913a: 122) From a twenty-first-century perspective, these
two concepts might allow us to place Marinetti within the tradition of
the (pioneering) theorists of the cyborg. Yet they would be better
situated and contextualized in the complex popular imagination of the
early twentieth century. Hence, both notions may conjure up certain
images of early special effects cinema, such as the comedy Cretinetti
che bello! (Too Much Beauty, 1909), in which Cretinetti (André
Deed) is followed by a flock of crazy amorous women who, in the
end, chop him up, dismember him and literally reduce him to ‘parts
that can be changed’ (Marinetti 1912a: 113-14). Deed learned this
trick of dismemberment from Georges Méliès, whose filmography
features numerous examples of torn-apart human bodies, cut into
various substitutable parts: Un Homme de têtes (Four Heads Are
Better Than One, 1898), Dislocation mystérieuse (An Extraordinary
Dislocation, 1901; with André Deed), Une Indigestion (Sure Cure for
Indigestion, 1902), Le Cake-walk infernal (The Cake-Walk Infernal,
1903), Le Mélomane (The Melomaniac, 1903), Le Bourreau turc (The
Terrible Turkish Executioner, 1904), and so forth. In the Technical
Manifesto of Futurist Literature, there is a direct reference to this stop
and substitution trick of early cinema. In order to illustrate how the
cinematic medium could render illogical ‘movements of matter’ and
unusual perspectives, imperceptible to the naked eye, Marinetti
observed: ‘The cinema shows us the dance of an object that divides in
two and then joins together again without any human intervention.’
(Marinetti 1912a: 111) He is not, in this instance, concerned with
disintegrating / reassembling the human body; however, the principle
remains the same.
Besides the ante litteram application of the mechanical man with
interchangeable parts, Méliès also demonstrated in an exemplary
fashion how to extend oneself (or better, himself) by means of the
movie camera. Employing the technique of superimposition, he
created a double of himself in numerous films, up to seven times in
L’Homme-orchestre (The One-Man Band, 1900). The Italian variety
artist Leopoldo Fregoli also experimented with ways of multiplying

himself on film. At the turn of the twentieth century, Fregoli was
world famous for his protean (or quick-change) capacities. In a single
evening, he was able to play more than sixty different characters, by
constantly changing costume, voice and gender. At the end of the
nineteenth century, Fregoli began to film his own transformation acts
which he then, in turn, projected onto the screen of the Fregoligraph.
In Segreto per vestirsi (Secret for Getting Dressed, 1898), the artist
transforms himself in the wings with the help of three assistants who
dress him in the clothes of various characters. The trick also featured
as one of the many numbers that Fregoli performed live on stage. It
was the so-called ‘backwards theatre’. Fregoli acted for an imagined
audience, with his face turned towards the stage’s backdrop (which
showed a theatre with an audience painted on it); he came to the front
of the stage to execute his transformations, watched by the real
audience. By recording this ‘backwards theatre’ on film, Fregoli
exploited the cinema to prolong on screen his protean art exhibited on
stage, to obtain, in short, an effect of man extended by the
cinematographic machine. He put cinema at the service, not just of the
stage, but also of his own profession.11
While Méliès’s name is not mentioned in any Futurist manifesto,
Fregoli’s appears twice in The Variety Theatre, published by Marinetti
in 1913. Initially, the Roman artist is mentioned to illustrate one of the
laws that govern life: ‘The synthesis of speed + transformations (e.g.,
Fregoli).’ (Marinetti 1913b: 188) His name appears again in one of the
proposed methods for ridiculing classic art on stage: ‘Corrupt all
classical art on stage – for example, putting on all the Greek, French,
and Italian tragedies in a single evening, condensing them and mixing
them up comically. Liven up the works of Beethoven, Wagner, Bach,
Bellini, and Chopin by inserting Neapolitan songs. Put Zacconi, Duse,
and Mayol, or Sarah Bernhardt and Fregoli, on stage together.’
(Marinetti 1913b: 191) This second idea seems to be directly inspired
by Fregoli’s performances and by the alternating montage of the
acting out of different characters. In comparison, one can cite here
Fregoli’s famous cake-walk number which consisted of a kind of
cross-cutting between a frivolous girl (that is, Fregoli dressed up as
11
Bernardini correctly observes that Fregoli used the cinema ‘as an alter ego’
(Bernardini 1986: 91).
216 Wanda Strauven
such) and a dandy (again, Fregoli dressed up) who is running after her
to the mechanical rhythm of the cake-walk. (Pellegrini 1948: 49) The
formula ‘synthesis of speed + transformations’, on the other hand,
could equally refer to the invention of the Fregoligraph and to the use
of certain cinematic tricks, although it is more likely that Marinetti is
alluding to the lightning fast transformations that Fregoli performed
on stage (without the artifice of the cinema).
In general terms, it is quite probable that with his concept of man
extended by the machine Marinetti was aiming for more than a mere
application on film. Undoubtedly, he aspired rather to an actual fusion
of human instinct with the machine, in a kind of heart-motor, which
allows the person not just to multiply himself but also to defy death
(or at least to defy sleep12). The concept of mechanical man with
interchangeable parts more directly implies the idea of both
mechanical and cinematic montage. One is nearing, in fact, the
mechanical man that Dziga Vertov prophesied in 1923: ‘From one
person I take the hands, the strongest and most dexterous, from
another I take the legs, the swiftest and most shapely; from a third, the
most beautiful and most expressive head – and through montage, I
create a new, perfect man.’ (Vertov 1984: 17) While Vertov wanted to
mechanically, that is cinematographically, create a man of flesh and
blood, Marinetti seemed more interested in the construction of an
artificial being, i.e. one that is not human: ‘With the knowledge and
friendship of matter, of which the scientists can know only the
physicochemical reactions, we are preparing for the creation of
mechanical man, one who will have parts that can be changed. We
shall liberate him from the idea of death, and therefore from death
itself, which is the all-embracing definition of logical intelligence.’
(Marinetti 1912a: 113-114) He possibly had in mind a metallic,
robotic being whose prototype would appear on Italian screens in
1922 in André Deed’s film L’uomo meccanico (The Mechanical
12
From the foundation of Futurism onwards, Marinetti was obsessed with triumphing
over sleep. ‘My friends and I had stayed up all night’ are the first words of the
Founding Manifesto of 1909. Further on one reads: ‘Up to now, literature has
extolled a contemplative stillness, rapture, and reverie. We intend to glorify
aggressive action, a restive wakefulness, life at the double, the slap and the punching
fist.’ (Marinetti 1909: 13) In 1909, too, Marinetti created the character of Gazurmah,
‘The Sleepless Hero’, Mafarka’s artificial son, born without any female intervention.
Man).13 The principle of montage, nevertheless, resides in the

interchangeable nature of the mechanical man’s body parts, just like in
Vertov’s vision of the kino-eye.14
The technique of the Futurist ‘marvellous’
The principle of montage is also the basis for what Marinetti calls ‘the
Futurist marvellous’, a concept which should not be confused with
that of the fantastic or the phantasmagorical. The Futurist marvellous
is first and foremost a theatrical technique. It consists of a chaotic, and
apparently accidental, mix of gimmicks of every kind: puns,
caricatures, funny or satirical sketches. In the Variety Theatre
Manifesto, Marinetti listed fourteen elements of which the Futurist
marvellous could be composed:
1. powerful caricatures; 2. the very depths of absurdity; 3. delightful,

unsurpassable ironies; 4. all-embracing, definitive symbols; 5.
cascades of uncontrollable laughter; 6. well-conceived analogies
between human beings, the animal kingdom, the plant world, and the
world of machines; 7. glimpses of revealing cynicism; 8. intricate
interplay of witty sayings, puns, and riddles, which have the effect of
airing the brain in an enjoyable manner; 9. the whole gamut of
laughter and smiles to calm the nerves; 10. the whole gamut of
silliness, idiocy, gawkiness, and absurdities, which drive intelligence
imperceptibly to the edge of madness; 11. all the new meanings of
light, sound, noise, and words, with their mysterious and inexplicable
extensions into the least known parts of our sensibilities; 12. the piling
up of events that are raced through in an instant, and of stage
characters bundled off, from right to left, in a couple of minutes (‘and
now let’s take a glance at the Balkans’: King Nicholas, Enver-Bey,
Daneff, Venizelos, arms akimbo then slaps between Serbs and
13
During these years, mechanical men will also appear on the Futurist stage, more
specifically in Ivo Pannaggi and Vinicio Paladini’s Ballo meccanico futurista (1922)
and in Fortunato Depero’s Anihccam del 3000 (1923).
14
The idea of creating an ideal person by amalgamating various body parts from
different people is nothing new and can be traced back to antiquity (see for instance
the legendary story of the Greek painter Zeuxis and the Beautiful Maidens of
Croton, whose most attractive body parts were combined by the artist to produce a
perfect portrait of Helena). What is however revolutionary in Vertov’s vision of the
kino-eye, is that such creation is achieved by the mechanical language of film, that
is, through the process of film editing – which makes the comparison with
Marinetti’s concept of mechanical man all the more relevant.
218 Wanda Strauven
Bulgarians, a couplet, then everything vanishes); 13. instructive

satirical pantomime; 14. caricatures of grief and nostalgia, strongly
imprinted upon our sensibilities through gestures that are exaggerated
by their spasmodic, hesitant, and wearying slowness; grave words
made ridiculous by comic body language, bizarre disguises, twisted
words, grimaces, and buffoonery. (Marinetti 1913b: 186)
In his detailed analysis of the concept, Umberto Artioli insists upon

the relationships between Futurist and Surrealist theory. (Artioli 1975:
189-200) Thereby, he seizes not just on the pre-Dadaist dimension of
the absurd, but also on the pre-Surrealist dimension of magic.
Regarding component 11 of the Futurist marvellous, Artioli invites us
to see a propensity in Marinetti’s programme for contact with the
supernatural, for mystery and for the inexplicable. However, Marinetti
was not interested in revealing the ‘least known parts of our
sensibilities’, and still less in arriving at a more real reality, or
surreality. Above all, Marinetti did not conceive of the marvellous in
terms of an imaginary wonder, of a universe where reality and dream
merge, where the fantastic ends up becoming real. On the contrary, it
was an inventive mechanism for the stage, provocative and shocking;
it was a purely pre-Dadaist concept insofar as it drew ‘on the absurd,
the ridiculous, the nonsensical, on everything that disconcerts and
desecrates’ (De Maria 1975: 386).
Dreamlike, psychoanalytic, fantastic and above all, beautiful
dimensions remained extraneous to Marinetti’s principle. In his first
Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), André Breton considered beauty to be
intrinsic to the merveilleux: ‘the marvelous is always beautiful,
anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is
beautiful’ (Breton 1972: 14). While for the Surrealist leader it was a
supreme category of aesthetic experience, Marinetti defined the
marvellous as a (theatrical) montage technique, generator of hilarity
and of ‘bodymadness’. Praise of madness is certainly an aspect which
permits us to juxtapose the two schools, but the reasons for which
such a mental state was cultivated are different. For the Surrealists, it
was a way of scrutinizing the many mysteries of the human psyche
and of exposing the subconscious, while Marinetti wanted, at all costs,
to rail against psychology and anthropocentric sentimentality:
While the theater we have at present highlights the inner life, erudite
cogitations, libraries, museums, boring struggles with conscience, and
the stupid analyses of feelings, in short – both the reality and the word
are foul – psychology, the Variety Theater exalts action, heroism, the
open-air life, skill, the authority of instinct and intuition. In opposition
to psychology it offers what I call bodymadness. (Marinetti 1913b:
189)
Marinetti implicitly correlates the Futurist marvellous to the advent

of cinema when he specifies that this key concept was ‘produced by
modern gadgetry’ (Marinetti 1913b: 186; Marinetti 1968: 71). Also
cinema was a product of the era of modern mechanics. From the
outset, it was adopted as an appropriate means of mechanically
generating astonishing effects, ‘to make the improbable and the absurd
reign supreme’ on screen – just as Marinetti wanted to see it govern
the stage (Marinetti 1913b: 190). The single difference is that
continued renewal is impossible in the cinema: once the ‘improbable
and the absurd’ have been recorded on celluloid, they cannot be
subject to any further improvised changes during the ‘performance’,
that is, the projection of the film. Nevertheless, early cinema allowed
film exhibitors a certain degree of freedom to improvise, particularly
in the ways they combined different strips of moving pictures. This
often resulted in bizarre and nonsensical shows, not least because the
audience was wont to perceive a continuity between the arbitrarily
organized films, and to discover an (unintentional) logic in the
programme. For example: ‘The Spanish monarch and the British king
jumped out after each other on a piece of white sheet, a dozen
Moroccan landscapes flashed past, followed by some marching Italian
cuirassiers and a German dreadnought thundering into the water.’
(Tsivian 1990: 248) From this account by a Russian spectator of the
early days of cinema, Yuri Tsivian has pointed out how ‘the
impressions of one picture were involuntarily transferred to the next,
to which it was connected only by its random adjacency in the
program’ (Tsivian 1990: 248). While Tsivian is speaking of the
(involuntary and ante litteram) Kuleshov effect, the phenomenon
could also be taken to be an example of the marvellous. (Strauven
2006a) It is the logic of the illogical, the continuity of the
discontinuous, or – to revert once more to Marinetti’s definition of
analogy – the ‘deep love that connects objects that are distant in kind,
seemingly different and hostile’ (Marinetti 1912a: 108). Furthermore,
early film programmes were often conceived as true variety shows,
enriched not only with live music accompaniment but also with
220 Wanda Strauven
interspersed performances of actors, singers and acrobats, which

augmented the ‘marvellous’ in force.
Even within the same film, the marvellous can reveal itself to be
one of the basic (montage) mechanisms. In particular, the first comics
with their rhythmicity and their sense of pre-Futurist absurdity come
to mind. In discussing the ‘orgy of movement’ in relation to early
chase films, Maria Adrianna Prolo describes ‘crazy men who are
chasing a young girl who is following a priest who is chasing a fat
wet-nurse who is chasing a fireman who is following a dog who is
running away with an endless string of sausages’ (Prolo 1951: 21). As
a trait of the burlesque genre, this rhythmicity is also intrinsic to some
of Georges Méliès’s films. Take, for example, Sorcellerie culinaire
(The Cook in Trouble, 1904), whose action takes place in a large
kitchen. A (disguised) beggar arrives, who, having been brutally
thrown out by the head chef, decides to take revenge by transforming
the kitchen into hell, or rather into a ‘theatre of transformations’
(Cherchi Usai 1983: 63). Little devils invade the kitchen; they jump
through the windows, they pirouette, disappear and reappear. These
entrances and exits have no narrative function – their sole function is
to create a visually rhythmic crescendo. Moreover, the little devils are
all played by artists of the Folies-Bergère, which links the
‘marvellous’ of Sorcellerie culinaire directly to the Variety theatre.
Re-construction of the universe
When, in 1916, along with the new guard of Florentine Futurists,

Marinetti signed the manifesto The Futurist Cinema, several concepts
of his literary and theatrical programme were integrated and
‘translated’ into cinematic terms. Not only does the manifesto propose
‘cinematic analogies’ and ‘filmed unreal reconstructions of the human
body’, but the idea of free montage returns also. Cinema was
considered to be an instrument by which one could arrive at the
‘polyexpressive symphony’ that consisted of combining all of the
various elements, ‘from slice of real life to a splash of color, from a
line to Words-in-Freedom, from chromatic, plastic music to a music of
objects’ (Marinetti 1916a: 262). In this list, one should note the
insistence upon the musical dimension that the Futurists wanted to
render in a visual manner, namely by means of colorization of the film
print (‘chromatic music’), the pictorial equivalent (‘plastic music’) or

animation (‘music of objects’). Further on in the manifesto, the
Futurists considered exploiting Luigi Russolo’s noise intoners
(intonarumori), but neglected to specify whether these should be
integrated as direct sounds (accompanied by silent images), or as
filmed sounds and therefore silent. As Dominique Noguez has
observed, sound is a lacuna that is both ‘perceived and rejected’
(Noguez 1973: 289) in The Futurist Cinema. On the one hand, the
Futurists understood the absence of sound as a void that needed to be
filled, using ‘discords, harmonies, symphonies of gestures, actions,
colors, lines, and so on’ or ‘Plastic, chromatic, or linear equivalents’
of music and noises (Marinetti 1916a: 264). On the other hand, the
absence of sound is not perceived as such: it is enough that the music
is turned into chromatic music and that the Words-in-Freedom cease
being literature and become images as well. This is all done with the
intention of realizing a ‘polyexpressive symphony’.
The road towards ‘polyexpressiveness’ had been prepared by
Bruno Corra and Emilio Settimelli in their manifesto, Weights,
Measures and Prices of Artistic Genius (1914), which introduced a
new concept of art consisting of a ‘chaotic, unaesthetic and heedless
mixing of all of the arts already in existence’ and of all those still to be
invented by the Futurists (Apollonio 1973: 146). In 1916, the Futurists
did not consider cinema as an end in itself but rather as a means of
pushing such artistic research to the extreme, of editing and piecing
together all imaginable aspects of the Futurist ‘art-action’ programme.
In other words, Futurist cinema ‘will be, at one and the same time,
picture, architecture, sculpture, Words-in-Freedom, the music of
colors, lines, and shapes, a hodgepodge of objects, and reality thrown
into chaos.’ (Marinetti 1916a: 262) The Futurist concept of ‘reality
thrown into chaos’ can be linked to the idea of deforming human
perception. It is worth noting that the original expression in Italian is
realtà caotizzata or ‘chaotized reality’, that is, reality that is not
necessarily chaotic in itself, but that has been rendered chaotic.
However, placed in relation to the idea of ‘slice[s] of real life’, this
concept of ‘chaotized reality’ could also be read in documentary
terms. Futurist cinema did not exclude filming from life and did in
fact favour the (chaotically organized) combination of different
elements taken from real life, or better, from ‘Futurist life’.
222 Wanda Strauven
In this regard, the concluding sentence of the manifesto is

revealing. It reads: ‘In this way we shall dismantle, then re-fashion,
the Universe according to our marvelous whims, to increase one
hundredfold the power of creative Italian genius and its absolute
predominance throughout the world.’ (Marinetti 1916a: 264) In order
to centuple the power of the Italian people, the Futurists resorted to
the whimsicality of the theatrical synthesis, which was a formula for
‘drawing on reality to combine aspects of it in a random manner’
(Marinetti 1915: 204). Furthermore, the text makes reference to the
concept of ‘Futurist reconstruction of the universe’ developed by
Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero in their eponymous 1915
manifesto. This manifesto, which introduced new artistic genres such
as the ‘Futurist toy’, the ‘artificial landscape’ and the ‘metallic
animal’, constituted a redefinition of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk
in Futurist terms.15 The authors declared that the ‘lyrical appreciation
of the universe, by means of Marinetti’s Words-in-Freedom and
Russolo’s Art of Noises, relies on plastic dynamism to provide a
dynamic, simultaneous, plastic and noisy expression of universal
vibration’ (Apollonio 1973: 197). On such a foundation they wanted
to re-construct, or rather to ‘re-create’ the universe ab ovo: ‘We
Futurists, Balla and Depero, seek to realize this total fusion in order to
reconstruct the universe by making it more joyful, in other words by
an integral re-creation. We will give skeleton and flesh to the
invisible, the impalpable, the imponderable and the imperceptible.’
(Apollonio 1973: 197)
The most appropriate means for the material expression of the
immaterial, or for the visible expression of the invisible, turned out to
be cinema. And the cinematic technique most suitable for realizing the
Futurist aspiration of reconstructing the universe, whimsically
decomposing and recomposing it, was obviously montage. Montage
would allow the Futurists to dismantle old systems of perception and
belief in order to re-assemble them according to the laws of
associative or ‘whimsical’ freedom. It is worth noting that this implicit
reference to the basic principle of cinematographic language appears
only in the final sentence of The Futurist Cinema. Yet the desire to
decompose and recompose the universe according to one’s own
15
As important for this redefinition of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk was the
pioneering work of Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra in the field of ‘chromatic
music’ and/or abstract cinema. For more details, see Strauven (2009.
‘marvellous whims’ can be reconnected to the idea of combining

hybrid elements (‘ranging from a slice of real life to a splash of color,
from a line to Words-in-Freedom’ [Marinetti 1916a: 262]), thus
rendering any kind of narrative continuity impossible. All in all,
Futurist montage is illogical, deforming and polyexpressive. At least it
is in theory.
In practice, however, Futurist film production revealed itself to be
less ambitious (and whimsical). The film Vita Futurista (Futurist
Life), which was shot in the summer of 1916 in Florence under the
auspices of Marinetti and under the technical direction of Arnaldo
Ginna, rather than aiming at a real reconstruction of the universe,
illustrated various activities typical of a ‘Futurist life’. It basically
described a day in the life of a Futurist: from dynamic (vertical) sleep
to the morning gymnastics at the Cascine park, from artistic creation
to the invasion of a passéist teatime gathering and the organization of
a theatrical soirée.16 The montage of Vita Futurista was illogical in
that it did not follow a specific narrative thread. Instead, it pieced
together, more or less arbitrarily, a certain number of brief sketches,
whose disparate nature was supposed to reflect the
‘polyexpressiveness’ of the Futurist artist. Therefore, the montage
stricto sensu (or inter-frame montage) was not particularly deforming
– in fact, it limited itself to linking together a variety of Futurist
scenes. Nevertheless, in terms of intra-frame montage (i.e. montage
within the film frame), there was no lack of manipulation of the film
images. Among the most memorable are the use of deforming mirrors
for the love story between the painter Balla and a chair (of which a
still has survived) and the conversation between an obese and a thin
man, in which ‘Marinetti [...] shot the two actors through two
deforming mirrors, one concave and the other convex. The figures had
an incomparable grotesqueness; the atmosphere even more so. The
lights and the reflections that bounced off the mirrors enveloped the
two bodies in a stringy silver substance, almost as if they were
immersed in a liquid that had entangled them and it gave the rhythm
16
Vita futurista unfortunately got lost, but the film can be reconstructed on the basis
of various historical documents, such as the announcements in the journal L’Italia
Futurista, the fragmentary (and often contradicting) testimonies of spectators and
Futurist collaborators of the film, the official file compiled for the censor office, the
programme of the first screening, and some surviving film frames. (Strauven 2006b:
161-188)
224 Wanda Strauven
of the discussion something strangely self-conscious and suffocating,

like a nightmare’ (Corrado Pavolini quoted in Marinetti 1926: 252-
253). Other special effects in Vita Futurista were the use of a
splitscreen to show two opposing ways of sleeping, and the recourse
to manual colorization of the film print in order to artistically resolve a
defect, namely the presence of white dots caused by dust. (Ginna
1965: 156-158) The experimentation in Vita Futurista could be
regarded as limited, if not wholly incidental.
Thais, also made in 1916, by the photographer Anton Giulio
Bragaglia, is worlds apart from the arbitrary structure of Vita
Futurista.17 Revolving completely around the theme of the femme
fatale, the film Thais presents a coherent, logical and linear narrative,
with a clear point of departure (the friendship between two society
women) and a dramatic finale (Thaïs’ suicide). The principal
ingredients are Dannunzian decadence, Baudelairian symbolism (with
the insertion of passages from Les Fleurs du mal) and, above all,
Italian divismo (star cult). The film is generally considered as a
product of Futurism because of the participation of the Futurist set-
designer Enrico Prampolini. His scenoplastica, however, remains
merely decorative, except for the spectacular finale, which, according
to Millicent Marcus, is a metaphor for the birth of Futurist cinema.
(Marcus 1996: 67-69) Marcus sees in Thaïs (played by Thaïs
Galitzky) the incarnation of the old style of cinema, for which her
(voluntary) death was necessary to allow for the emergence of a new
type of cinema – a ‘pure’ cinema where rhythm, light and
scenoplastica would substitute for traditional narrative and where
cinematic characteristics would become a self-sufficient language.
Thus, only in the last few minutes of the film, Prampolini’s set-design
becomes the dominant and active element. But this finale, impressive
it may be, does not, in fact, offer a valid solution for futuristically (that
is, whimsically) re-constructing the universe.
17
In 1916, Anton Giulio Bragaglia established his own production company ‘La
Novissima’. In the years 1916-17, he directed not only Thais, but also Il perfido
incanto, Il mio cadavere, and the short movie Dramma nell’Olimpo. Only Thais
survived, a copy of which is preserved at the Cinémathèque française in Paris. For
more details on Bragaglia’s film production, see Bragaglia 1980.
A provisional conclusion
As Scott MacKenzie has observed, the ‘history of film manifestos

represents a history of one unmitigated failure after another’
(MacKenzie 2000). The Futurist Cinema of 1916 was certainly no
exception. It was too progressive for the period, not just aesthetically,
but above all, technically. The majority of the film projects undertaken
by the Futurists in successive years, particularly in the context of the
second wave of Futurism, were destined to remain on paper. Enthused
(or maybe rather disappointed?) by the experience of directing Vita
futurista, Marinetti worked on Velocità, a screenplay for a truly
Futurist film that combined several, if not all, of the aspects discussed
above: montage of analogies, Words-in-Freedom, man-machine
analogies, Futurist reconstruction of the universe, caricatures of old-
fashioned characters, and, most importantly, speed as a theme and as a
(film) technique. As already mentioned at the beginning of this
chapter, the project was kept hidden by the leader of Futurism until his
death. Even on paper, Velocità was never revealed to the eyes of
others; Marinetti’s dream factory remaining forever a dreamed
factory. (Strauven 2006c) In 1930, the Turin-based Futurists Pippo
Oriani, Tina Cordero and Guido Martina made a film with the same
title, but with no connection to Marinetti’s screenplay. The Turinese
Velocità is one of the rare actualizations of Futurist cinema, but,
notwithstanding obvious references to Marinetti’s poetics (in
particular the insertion of ‘dramas of objects’), this film is far from
what was aspired to in the ‘polyexpressive’ film programme
announced in 1916. (Verdone 1996; Lista 1997: 98) Other Futurist
writings on cinema were to follow and Marinetti himself would sign a
final manifesto dedicated to cinema in 1938, in which recent
technological developments (such as sound, colour, stereoscopy, etc.)
were cited as new artistic solutions. But this manifesto, too, was to
remain without concrete consequences within the Futurist movement.
In reality, the Futurist manifestos on cinema were not only too
ambitious (or futurological), but also aimed at a total work of art that
surpassed the characteristics of cinema. In order to arrive at a Futurist
re-construction of the universe, cinematic techniques (either of their
time or of the future) were not enough. What was needed was a real
synthesis of all of the Futurist arts. Conversely, the workings of the
cinematographic language are seized better in Futurist writings not
226 Wanda Strauven
expressly dedicated to cinema and, more specifically, in Marinetti’s

theatre and literature manifestos. As I have tried to show, it is actually
in these manifestos that the founder of Futurism proposes a theory of
cinema. It is an indirect (or imagined) theory of cinema, where verbal
language is mechanized, technologized and regulated by analogical
perception and by the principle of the ‘marvellous’ (or free montage).
To cite once more the words of Piero Gobetti, what is in question is an
aesthetic which ‘applied to the art of the screen would [have been] a
logically justified aesthetic’, and – I would add – more productive
than a literal application of the manifesto The Futurist Cinema.
Translated by Selena Daly
Acknowledgments. An earlier version of this article was published as

‘Dall’ ‘immaginazione senza fili’ al ‘meraviglioso futurista’: La
poetica marinettiana come teoria indiretta, intuitiva, del cinema’, in
Cinema Video Internet: Tecnologie e avanguardia in Italia dal
futurismo alla Net.art, edited by Cosetta G. Saba, Bologna: CLUEB,
2006, pp. 89-111. I wish to thank Günter Berghaus for the opportunity
to elaborate the text in English and for his valuable comments to
improve on the original.
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Futurism and Radio
Margaret Fisher
Abstract: This chapter assesses the condition of Italian radio in the 1920s and 30s,
examines the influence of broadcast programs and policies on Futurist radio output,
and asks to what degree Italian radio may have embraced, at least partially, Futurist
aesthetics. Many key elements of Futurist aesthetics matched the innate qualities of
the new radio technology; vice versa, radio contained many features that held the
promise of an ideal Futurist medium. The Futurist Radio Manifesto, signed by F. T.
Marinetti and Pino Masnata, temporarily redirected the Futurist embrace of
technology from machines to the physics and metaphysics of radio waves. The
‘wireless imagination’ gave birth to the artista in libertà (the artist freed from the
constraints of human perception). The goal was a synthesis of art and science that
strove for a new spectrum of sensibilities located in the immateriality of the world.
Historians have accorded the Futurists unqualified recognition for their influence over
Italian radio. This study challenges that point of view by examining the context and
problems associated with Futurist radio broadcasts in Italy. Politics and economics
affected radio institutions in ways that did not accord Futurism the chance to
contribute to the new medium in the manner Marinetti was keen to do. The
programmes paid an occasional tribute to Futurism but, for the most part,
marginalized it. And Radiorario, Italian radio’s official programme listing guide,
foiled any attempt by the Futurists to dominate a cultural discussion of technology.
In recent years, there has been a sea change in Italian scholarship

concerned with early Italian radio. Italian scholars are gradually
recovering a radio history of the 1920s and 30s. This has led to a re-
assessment of the accomplishments of the first engineers and
programme directors, and of the relevance of those accomplishments
to current media, new music and inter-disciplinary studies. Their work
has implications for our knowledge of Futurist radio art, which for too
long has dwelt in the ether of our imagination. We can now place
Futurism within the context of early Italian radio and draw from
related primary radio texts (which I will refer to as para-texts) to
stimulate a fresh discussion on Futurism and technology. This study
considers some of the main points of early Italian radio but does not
substitute for a survey of the field. I apologize in advance to those
disappointed not to find in my arguments some of the justifiable and
well-known conclusions regarding consensus building and propaganda
230 Margaret Fisher
under the Fascist régime. When I approach Futurist radio activities of

the 1930s, I have not attempted to represent the corresponding
political climate and associations between Futurists and the
government. Rather, I have stayed close to underlying themes
identified by David R. Roberts in his appraisal of Fascist
corporativism: ‘the original Italian self-assertion, the sense of offering
a superior modernity, that fuelled the first overtly totalitarian
departure’ (Roberts 2007: 40). These themes emerge repeatedly in the
study of Futurism and Italian radio programming, even where the
objective is other than totalitarian; the point being that in retrospect
Roberts’ appraisal of the self-conscious exploitation of an identifiable
and particularly Italianate sensibility applies handily, rather than
absolutely, to Futurism and Italian radio.
Radio technology
A glance at what is innate to radio technology demonstrates how radio

epitomized many of the main themes of the Futurist movement. Radio
communication, the wireless transmission and reception of sound
waves within an electro-magnetic field, uses a ‘transmitter’ to amplify
the sound wave and assign it to a carrier wave with a specific
frequency. Broadcast radio is transmitted from a single point and
diffused widely for reception at many points at once. At the
destination, sound waves are decoded by a ‘receiver.’ Electro-
magnetic waves continue to flow whether they are received and
decoded, or not, so that sounds are immediately replaced by new
sounds or silence (Menduni 2002: 30-32). All traces of the original
radio waves disappear. As radio waves travel at the speed of light, we
tend to ascribe a quality of simultaneity or near-simultaneity to the
transmission and reception. These events are innate to radio, and have
the potential to realize the main platform of Futurism. The Futurists
extolled machines, electricity, speed and simultaneity. They called for
the erasure of history, the intensification of the senses, the penetration
of art into all aspects of life and a resulting symbiosis between art and
life. They espoused a freedom for words (parole in libertà) and the
recognition of all sounds as music. By comparison, radio expands the
experience of space even as it collapses the sense of distance and time.
It highlights the sense of hearing, the most isolated of our five senses,
and acts as a stimulus to memory, imagination and psychology. Radio

sounds merge with ambient sound, so that the perception of received
sound differs at each point of reception, though we tend to imagine
that the same sound is heard simultaneously in multiple locations.
Until the advent of the internet, radio was a transitory or ephemeral
medium. In the 1920s, radio introduced unintended new auditory
experiences to a listening public, such as the juxtaposition of sounds
arising from interference between stations. This could be had with the
turn of the radio dial, or emerge unexpectedly from atmospheric
conditions. With radio, interference, fading, static, and station
identification signals joined the sounds of nature, industry, music and
conversation. Radio became part of everyday life and culture as its
programmes infiltrated homes, cafés, gardens, hospitals, schools, and
automobiles, and reached into the most remote areas of this planet.
Italian radio’s first phase, 1924-1927
In their articles and speeches, the engineers and programme directors

of Italian radio regularly invoked the ‘miracle of radio’ – the mystery
of electro-magnetic waves – to counter the diurnal problems of clear
technical reception or the difficulty of satisfying a multitude of
musical tastes. Their sense of wonder in the face of a universal
phenomenon was mirrored in their engagement with the world
through Italian radio. Although such a universal or international
sensibility is not innate to radio, it was a distinctive feature of Italian
radio during its first phase, 1924-1927. Under the stewardship of
Unione Radiofonica Italiana, this phase was characterized by a global
vision, which found expression in the extensive and sustained foreign
content in the radio listings, feature articles and regular columns of the
official programme guide Radiorario. It could, arguably, be pinned to
a collective sensibility of the Italian radio pioneers.
A more practical justification for early Italian radio’s global vision
– at odds with the nationalistic tone of Italy’s domestic policies – can
be found in the concerted effort of government and industry to
improve Italy’s standing in Europe. To remain economically
competitive, Mussolini was forced to rely on the private industrial
sector. The first Italian radio concession was a monopoly granted to a
private consortium of French and German interests. Independent of
232 Margaret Fisher
State control, the consortium returned no apparent benefit to Italy

(Monteleone 1976: 235-43). Guglielmo Marconi, Italy’s most famous
living native son and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1909 for his
invention of wireless telegraphy, had earlier, but unsuccessfully,
offered his patents to the State in exchange for the concession to build
Italy’s national radio system. A former Italian Senator, Marconi was a
member of the Fascist Party from 1923 and good friend of Benito
Mussolini and Admiral Costanzo Ciano, Minister of Communications
as of April 1924. Some of Ciano’s ministerial manoeuvres behind the
scenes led to an amalgamation of Marconi’s Italian company,
Radiofono, with the Italian subsidiary of Western Electric Co., Société
Italiana Radio Audizioni Circolari (SIRAC), to form a new
consortium, the Unione Radiofonica Italiana (URI), which was
sanctioned by law in December, 1924. The arrangement was
indicative of the cordial relations at the time between Italy, Britain and
the U.S.
Ciano, a decorated naval hero and former Undersecretary of the
Marine, brought an international competitiveness to his Ministry as
well as radio-specific skills. He had just upgraded the marine, ports
and ship-building facilities. In a few years he would be Mussolini’s
most trusted Minister.1 To balance Marconi’s British interests, Ciano
placed Enrico Marchesi, engineer and general director from FIAT, as
president of URI, and nominated Raoul Chiodelli, an engineer from
SIRAC, to fill the post of general director. Marconi’s engineer, Luigi
Solari at Radiofono, was nominated vice-president. This formidable
team – a renowned inventor and three engineers, overseen by a naval
commander – was something of an Italian ‘industrial complex’ whose
mandate included, in addition to building a national radio service,
selling radio equipment of their manufacture (Monticone 1978: 12).
Enjoying the trust of the regime, the engineers benefited from relative
independence and were able to set the tone with a global,
technological agenda for the new radio service. Their ideas were
1
After the second assassination attempt on his life, Mussolini secretly named Ciano
as his chosen successor in the event of his death (Santini 1993: 6; De Grazia and
Luzzatto 2002: I 279). When Ciano died unexpectedly in 1939 at age 63, it was
assumed that succession would pass to his son Galeazzo, who had married Benito
Mussolini’s daughter Edda. Galeazzo held various government and ministerial posts
from 1930. In 1943, as a member of the Fascist Grand Council, he voted for the
removal of Mussolini from office. He was tried for treason by the new Repubblica
Sociale Italiana and executed in January 1944.
conveyed by Chiodelli throughout the pages of Radiorario (1925-

1929). Chiodelli managed the weekly and directed URI with an
authoritative ‘top down’ style.
URI established a radio station outside Rome (1924), a second in
Milan (1925) and a third in Naples (1926). Until 1927, neither the
individuals in charge nor the government recognized the potential of
this new medium of mass communication (Monticone 1978: 40;
Santini 1993: 153). Italian radio began, under the influence of
Marconi, with British radio as their model of public service, but
without the Calvinist overtones of the BBC’s director John Reith. The
Fascist radio pulpit, more discretely referred to as a ‘lectern’ (la
cattedra), entered the story of Italian radio somewhat late. It may
come as a surprise that Italian radio until 1927 had not yet become a
significant domestic propaganda vehicle for the régime, save for
special political holidays. The nascent radio news, licensed to one
officially-sanctioned source and limited to ten minutes, was
undervalued. Neglect of the political uses of the medium delayed the
onset of radio puberty in Italy – the singular focus on pro-régime
propaganda that characterized Italian radio throughout the remainder
of the Fascist years.
A radio subscription (paid up front on a two-year minimum basis),
license fees and taxes cost 160 lire per year or more, depending on the
equipment purchased. For a lower middle class clerical worker
earning less than 1,000 lire per month, the fees represented over 13%
of annual income (Monticone 1978: 14, 370).2 This was on top of the
initial cost of the equipment, which in the mid-1920s was over 2,000
lire. As a result, many listeners accessed radio only through their
cafés, clubs and cultural centres.
The entertainment and education broadcasts had excellent public
relations value directed to foreign listeners and the foreign press. Like
Marinetti, Italian radio spread a wide net in its self-promotion.
Broadcast programmes and Radiorario combined to represent Italy to
the world as a modernized power among Western nations, a leader in
the arts and sciences. Because the Duce personally was in charge of
2
The relative-to-income high cost of a radio subscription left Italian radio, compared
to other European countries, with a small subscriber base (40,000 subscribers in
1927) (Ortoleva & Scaramucci 2003: 274). The listener base was in actual fact many
times larger than this if we take account of public listening in the cafés and social
clubs.
234 Margaret Fisher
the foreign press and foreign relations, he was undoubtedly first and
foremost of Radiorario’s target readers.
Readers and listeners
Radiorario content, written by the radio producers and engineers,

‘talked up’ to its audience – monarchists, industrialists, the
bourgeoisie and educators – offering them a brief on art, science,
industry and modernism. The articles, like the programming itself,
glorified large historic personalities and contemporary ones: Gabriele
D’Annunzio and Marinetti (Monteleone 1992: 40). We might
conclude from the Radiorario listings that the URI imagined its
domestic audience, the nuclear bourgeois Italian family, in its own
image – as professional musicians and engineers. The music
programme, especially catholic in its selections, offered a serious,
edifying sampling of every kind of music, as well as a significant
ration of contemporary music! Included in this latter category was
even a small dose of Futurist music.
There was enticement to the veteran soldier of the First World War
who had been exposed to radio technology in the field. Radiorario
cultivated a niche community of radioamatori who were encouraged
to build their own equipment and tune in to stations around the globe
– a kind of para-military instruction that would bring skilled
applicants to the new radio jobs on the horizon. The radio industry and
the government had good reason to want to exert influence over
veterans from the Great War who had picked up a practical knowledge
of radio: oppositional forces could wreak havoc with interference of
broadcast communications (Solari 1939: 362-64). This enticement
equally applied to adolescents with aspirations to a military career or a
job in science and technology. Radiorario articles reported
occasionally on Futurist-like experimentation, such as instructions by
R. F. Starzl, reprinted from Radio News, for converting an acoustic
violin into an electric violin. The absence of Futurist experimentation
in these years becomes quite pronounced in this setting, if only
because the new technology was not just presented; it was flaunted,
shared, discussed and re-invented, week by week.
Programmes for children, aged four to twelve, offer a stunning
view of the URI years. Like the radioamatori, children were
Illustr. 1 + 2: F.T. Marinetti in the broadcast studio. From Radio Corriere vol. 8,
no. 15 (9-16 April 1932) and vol. 10, no. 10 (6 March 1934).
encouraged to interact with radio. Radiorario portrays the children’s

programmes in a liberal, progressive light, perhaps to showcase Italy’s
domestic educational innovations to an international readership. The
children had their own photo-rich displays in the front pages of
Radiorario. Boys and girls were photographed in the station control
room with their hands on the instruments. I make a point of this
because the known image we have of a Futurist with hands on the
radio equipment is a 1932 photograph of Marinetti at the microphone
of Radio Trieste (Radio Corriere April 1932 [vol. 8, no. 15]: 9). His
stentorian pose and formal dress created a marked contrast to the boys
and girls, who were more naturally engaged with the equipment.
The children recited and sang on air, published their letters in
Radiorario, participated in contests and field trips. They joined
Minister of Aviation Italo Balbo for an aeroplane ride to learn about
air-to-land communications. The Naples station, sponsor of the
programme Bambinopoli, fancifully created a ‘virtual’ radio nation
with its own constitution, to which the children could apply for
citizenship. Radiorario taught children about a global community
dedicated to helping and healing; one article, for example, featured a
child connected to a heart monitoring machine so that doctors around
236 Margaret Fisher
the world could, by means of radio, listen to and comment on his heart
murmur. Children’s programmes created a win/win situation for the
régime; they provided a public service and good press. While radio
scholars portray these programmes as Fascist indoctrination, I would
counter any easy dismissal of the children’s programmes as Fascist
seedbeds. For one, the process of turning Italian radio into a Fascist
radio took more than five years; until the late 1920s, the Montessori-
styled programmes appear to have prevailed, outweighing the
régime’s propaganda.3 There are other, more contemporary, internet-
related reasons not to gloss over this lost world of children accessing
the world through the media. Most pertinent to this study are two
Futurist radio dramas with child protagonists: Marinetti’s Violetta e
gli aeroplani, and Pino Masnata’s La bambina ammalata. The two
radio plays appear to be rooted in the culture of the children’s
programmes of Italian radio.4
The Futurists were never granted the preferred status under
Mussolini that they had hoped for (Cannistraro 1975: 7, 58-59). They
watched from the sidelines as Italian radio flexed its technological
muscles and penetrated the lives of its subscribers. URI promoted
radio with Futurist-like rhetoric: the radio receiver was the domestic
hearth; radio was both nanny and tutor (Radio Corriere Jan. 1930
[vol. 6, no. 1]: 9). The headset was URI’s chosen icon and most up-to-
date Futurist-like personal accessory. It emphasized the individual’s
isolation in a private world and, ironically, linked Italy’s new mass
medium to the liberal democratic traditions privileging individual
interests. Again, we see the contradictory position held by radio in
relation to a régime becoming more and more interested in popular
culture and public assembly.
3
Montessori’s disciple Elisabetta Oddone founded the first children’s programme for
the Milan station, Il cantuccio dei bambini (The Children’s Corner) on 4 January
1926. She and her co-host Ettore Margadonna were strong advocates of high quality
music programmes for children.
4
Pino Masnata’s radio play The Sick Child was first broadcast in 1986 in Italy on RAI
Uno. This ‘radio fantasy’, rich in sound effects which today may seem somewhat
dated, is a feverish soundscape of the sick room and the mental states of those who
occupy it. A brief excerpt from the dramatic ending of Marinetti’s Violet and the
Aeroplanes, unidentified but probably from the 1941 broadcast, was included in the
1974 fiftieth-anniversary program of Italian radio titled ‘Il radiodramma.’ As in The
Sick Child, the roles are spoken by adult actors, and delivered with a theatricality
that seems out of kilter with Marinetti’s revolutionary Futurist theatre.
Italian radio’s second phase, 1928-1944
In 1927, Italian radio’s infatuation with international modernity

shifted to a national emphasis, but the foreign programme listings
continued. The change occurred over a period of three years, with
progressively more time devoted to government programmes. Late in
1927, the Duce’s brother Arnaldo Mussolini was appointed vice-
president of the revamped Italian radio, Ente Italiano Audizioni
Radiofoniche (EIAR). The new State system débuted in 1928,
introduced by Augusto Turati, Secretary of the Fascist Party, as the
voice and will of the régime (‘Il Fascismo per la radiofonia’,
Radiorario, 1 Jan. 1928 [vol. 4, no. 1: 1). EIAR appointed a sixteen-
member High Commission for Radio Inspection which would
influence and oversee programming content. Among its first members
were composer Pietro Mascagni and publisher Arnoldo Mondadori
(Monticone 1978: 39-40). In 1930, Radiorario was renamed Radio
Corriere to reflect its role as government messenger. The children’s
programmes offer a specific view of this shift. Photographs in
Radiorario and Radio Corriere document the changes that overtook
the children of Italian radio’s first phase. By 1933, the showcasing of
children with new technology disappeared.5 Children were no longer
photographed from the control room facing the camera, but rather
with their backs to the camera, facing the loudspeakers in a concrete
gymnasium (Radio Corriere Feb. 1933 [vol. 9, no. 8]: 1). With the
onset of radio puberty, the heart(h) grew cold. A 1939 photograph
shot from below depicted Mussolini viewing a children’s athletic
programme. The children were nowhere to be seen. Instead, F. T.
Marinetti’s prose poem, L’aerocanzone futurista delle nuove parole,
illustrated with a photograph of a propeller plane, shared the page with
Mussolini (Radio Corriere Aug. 1939 [vol. 15, no. 33]: 9).
Personifying the régime in a way that Ciano or his team could not,
Arnaldo Mussolini brought to radio his brother’s successful strategy
of appeasing the many differing points of view within and without the
Fascist Party, and turning them to his advantage. We see this clearly in
his piece for the inaugural issue of Radio Corriere where he tips his
5
Children could continue to join the radio clubs sponsored by the Opera Nazionale
Balilla, the Fascist Youth Movement.
238 Margaret Fisher
Illustr. 3: Children, listening to a radio broadcast in a gymnasium, are

portrayed as a faceless and passive audience, contrasted to their earlier
portrayal as engaged individual participants in all aspects of radio
technology. From Radio Corriere, vol. 9, no. 8. (19-26 February 1933)
hat to the Futurists with two themes: spirituality and the language of
the manifesto. After dismissing the URI phase as a period of
dilettantismo (amateurism),6 he declared what radio should not be or
should not do: ‘La radio non deve essere […]; non deve propagare
[…]; non deve farsi […]’, followed by what radio should do, ‘[La
radio] deve accostarsi . . . deve istruire [...]’.
Radio has by now become a part of everyday civilian life; it informs

our practical activity and is a primary factor in the nobility of the
spirit. This mysterious fluid that runs through the ether and imparts a
wondrous feeling touches every possible kind of person. [. . .] Radio
should not be the bearer of useless chatter; [radio] should not promote
third-rate catchy tunes; [radio] should not turn itself into the launching
pad of lousy books. . . . [Radio] brings you the ‘buzz’ of artistic events
and the latest political news: in other words, it is a super-highspeed
complement to all our daily exertions. (Radio Corriere Jan. 1930 [vol.
6, no. 1]: 1)7
Readers familiar with the Futurist Radio Manifesto will anticipate

the antiphonal response, ‘Radio should not be . . .’ (La Radia non deve
essere). Arnaldo’s speech the following week, ‘Heroes of the Will’
(Gli eroi della volontà), combined Futurist phraseology, ‘love of risk-
taking’, ‘audacious consciousness’, ‘a suggestive poetics of danger’
(l’amore per il rischio, audace coscienza, poesia suggestiva del
pericolo) – with a particularly Italianate notion of the affirmation of
individual will, the well-known credo of eighteenth-century dramatist
Vittorio Alfieri: ‘Volli, sempre volli, fortissimamente volli’ (I wanted
6
It should be noted that because the medium was new, all early broadcast
programming is characterized by dilettantism to a degree. To dismiss this early
period would be comparable today to dismissing the early history of the Internet.
7
‘La radio è entrata ormai nelle consuetudini della vita civile; è un coefficiente di
attività pratica ed è un fattore primario di elevazione spirituale. Questo misterioso
fluido che corre l’etereo e che dà la sensazione del miracolo, si accosta ad ogni
specie di categoria di persone . . . La radio non deve essere diffonditrice di
chiacchiere inutili; non deve propagare musichette da strapazzo . . . ; non deve farsi
banditrice di cattivi libri . . . [La radio] vi dà le vibrazioni e le manifestazioni
dell’arte e le ultime notizie di carattere politico: è insomma, un complemento
ultraveloce di tutta la nostra fatica giornaliera.’ Marconi and Einstein, among others,
actively campaigned to replace the fiction of ‘radio’s ethereal medium’ with the
concept of an electro-magnetic field (Graham, 1942: 4,441). Page 5 of the same
issue carries Enzo Ferrieri’s announcement that F. T. Marinetti will be a regular
collaborator with EIAR. (‘Nuovi collaboratori fissi dell’EIAR’).
240 Margaret Fisher
[it], I always wanted [it], I wanted [it] as strongly as possible).8

Descended from the House of Savoy, Alfieri was invoked by the
régime as a figure who advocated a revolution to propel the individual
spirit towards more liberty but who could not countenance a people’s
revolution (i.e., the French Revolution) because of his ties to
aristocracy. The rhetoric of Vittorio Alfieri would appeal to the
monarchy and friends of the monarchy, such as the Cianos, and was
generally the perfect foil for the régime’s strategy to win over
opposition on many fronts. Arnaldo closed the speech citing the
Duce’s own Futurist-derived words, ‘vivere pericolosamente’ (live
dangerously) (Radio Corriere Feb. 1930 [vol. 6. no. 7]: 3-4).
Arnaldo’s fiery message was given a rational and more thoughtful
reprise by Enzo Ferrieri, Artistic Director of EIAR. Gone was the
poetry and daring. Ferrieri emphasized the popularizing aspect of the
medium – ‘mezzo divulgativo.’ Ferrieri’s ‘Manifesto of Radio as a
Creative Force’ (Radio come forza creative) published in Il convegno
(June 1931), divided radio sound into three categories: music, voices
and noise. The language is somewhat prosaic, but Ferrieri was well
respected in theatre, cinema and radio, and his words had their
intended effect: ‘Radio should broadcast the more pleasing voices [...]
Radio should only deal with professional speakers [...] Radio should
also entertain’ (La Radio deve diffondere [...] La Radio non devono
parlare [...] La Radio deve anche divertire [...] [underlining added]).
The manifesto carries Ferrieri’s seminal idea that the source of radio’s
true, paradoxical power derives from silence (Ferrieri 2002: 32, 39).9
Again, readers familiar with the Futurist Radio Manifesto will
recognize the urtext here: the power of silence to give shape to sound.
Ferrieri’s manifesto discussed radio speakers, radio drama and radio
news, and presented the new EIAR-sanctioned radio practice and
style. His second of nine points claimed that an effective radio style
depended on concision and speed, and an awareness of the need to
dominate silence with calculated timing. This idea, too, owed much to
the Futurist aesthetic, although Ferrieri’s final phrase turned the
discussion away from the Futurists and toward tradition, ‘The style
8
This phrase is taught to Italian school children to encourage action and assertiveness.
9
His theory about an effective radio technique predates Rudolph Arnheim’s Radio
(1936), which is considered the first comprehensive radio theory and microphone
technique. Ferrieri’s manifesto is printed together with the Futurist Radio Manifesto
in Ferrieri 2002.
suited to radio is rapid, vivid, without pause and without wasted

words, pressing, lyrical, typically Italian’ (Lo stile adatto alla radio è
rapido, vivo, senza pause e senza sprechi, incalzante, lirico,
tipicamente Italiano) (underlining added) (Ferrieri 2002: 30-31).
Further, Ferrieri’s stylistic emphasis contradicted the microphone
technique preferred by the engineers: ‘Speak slowly, very slowly, but
clearly, in a natural tone as if you were conversing’ (Parli adagio,
molto adagio, ma chiaramente, con tono naturale, come se
conversasse) (Solari 1939: 369).
In August 1931, Ferrieri followed up with Inchiesta sulla radio, a
radio survey that solicited criteria from prominent writers and artists
of the day (Ferrieri 2002: 59-67). He asked them to identify and
describe radiogenic content for broadcast, prophesizing that such
material would eventually be written by artists (Ferrieri 2002: 67).
Radiogenic material was material particularly suited to the social and
acoustic properties of the new medium or that which could suggest
intellectual and sensorial experiences unique to radio. But what was
the point of inviting artists to enter the discussion after the EIAR style
had been clearly defined? I suspect the answer might be that Ferrieri
had to negotiate between a personal and professional strategy. He
could salvage or even enhance his reputation among peers while
fulfilling a requirement of his job: Radio in the 1930s was one means
of enticing intellectuals to participate in the government’s cultural
programmes.
Arnaldo’s and Ferrieri’s texts are important para-texts to Futurist
radio, as are the many articles about children’s programmes and radio
technology. They alert us to the fact that radio’s early influences were
eclectic, that there were internal differences of opinion, and that there
is a need to look beyond Futurist texts. They help us test Italian
radio’s embrace of the Futurist aesthetic and the Futurists’ embrace of
Italian radio conventions. We can discern a Futurist presence in these
texts, a presence that has generally been assumed, but has not been
substantiated. Conversely, we can identify a URI presence in the
Futurist radio dramas. The recent re-publication of the Ferrieri
manifesto by Emilio Pozzi contains the Futurist Radio Manifesto
appended at the end of the book. Other sources for para-texts are the
transcripts of broadcasts from the programme guides, found in
Monticone (1978) and Isola (1998).
242 Margaret Fisher
The Italian government’s lack of preparation to provide a State-run

radio service created a particular environment of experimentation
quite different from, for example, that at the BBC, where public
service had a decidedly moral tone. Italian radio drew from the
language of technology, mystery and miracle, and by the 1930s, from
the language of the Futurist manifesto. Under the jurisdiction of a
team of engineers and industrialists seeking to make a profit, and
overseen by a government intent on restoring Italy’s prestige in the
world, this miracle of the invisible and immaterial world and its
attendant technology were accessible to the high-profile Marinetti and
other Futurists, but they were not for sale. There were no opportunities
to hold the kind of event at which the Futurists excelled – a full
theatrical soirée (serata). Broadcast slots for talks on the arts were ten
minutes at most, individual pieces of music often shorter than five
minutes. Projecting a Futurist voice or style through radio’s bustling
sound factory was difficult at best. Futurist radio content on air and in
Radiorario, although sporadic, was always favourable, and helped
raise the Futurists’ standing among the Fascist party’s upper echelons.
Part II: Futurism and radio
The first year of regular broadcasting, 1925, included eleven

transmissions by Futurists and one Radiorario article about Marinetti,
but the total broadcast time represented is very small. Futurists also
embarked on non-Futurist radio activities. Italo Bertoglio, staff
photographer for EIAR, supplied Futurist as well as Neo-realist cover
pages for Radio Corriere; Guido Sommi-Picenardi wrote a weekly
column for Radio Corriere, ‘Sussuri dell’etere’, that treated radio
more generally; Paolo Buzzi, provincial secretary in Milan, broadcast
in an official capacity and hid his ties to Futurism; Arnaldo Ginna
wrote about radio for the Rome daily, L’Impero d’Italia, 1930-31. To
date, no complete list of Futurist scripts, recordings or broadcasts has
been compiled. Once such a task is achieved, it is likely that our view
on the relationship between Futurism and radio will shift from an
‘analogy between the new radiophonic experiences and the Futurist
movement’ (Ferrieri 2002: 39), to a more nuanced assessment of how
the Futurist movement exerted an influence over early Italian radio.
From an historical viewpoint, it is understandable that the Futurists
put their publicity machine to work proclaiming Italian radio a

Futurist radio; but it is less acceptable that we still oil the gears for
them. It is time to critically question judgments such as: ‘Radio sound
waves became the vehicle for Marinetti’s Words-in-freedom’ (Tisdall
and Bozzolla 1996: 199), or, ‘The most important “cultural” broadcast
of the period took place in February 1929, when Filippo T. Marinetti
spoke on the radio. […] His broadcast, The Bombardment of
Adrianopoli, was awaited by the public with great interest and was
heralded by critics as the most significant cultural event of the Italian
radio’ (Cannistraro 1975: 131). Regarding the latter, the documents
that I have examined record the date of broadcast as 6 January 1929.
Radio audiences were not primed for the event, because Radiorario
appears to have belatedly printed Umberto Bernasconi’s enthusiastic
preview article, ‘F. T. Marinetti’, in the issue of 17 February 1929,
that is, over a month after the broadcast had taken place. Because the
1929 recitation of Il bombardamento di Adrianopoli is the earliest date
mentioned in existing studies on radio and Futurism, I, too, was
misled into thinking that this was Marinetti’s debut broadcast in Italy.
However, a photograph and full-page article in Radiorario indicates
that Marinetti had already declaimed the poem on 23 April 1925 with
equal post-facto fanfare (Radiorario 30 May 1925 [vol. 1, no. 20]: 1).
On 23 April 1925, Marinetti gave a talk titled ‘New Poetry –
Words-in-Freedom’ that included a thematic ‘Lecture on Futurism’
and his first radio recitation of Il bombardimento di Adrianopoli.
Other poems by Marinetti had already been broadcast by Ugo
Donarelli, Director of the Rome station. These included ‘Invocation to
the Sea Pleading to be Liberated from the Ideal’ and ‘Song of the
Beggar for Love’, on 28 February and 21 March 1925, respectively.
Alessandra Ottieri, in her evaluation of Futurist work in radio and
other mass-media, is skeptical of the reputed success of Futurist
radiophonic works simply on the merit of their content. She concludes
that the Futurist relationship with radio was ‘a missed opportunity’
(un’occasione mancata) for the diffusion of parole in libertà (words
freed from the restrictions of syntax), as well as for the exploitation of
the condition of synchronicity of the transmission and reception, a
condition that perfectly corresponds to and fulfils the Futurist
condition of simultaneity in art. Her catalogue of works is useful as a
springboard for exploring the question further, precisely because it
does not pretend to be complete:
244 Margaret Fisher
Even before the publication in 1933 of the Radio Manifesto, [. . .]

some Futurists had already been involved in the creation of Futurist
Radio works, evidencing in this activity a growing interest in the new
mass medium, where one had to ‘seize’ its secrets (including technical
secrets) to be able to take full advantage of its potential. In 1924,
Luciano Folgore launched a regular radio show that lasted more than
ten years (Gramophone of Truth); Pino Masnata (inventor of a
‘visionary theater’ and drafter, with Marinetti, of the late manifesto
cited above) appeared in 1931 in the guise of radio author, proposing
the radio fantasy The Sick Child and the Futurist-Grotesque work Tum
tum, while the following year Marinetti’s radio drama Violet and the
Aeroplanes was broadcast. In 1929 Marinetti had successfully recited
his celebrated Battle of Adrianopoli on radio. (Ottieri 2004: 68)
The most provocative piece the Futurists produced for the radio
was the Futurist Radio Manifesto, or ‘Manifesto futurista della radio’,
written not for broadcast but for the Torino daily, Gazzetta del popolo
(22 September 1933). It appeared as ‘Manifesto della Radio’ in
Futurismo (1 October 1933) and as ‘La Radia, Manifesto futurista
dell’ottobre 1933’ in Autori e scrittori (August 1941). The feminine
ending reflected the Futurists’ treatment of radio as a new fine art, to
be added to the other arts: la musica, la poesia, la pittura, la scultura,
la danza, l’architettura. Further, they wanted to detach la radia from
radio theatre – il radioteatro – and from broadcasting, which Masnata
explained, contained the idea of circulating a performance rather than
creating one. La Radia was not to refer to all transmissions, but only
to those which were creations of radiophonic art, or ‘radiarte.’ French
versions appeared in Comœdia (15 December 1933, Paris) and Stile
futurista (December 1934); English (World Radio, 1933), Spanish
(Renovacion, 1933) and Esperanto (Esperanto, 1935) translations also
followed.10 For seventy-five years, the manifesto shouldered the main
burden of demonstrating the incontrovertible influence of Futurism on
Italian radio. It continues to exert ‘iconic force’ over the imagination
of artists and writers committed to rethinking art through electronic
media (Grundmann 1994). Marinetti’s most radical artistic
contribution to radiogenic literature was his collection, Cinque sintesi
10
Not all printings of the Radio Manifesto contain the prefatory material published in
the Gazzetta del popolo. The manifesto proper begins, ‘LA RADIA, nome che noi
futuristi diamo alle grandi manifestazioni della radio, è ancora oggi [. . .].’
radiofoniche, which was produced for the first time by Juan Allende-
Blin for the Westdeutsche Rundfunk in 1980.11
To highlight the sense of radiophonic distance, a broadcast of
radiophonic lyrics would be unexpected, wilful and magical.
Fortunato Depero’s preferred listener would be caught unawares, ‘on
the street, in cafés, aeroplanes, on the bridge of a ship, in a thousand
different environments’, removed from any sense of security or
romantic seduction (Depero 1934: 7). Depero, in the introduction to
his collected poems, Liriche Radiofoniche, listed the qualities of a
Futurist radiophonic expression:
Brevità di tempo (Brevity or concision)
Varietà concise di immagini (Concise variety of images)
Soggetto contemporaneo (Contemporary subject matter)
Stile simultaneo e giocondo (Simultaneous and cheerful style)
Lirismo poetico fuso con il lirismo fonico, (Poetic lyricism fused to a phonic
sonoro e rumorista lyricism; sonorous and using sound
effects)
11
Vier Klanghörspiele. Radiophone Synthesen. It included Drame de distance, Les
Silences parlent entre eux, Un paysage entendu and La Construction du silence. An
Italian production by Daniele Lombardi was issued as a long-play disk: Cinque
sintesi radiofoniche 1933: Un paesaggio udito, Dramma di distanze, I silenzi
parlano tra di loro, Battaglia di ritmi and La costruzione di un silenzio (in Musica
futurista. Antologia Sonora, Milan: Cramps Records, Collana Multhipla 5204002,
1980; later re-issued on CD: CRSCD 046). The same performance was also issued
in 1997 on CD 4 of Futurismo: Antologia di rumori future (Lombardi, Daniele and
Antonio Latanza [eds.], Fonoteca: FT020201) entitled Cinque Sintesi per il Teatro
Radiofonico. Previously, two of the sintesi were recorded in the US: ‘A Landscape
Heard’ and ‘Silences Speak among Themselves’ (audiocassette, A Futurist Octet,
AudioPlayers, San Francisco 1978). Another broadcast was given in Austria on 5
September 2004, in the series KUNSTRADIO - RADIOKUNST at the station Ö1. I
am grateful to Günter Berghaus for this information.
Cinque sintesi radiofoniche creates radio art from a list of sounds. The concept for
Cinque Sintesi may well derive from the European station identification signals. See
the catalogue assembled by engineer and General Director Raoul Chiodelli in
Radiorario. An excerpt from the list reads: ‘Ginevra: quattro note musicali, Lipsia:
Orologio che batte un tic-tac per secondo; Dresda: Segnale Morse __..__.. ;
Stoccarda: tre colpi di gong di note differenti [...]’ (Radio Corriere,
‘L’identificazione delle stazioni’, 29 Jan. 1928 [vol. 4 no. 5]: 6). Marinetti’s sintesi
Un Paesaggio Udito, for example, reads, ‘10 secondi di sciacquio. 1 secondo di
crepito, . . . 6 secondi di fischio di merlo.’
246 Margaret Fisher
Onomatopee: imitative e interpretative (imitative and interpretative

onomatopoeia)
Linguaggi inventati (Inventive language)
Canti e voci rallegranti (Joyful songs and voices)
Stati d’animo a sorpresa (Surprises for the spirit)
Espressioni colorate e sintetiche strappate (Colourful, synthetic expressions

dalla vita, quotidianamente pulsante, snatched from life, throbbing with a
mutevole daily rhythm, fickle)
To be avoided were:
Analisi descrittive (Descriptive analysis)

Melanconie svenevoli (Maudlin and gloomy content)
Prudenze scolastiche (Didacticism, or intellectualism)
Reviews such as Ferrieri’s are valuable documents of this lost

generation of Futurist sounds: ‘Depero has triumphed in his particular
art’, and ‘His radiophonic lyrics reveal a world of new sounds, of
odours, of fresh conjuring and of exquisitely affecting and delicate
notes, and, above all, joy, joy, joy uncorked from the will to work and
to win’ (Radio Corriere 18-25 Mar. 1934 [vol. 10, no. 11]: 35).12
Masnata viewed Depero’s accomplishment differently, writing that his
texts were not radia but radiophonic poems (Masnata, n.d.: 38).
Given Depero’s criteria, I recommend some alterations to the
catalogue of Futurist radio works. It is expedient first to turn to the
radio work of Luciano Folgore, a member of the Futurist movement
from its earliest days. Folgore represents the most extensive
interaction by a Futurist with the medium of radio. His shows,
Gramophone of Truth (Il grammofono della verità) and Fifteen
Minutes of Humour (Il quarto d’ora umoristico), though radiogenic,
are grouped by Monteleone, and I think rightly so, with radio comedy
such as The Four Musketeers (I quattro moschettieri) rather than with
Futurism (Monteleone 1992: 66). Folgore’s broadcasts were light fare,
12
There have been numerous post-WWII recordings and broadcasts of Futurist
poetry, drama, and music. Commercial recordings from the 1970s and 1980s tend to
conform to Ferrieri’s description. The RAI Radio production in connection with the
1986 Palazzo Grassi exhibition, Futurismo & Futurismi, for example, presented a
Futurist ‘sound’ in a different vein: a machine gun execution of the words in the
absence of modulation, silence, or contrast. Also see previous note regarding the
production of Masnata’s drama.
wedged between selections from classical music or opera. The custom

of humour during programming intervals was an artefact carried over
to radio from the live stage (perhaps reason enough to discount these
programmes as Futurist!). Folgore’s scripts conform to literary and
ethical norms; they lack an avant-garde element that would give them
a Futurist edge; nor do they qualify as risqué cabaret or variety show
material. His radio humour, comprised of epigrams and other verses
woven together by narrative prose, depends on word games that
confuse spelling, meaning and pronunciation. The listener is tied to
the guidance of the narrator, the letter of the word and its syntax to
arrive at the humorous outcome.13
When Folgore intro-
duced themes specifically
related to the radio
microphone or sound
cinema, he teased the
interests of listeners who
followed developments in
the new technologies
(Luciano Folgore Papers,
Ms, 1 July and 3 July
1933). Here, the content
falls within Depero’s
parameters. Elsewhere, the
playfulness, delight in
rhyme and singsong
lyricism of his scripts
could be argued to appeal
Illustr. 4: Armando Dal Bianco – Radio
to a Futurist interest in the
(1934) from Collection Lucien Peinetti: 53 isolated sense of hearing.
tableaux futuristes italiens. Ancienne But this kind of appeal was
collection du comte Emmanuele Sarmiento. not unique to Futurist radio
Sales catalogue. Lyon: Hôtel Sofitel, 23 work or to radio
octobre 1984. Lyon: J. Verrière, 1984.
programmes per se.
13
A recent re-creation of one of Folgore’s ten-minute talks for Il grammofono della
verità brought out little avant-garde sensibility other than a keen wit. I am grateful to
Luciano Chessa, author of the forthcoming Luigi Russolo Futurista: Noise, Visual
Arts, and the Occult (University of California Press) for his collaboration on this
recording project.
248 Margaret Fisher
At the turn of the century, for example, the actor Nicola Maldacea
commercially released a series of cabaret-style caricatures, or
macchiétte, on phonograph records. These were occasionally
broadcast on Italian radio. Maldacea’s recitation of Pasquale
Cinquegrana’s Il rusecatore, or Trilussa’s Il balbuziente, among
others, evidenced a pronounced interest in the plasticity of sound. In
the absence of a Futurist context, Folgore’s wit, I would argue, did not
contribute to the diffusion of parole in libertà on radio. It may well be
that his ‘foot in the door’ of Italian radio was more important to the
Futurist presence.
To resolve the conundrum of how to classify Folgore’s broadcasts,
we might instead link them to the para-Futurist technique of stile
parolibero. Characterized by speed, dynamism, intensity through
brevity and simultaneity, the ‘Free-Wording Style’ was an outgrowth
of the Futurist parole in libertà. We find this differentiation
documented in Marinetti’s response to Ferrieri’s above-mentioned
Inchiesta sulla radio. Marinetti suggests that radio script writers
should use the style derived from the Futurist parole in libertà, that of
parolibero (Ferrieri 2002: 129). Ferrieri, for his part, accepted, at least
theoretically, criteria set by Marinetti to identify other, truly Futurist
expressions of radio that merited further advancement: radio news,
radio communications and, especially, advertising (Ferrieri 2002: 62,
129).
Noting that radio proved to be the most forward-looking or avant-
garde technology in its time, Ottieri asks why it was so little exploited
and studied by the Italian Futurists, as compared to their interventions
in theatre. One part of the answer, I believe, is to be found in the
institutional structures and restraints imposed by bureaucratic and
political powers. Although Italian radio was under the auspices of
private interests, one could not, in principle at least, buy time on radio,
control the programming context, or approach the audience as one
could do at the theatre. One could rent a theatre, advertise, ‘stack’ the
audience, and determine the context and time frame in which an event
would unfold. Theatre belonged to a material and commercial world.
The Futurists were experts at exploiting to advantage any limitations
presented by the local censor and any confrontational challenges
encountered on site. Radio presented entirely new boundaries, many
of which were immaterial. All visual components of personal
charisma were detached from the radio presence and subject to the
listener’s imagination. Furthermore, recognition of broadcast material

as ‘Futurist’ output was compromised. Theatre and print media may
admit the ‘Futurist’ appellation on the basis of the author’s or
producer’s intent. Italian radio in the 1920s and 1930s generally
stripped the work of this intent. The sound had to ‘hold its own’ in the
absence of a thematic programme or neighbouring Futurist works that
might bolster the listener’s awareness of an intended style or
technique, the exception being the Russolo programme, discussed
below.
Additionally, the bureaucratic procedures required in order to gain
access to production facilities, not least of which was the necessity of
submitting scripts to a censor’s office, insured that Futurist radio
scripts and activities were affected by the radio process. Any censorial
or political challenge could lead to silencing. The other part of the
answer concerns music, which presented a more favourable set of
conditions.
The condition of music
For the Futurists to create an identifiable presence in radio, they would

have needed continual exposure – on air, in the programme guides and
in the daily newspapers. Despite their virtuosic ability to promote their
cause, radio publicity was less susceptible to their manipulation.
Relative to radio broadcasts overall, the Futurist presence was small,
and music well outnumbered their radio dramas. However, not every
piece broadcast by a Futurist composer should be classified as
‘Futurist’. A study of Futurist music heard on early Italian radio
inherits the larger problem of ambiguities present in the music itself
(Daniele Lombardi 1981 and Fiamma Nicolodi 1984). New music in
Fascist Italy enjoyed generous patronage and performance
opportunities, including broadcast opportunities. Musicologist John
Waterhouse recalls that
in its earlier days Fascist Italy, like Soviet Russia in the same period,
often actively encouraged revolutionary trends: it is symptomatic that
so many futurists (from Marinetti downwards) became enthusiastic
supporters of the régime, and in such a climate it was only to be
expected that composers like Casella and Malipiero would be drawn
in the same direction. Not until the 1930s (and here again parallels can
250 Margaret Fisher
be drawn with Soviet Russia) did the crasser kind of ignorant

conservatism start to get the upper hand; and even then it did not
always win the day. (Waterhouse 1986: 427)
In charge of music at URI were composer Alberto Gasco, as

General Artistic Director, and baritone Ugo Donarelli as Artistic
Director of the Rome Station. Donarelli was familiar with the BBC
Music division, but he chose a different approach, taking advantage of
the relative freedom afforded to Italian radio programmes. Save for an
apparently allergic reaction to the music of Stravinsky and
Schoenberg in the first few years of URI, he gave the Italian listening
audience a generous survey of music, as mentioned earlier, from
Western and Eastern Europe and Russia. There was also a sampling of
world music from Mexico, South America, Japan and the United
States, in both the serious and light music programmes. Undoubtedly,
there were internal tensions and power struggles, but the overall
impression I have from reading through the listings is that of a grand
musical tour that sought enjoyment in all types of music. Some
programmes were thematic by content or style, others were organized
around the performing forces assembled for the particular hour. Opera
and choral pieces and pieces for solo voice certainly had hegemony.
By contrast, the BBC’s artistic directors sought to ‘shape a nation’s
tastes’ from the top down, carefully vetting the composers, the genres
and their relative proportions (Doctor 1999).
Futurist composers
Artist-musicians allied with Futurism from its beginnings were
x Luigi Russolo, a painter, inventor of several kinds of noise-

intoners (intonorumori and the rumorarmonio), and author of
the seminal Futurist manifesto on music and sound, The Art of
Noises (1913);
x Antonio Russolo, brother of Luigi and composer of several
pieces for the intonorumori;
x Francesco Balilla Pratella, composer (a student of Pietro
Mascagni) and author of the Manifesto of Futurist Musicians
(1910); Technical Manifesto of Futurist Music (1911); The
Destruction of a Rational Metrical Framework (1912).
All three men left the movement by the 1920s to pursue other
interests, but Pratella’s music had a brief second wind with radio. The
output of other musicians who followed in their stead is difficult to
evaluate in relation to Futurism, for one reason or another (on this, see
Nicolodi 1984: 72-73). These musicians included: Franco Casavola,
Silvio Mix, Nino Florio Caravaglios, Mario Bartoccini, Aldo Mantia,
Mario Silvani, Luigi Grandi, Aldo Giuntini and Nuccio Fiorda.
Nicolodi broadens the discussion to include Alfredo Casella and Gian
Francesco Malipiero, frequent collaborators with the Futurists for live
theatrical and dance events. Also, their early works, occasionally
broadcast on Italian radio, sometimes shared a Futurist aesthetic.14 The
directory of Futurist composers ranged from the untrained, the self-
taught and the amateur to the thoroughly schooled and accomplished
musician. Because some of them also performed and conducted on
radio, it is difficult to determine from the RAI multimedia catalogue
or the programme guide the full extent of each composer’s radio
output that can be linked to the Futurist movement. Only Pratella,
according to Nicolodi, adhered to a Futurist music aesthetics as set out
in his second manifesto: dispense with the idea of consonance and
dissonance, promote microtonal intervals as the true arena of Futurist
music, work with original texts so as not to be slave to the verse
rhythms of others, and freely invent new rhythms and new sounds.
Among the Futurist composers, Pratella enjoyed the most contact with
the Duce (Biguzzi 2003: 110). By 1929, he fully embraced the
régime’s efforts to nationalize culture for the masses and promote the
folkloric traditions of Italy. A respected specialist in the music of
Romagna, he devoted himself to promoting this music and composing
in a style derived from it (Nicolodi 1984: 102, 117-119).15
14
See Lombardi (1981) for a different point of view. Alfredo Casella actively
collaborated with EIAR to produce symphonic concerts and radio drama during the
1930s. For a broader perspective on the music of Casella and Malipiero, see Illiano
2004: 570-82.
15
Two articles preview Pratella’s Milan broadcast of Romagnolo songs (Radiorario
23 Apr. 1927 [vol. 3, no. 17]: 2-3).
252 Margaret Fisher
Futurist music and drama broadcast in Italy in the 1920s and 30s
Radiorario followed the developments of various music machines

invented in the twentieth century such as the theremin, the ondes-
Martenot and the noise-intoners of Russolo. A two-page feature on the
theremin, ‘New Proof of Music from the Ether’ (Nuovi saggi di
musica eterea), appeared in the 1927 Christmas issue (Radiorario 25
Dec. 1927 [vol. 3, no. 52]: 12-13). The following year the guide
devoted a full page article to Luigi Russolo, ‘Russolo’s Noise
Harmonium’ (Il Rumorarmonio di Russolo) (Radiorario 22 Jul. 1928
[vol. 4, no. 30 ]: 10). The article projected a future performance at the
Milan station when Russolo returned from Paris. The broadcast did
not take place. It was to feature the rumorarmonio (noise machine
with a primitive keyboard) alone and in combination with other
instruments as follows:
Solo pieces
1. Prelude. States of Mind (Preludio, Stata d’animo)
2. Expectation (Attesa)
3. Anger (Ira)
4. Exaltation. Animal Voices. Duet between a Frog and a
Bluebottle Fly. Quartet between a Bluebottle Fly, Frog, Cicada
and Cricket (Esaltazione. Voci degli animale. Duetto fra la rana e
il moscone. Quartetto: moscone, rana, cicala e grillo)
For the Rumorarmonio and piano: Lament of the Abandoned Frog
(Lamento della rana abbandonata)
For the Rumorarmonio, voice and piano: Rain (Pioggia, with poetry
by Pascoli and music by Antonio Russolo)
(Radiorario 22 Jul. 1928 [vol. 4, no. 30]: 10).
Other Futurist art carried by early Italian radio: On 18 January

1926, Vittore Costantini gave an ‘Artistic Conversation about Painters
of Velocity’ (Conversazione artistica, i pittori della velocità), which
sounds like a Futurist subject. A work by Futurist composer Franco
Casavola, ‘The Caliph’s Hunchback’ (Il gobbo del Califfo), was noted
in Radiorario 20 Jan. 1929 [vol. 5, no. 4]: 1-2). Vocal and
instrumental pieces by Pratella were performed about twenty times
between 1925 and 1929. Added to these were a few broadcasts of
music by Casavola, Giuntini and Mix, the play ‘Una serva futurista’
by Ugo Orlandi (27 August 1928 and 27 July 1929) and, as
mentioned, Marinetti’s Il bombardimento (23 April 1925 and 6
January 1929).
Another little explored avenue was that of the Futurist interest in

improvisation and jazz music. Casavola wrote in 1926 that the jazz
band was the most typical product of an heroic generation, ‘violent,
domineering, brutal, optimistic, anti-romantic, anti-sentimental and
against that which is charming’ (Giroud and Pettenella 2004: 182). By
1934, the political climate had changed. Giuntini and Marinetti, co-
signers of the Futurist manifesto of the condensed, geometric and
healing music of flight (Manifesto futurista dell’aeromusica sintetica
geometrica e curative), denounced the use of syncopation and a strong
rhythmic beat in music (Biguzzi 2003: 109).
In January 1933, Mino Somenzi, founder of the weekly Futurismo,
accused the press of having neglected Futurist radio contributions for
the past ten [sic] years, save for the 14 September 1932 broadcast of a
radio drama by Marinetti, Violetta e gli aeroplani.16
Was there no review of Pino Masnata and Carmine Guarino’s
musical Tum-tum ninna nanna (or, Il cuore di Wanda), in which the
protagonist is a human heart? It was prominently advertised in Radio
Corriere a week prior to its 20 December 1931 broadcast. The listing
also appeared during the week of the broadcast, accompanied by the
published libretto. Performing forces included Maestro Arrigo
Pedrollo, soprano Giuseppina Baldassari-Tedeschi and baritone Carlo
Tagliabue. Both dramas were destined for a volume that included the
Futurist Radio Manifesto and its exegesis by Masnata. Here, Masnata
described Violetta e gli aeroplani as a ‘paesaggio rumorista’
(soundscape) (Masnata n.d., Beinecke: 14).17
Marinetti wrote in Radio Corriere, ‘I love radio drama; I know all
of its limitations and all of its new possibilities. For some time I have
been preparing a radio comedy’ (‘L’invito ai commediografi italiani di
scrivere per la Radio’, Radio Corriere 3-10 Oct. 1931 [vol. 7, no. 40]:
4). This may have been a reference to the manuscript ‘Miss Radio’,
which was included in his Novelle colle labbra tinte (Marinetti 2003:
16
Violetta e gli aeroplani was submitted to the Censor’s Office by the Società
Anonima Cosmos on 30 March 1932. As regular Italian programming did not start
until 1925, Somenzi’s figure of ‘ten years’ was exaggerated.
17
Other radio playscripts by Masnata were: L’aviatrice Gaby Angelini; Il bambino;
Beethoven; Il fischio; Fox Trot; Ricerca sentimentale; Rosa rossa; Uno schiaffo
(Autori e scrittori, Aug. 1941 [vol. 6, no. 8]: 3-10). These works were not submitted
to the censor’s office (Patrizia Ferrera, ed. 2004. Censura teatrale e fascismo [1931-
1943]. Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. Direzione Generale per gli
Archivi).
254 Margaret Fisher
59-68). In this short story, Millina, ‘Miss Radio’, promises her lover
Aldo that electric radio waves will join them forever in love, should
they ever be separated. She betrays Aldo, who escapes to South
America; but Aldo fails to block the oncoming waves emanating from
Millina and goes mad (Beinecke Library, General Collection 130, Box
28, Folder 1412). This drama, more than Violetta, anticipates the
Futurist Radio Manifesto in its fascination with paranormal states
suggested by the new knowledge regarding the behaviour of radio
waves.
Somenzi also reproached Italian radio’s producers for doing what
they could to avoid Futurist content, save for a token accompaniment
to the obligatory once-a-year tribute to Fascism. To remedy this, he
proposed a weekly Futurist programme (Somenzi 1933: 1). The tribute
to Fascism referred to URI’s habit of asking Marinetti and Senator
Innocenzo Cappa, (Benedetta Marinetti’s ‘guardian’ uncle), to give
radio talks for ‘solemn official celebrations.’ Both men had broadcast
since the first year of URI and their names were on a list of approved
speakers vetted by the Ministry of Communication (Monteleone 1992:
70). Did Marinetti gain access to Italian radio through well-positioned
individuals, such as Cappa, the two Mussolinis and Marconi, or
through other channels? This remains an open question.
The year 1933 turned out to be a highpoint for Futurism and radio.
Violetta e gli aeroplani was re-broadcast within two weeks of
Somenzi’s article. On 12 August 1933, Marinetti had the honour of
hosting the national radio coverage of Italo Balbo’s trans-Atlantic
crossing and home-coming, an important occasion attended by King
Vittorio Emanuele III and Mussolini.18 There followed the publication
of the Futurist Radio Manifesto. Another appearance by Marinetti on
28 October 1933 was occasioned by the tenth anniversary of the
March on Rome, for which Marinetti translated Marconi’s celebratory
speech into French. Also in 1933, Depero broadcast selections from
his writings on 23 November.
In 1934 Marinetti hosted two music programs, Daniele Napoletano
(6 March) and Aldo Giuntini (22 April), and recited his own poem
‘Golfo della Spezia’ (6 May). The year 1936 saw an increase in the
broadcasts of music by Pratella and Mix, whereas Franco Casavola
18
Marinetti’s eye-witness account is published in Radio Corriere (20-27 Aug. [vol. 9,
no. 34]: pp. 3-4). A recording of excerpts from his broadcast is archived at the
Discoteca di Stato, Rome.
had two of his compositions put on air.19 The ‘para-Futurist’ highlight

of 1936 may well have been a live broadcast from La Fenice opera
house in Venice featuring Malipiero’s triptych L’Orfeide, which
consisted of two unusual one-act operas (La morte delle maschere and
Orfeo) book-ending semi-Futurist mini-operas entitled Sette canzoni
(Seven songs). Pratella reviewed this work earlier in Il pensiero
musicale, claiming the seven songs were ‘derived directly from the
Manifesto, A Futurist Theater of Essential Brevity, by Marinetti,
Corra, Settimelli, Buzzi, Pratella et. al. (Nicolodi 1984: 74-75). These
songs, called ‘amiable freaks’ by Malipiero’s biographer, are filled
with ‘lively, squealing pungency’ and grotesqueries (Waterhouse
1999: 139-40).
Violetta e gli aeroplani was broadcast again on 29 September
1941, directed by Alberto Casella. Performing forces are listed for the
first time: Giunco: Gianfranco Bellini; Violetta: Ada Cannavo;
Plomplom: Cesare Barbetti; Merlo: Giorgio Piamonti; Gozzonero:
Pietro Tondi; Padre: Gianni Santuccio; Guardiano del faro: Gino
Mavara; Madre: Celeste Almieri Calza; Gruppo di bambini: folla di
bagnanti. It is unclear if the children’s voices were pre-recorded. A
preview article by Cesare Cavallotti, ‘Futurist Radio Drama’ (Il
radioteatro futurista), posited a relationship between the drama and
the Radio Manifesto, but was cautious in affirming that the work
exemplified Futurist poetic principles. Marinetti’s radio sintesi, ‘The
Silences Speak Among Themselves’ (I silenzi parlano tra di loro),
was printed in full as the exemplary Futurist radio work, with a note
that the work had never been broadcast. Cavallotti ended by
recommending Violetta as affective and capable of creating new
myths (Radio Corriere 29 Sept. 1931 [vol. 17, no. 36]: 7). Enrico
Rocca dismissed the drama as ‘superficial in all aspects’ (un lavoro in
tutti i sensi all’acqua di rose) (Rocca 1938: 244).
Added to this motley array of Futurist music and drama on radio in
the mid-1930s was Marinetti’s series of ten-minute monthly
broadcasts (Conversazioni), shared in 1936 with his wife Benedetta.
Each talk discussed some facet of Futurist activity,20 for example,
19
I have relied on RAI’s multimedia catalogue for these figures, and have not at the
time of this writing had the opportunity to corroborate them in the program guides.
20
I have read that the series was weekly but the documentation does not bear this out.
A letter from Alessandro Pavolini, Minister of Popular Culture, to Raoul Chiodelli,
Direttore Generale dell’EIAR (14 Dec. 1941) confirms the frequency of broadcasts:
256 Margaret Fisher
‘Heroism, the supreme Futurist will’ (Eroismo, suprema volontà

futurista), ‘African poets and novelists’ (Poeti e romanzieri
africanisti) and ‘Nature worship and the mechanical society’ (Il
Naturismo e la civiltà meccanica). These broadcasts, under the rubric
‘World Futurism’ (Futurismo mondiale), oiled the Futurist publicity
machine. In his talk, ‘Futurist Portraits of the Duce (Ritratti futuristi
del Duce: Conferenze alla Radio di F. T. Marinetti), the Futurist
leader discussed various portraits of Mussolini by Prampolini, Rosso,
Thayaht, Ambrosi, Balestrieri and Forlin, exhibited in the
Quadriennale in Rome, arguing that the popular success of these
works proved that realism in portrait painting was dead (Marinetti,
n.d., but 1935, 1939, or 1943, Getty Research Institute).
The Futurist heritage: La Radia
La Radia, written by Masnata and signed by both Masnata and

Marinetti, is the document that secures a patrimony for Marinetti and
Futurism in the story of radio. The opening statements offer a Futurist
allegiance to Fascism, a catalogue of the movement’s
accomplishments, and an attack on current radio art practices.
Regarding the latter, Masnata’s expansive knowledge of contemporary
French, Belgian and German avant-garde radio theorists and
dramatists seems uncanny, but can be explained by the foreign listings
in Italian radio’s programme guide, mentioned earlier. The preface to
the Manifesto reveals a movement reorganizing its priorities, as
outlined in Futurism’s Second National Congress (May 1933 at the
Galleria Pesaro in Milan) and a movement negotiating the changing
political climate between Italy and Germany. The Manifesto’s
‘[…] egli possa curare la rubrica ‘Futurismo mondiale’ con un trasmissione al mese
di liriche di guerra, di durata non superiore di dieci minute’ (ACS, Minculpop,
Gabinetto busta 53, fasc. 322 Marinetti). ‘Marinetti’ has 12 documented entries in
Radio Corriere in 1932; 7 in 1933; 18 in 1934 (the high point); 16 in 1935; 10 in
1936; 13 in 1937; 5 in 1938; 3 in 1939; 9 in 1940; 5 in 1941; 4 in 1942; and 2 in
1943. The periodicity of the broadcasts obviously changed over the course of the
mid-1930s. Some of the entries refer to articles or other broadcast activities.
Preceding the talk ‘Il Naturismo’ was a commemoration of the Futurists Sofronio
Pocarini and Albino Grosso (Marinetti 1977: documento, 13 Sept. 1934). On
Marinetti’s refusal to submit a text before broadcast or to read from a text, see
Berghaus 1996: 287-290.
proscriptive list of what radio must not be (theatre, cinema or books)

and a list of that which radio will abolish (theatrical space, time, unity
of action, theatrical personages and the passive, anti-progressive
audience) are followed by a 20-point prescription for what radio
should be. It is this last section that contains the Futurist legacy with
regard to all radio, not just Italian radio, in its promise of new sensory
experiences and spiritual transcendence. Masnata reported that the
Manifesto enjoyed ‘enormous success and widespread resonance’,
claiming it was noticed by World-Radio (London) and by Comœdia
(Paris), with a review by the French radio pioneer Paul Deharme
(Masnata n.d., but 1934 or later: 8-9).
Pino Masnata’s explanatory notes to La Radia, written several
years later, place the Manifesto under two contexts: 1) Radio was still
primary in the Futurist technological imagination well into the years
of television experimentation (briefly referred to in the prefatory
remarks). The radio set and the aeroplane were the century’s two
emblems, wrote Somenzi (Futurismo 11 Dec. 1932 [vol. 1, no. 14]: 2).
2) The poetic language describes an overriding desire to arrive at
spiritual conversion through radio waves – a variation on the ‘Miss
Radio’ theme.
In the section ‘Tapping into the Vibrations Emitted by Beings,
Dead or Alive’ (Captazioni di vibrazioni emesse da esseri viventi o
morti), Masnata cites Georges Lakhovsky’s theory, in L’origine de la
vie: La radiation et les êtres vivants (Paris: Nilsson, 1925) and other
works, that all living beings emit radiation, that the majority of living
beings are able to receive and transmit waves, and that every cell has
the potential to be an oscillating circuit capable of influencing life.
The culmination of these theories was a ‘new science’ that held its
First International Congress, La elettro-radio-biologia, in 1934 in
Venice, headed by Guglielmo Marconi. According to Masnata,
Marconi claimed that the human brain is far more sensitive a receiver
than any mechanical apparatus. Masnata then asks if mankind will in
the future become radio receivers without mechanical devices
(Masnata n.d.: 19-24). The next section, ‘Tapping into the Vibrations
Issuing from Matter’ (Captazione delle vibrazioni emesse dalla
material), reviews the molecular structure of cells and the polarity of
electrons, leading Masnata to propose that radio ‘tomorrow could tap
into the secret of the universe, the vibrant soul, the life of flowers or of
metals, the voice of God’ (Masnata n.d.: 26-27). In radio parlance, the
258 Margaret Fisher
radio receiver is always paired to ricevere and ricezione. The technical

terms captare and captazione are related to the performance,
measured as the selectivity and sensitivity of a receiving set and its
ability to ‘tap’ or ‘tune into’ something with discrimination:
‘Selectivity is that characteristic which makes it possible to determine
how well a set will tune out one signal and tune in another’ (Graham
1942: 4,497). A search for the words in a contemporary technical
dictionary, Dizionarietto radiofonico by Umberto Tucci, yielded no
entries. Combing through a wide sampling of technical columns in
Radiorario, I found the verb captare twice, and then it was used in
reference to changes occurring in the air, and not in the radio receiver
itself. This more nuanced translation supports Masnata’s esoteric
purpose. Elsewhere I have written that the language of the Manifesto
is informed by technological developments in audio registration on
film (sound film) and magnetic tape, processes where sound is
converted to light and image, and, with electricity, back to sound
again (Fisher 2002: 57-62). The discovery, circa 1926, that sound
could be carried by light waves provided a means to unite sound
waves with electrical waves. Masnata, having followed these kinds of
developments, imagined transposing the radiophonic changes and
sensations onto the human organism to arrive at an art without time,
and the destruction of time, which he clarified as being the conditions
needed to tap into voices of the past (Masnata n.d.: 29-30). The past!
A lengthy section, ‘Le parole in libertà’, deserves a chapter of its
own to explore the relationship to the technological imagination:
‘Words in freedom, ultimately, through the recitation of our lyrics at
the microphone, have demonstrated experimentally that which we
affirmed in the Manifesto’ (Masnata n.d.: 37). The conclusion
describes the moment the technological imagination came into full
flower,
When we wrote this manifesto, we were on Lago di Garda in the park
of a hospitable villa. Innumerable blue waves were swept to the foot
of Mt. Altissimo, smashing into the rocks on which we found
ourselves. We felt we were two active thermionic valves highly
sensitized to the waves coming from the infinite. We trust we snatched
from nature another of its many secrets of beauty and of art. (Masnata
n.d.: 51)
Illustr. 5: Eriberto Carboni - illustration for postwar Italian radio, RAI (1950) (RAI
Teche). The picture redraws, whether intentionally or not, the adventures of the two
protagonists of Marinetti’s Violetta e gli aeroplani. We see the seaside colony, and
two children flying atop a radio receiver. The dreams of air flight are portrayed as
synonymous with radio, as they were generally in Futurist drama. Only Marinetti has
been rubbed out in this palimpsest of early Italian radio.
Summary: From Adrianopoli to Bambinopoli
While it is arguable that the recitation of Futurist lyrics, the

performance of songs and the delivery of talks at the microphone were
practical tests for the theories expounded in the manifesto, La Radia, a
Futurist aesthetic and phraseology did enter the discourse of Italian
radio from its first year 1925. However, the style of speaking, the
airing of music by living composers and music of jazz bands, the
extreme emphasis on machines and technology did not derive from
Futurism, with a few exceptions. The children of Bambinopoli had far
260 Margaret Fisher
more access to radio technology than the Futurists. Arnaldo Mussolini

appears to have exploited Futurist terminology for his own purposes;
perhaps he also represented an extension of the Duce’s willingness to
maintain a viable cultural position for the Futurists, short of acceding
directly to their requests. The programme guide, an important part of
radio diffusion in Italy, was already predisposed for its own reasons to
cover almost all subjects related to machines. Futurism and Fascism
converged with the radio reportage of Italo Balbo’s trans-Atlantic
flight in 1933. One would have to conclude that the invitation to
Marinetti to speak on this occasion suggests that Italian radio
preferred the Futurist aesthetic, even if it wasn’t a regular practice. But
it was a different radiogenic convergence that survived World War II
and the Futurist promotion of war, violence, colonization and
destruction. The first imaginings of what noise could be – Russolo’s
noise-intoners and his theoretical writings on an art of noise – to the
later imaginings of the human embodiment of radio functions,
amounted to a sustained achievement, a kind of invention suspended
in time that continues to affect the way we think about sound and
sweeps up everything in its path as its own. La Radia was to be an art
made from the immaterial – vibration, radiation, amplification and
transfiguration – channelled through the critical and transcendent act
of captare. Masnata’s manuscript was not published but languishes
among Marinetti’s archived papers. Had he transgressed a threshold
for the occult that Marinetti could not brook?
The vision of an Italian radio service that propelled Ciano and
Chiodelli, and the Futurist concepts of radio promoted during the
1930s, both possess a relevance that goes beyond the Fascist period.
They anticipated by seventy years or more the intensity and detail of
daily internet and personal conversations we engage in today
regarding hardware, software and communications devices.
Radiorario portrayed all the radio technology of its time. The
Futurists imagined radio technology for all time.
Acknowledgement: Many people and institutions have helped me in

the researching and writing of this paper. I am grateful to the
American Academy in Rome for the opportunity to pursue this study
in Rome. I wish to thank Günter Berghaus, Luciano Chessa and
Marjorie Perloff, who read and commented on this essay; and Mauro
Canali, who kindly guided me through the cataloging system at the

Archivio Centrale dello Stato in 2003. Special thanks also to
Dottoressa Spotti and library staff associates Baldassari and Casini at
the Biblioteca Nazionale di Roma, the curators and staff in Rome at
the RAI Biblioteca Centrale, La Biblioteca della Storia Moderna, La
Discoteca di Stato, L’Archivio Centrale dello Stato at EUR, and in the
U.S. at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (New
Haven), and the Getty Research Institute (Santa Monica).
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––. 2003 (1930): Novelle colle labbra tinte: Simultaneità e programmi di vita con
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––. 2006. Critical Writings (ed. Günter Berghaus; trans. Doug Thompson). New
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From Words-in-Freedom to Electronic Literature:
Futurism and the Neo-Avantgarde
Matteo D’Ambrosio
Abstract: It is not uncommon to find that, in the history of art, avant-garde artists have
tried to obtain creative results which the technological developments at that moment
in time rendered unachievable, but which, in a later period, thanks to more
sophisticated devices, became entirely feasible. Also the Futurist avant-garde desired
to put into practice complex concepts using languages and media that at the time were
only in their infancy. F. T. Marinetti, in his manifestoes, promoted not only radically
innovative textual models and composition strategies, but also the creation of works
of art in media such as radio and television which, given the technological facilities at
his disposal, remained Utopian ideas. The manifesto La radia and two of his dramas
for the radiophonic theatre, Drama of Distances and Construction of a Moment of
Silence, anticipate our contemporary reflection on the Internet and the works of art
that are linked to information and communication technologies. In his literary reform
programme, Marinetti employed Words-in-Freedom and Free-Word Tables in order to
produce in his readers an experience not only of perceptive and cognitive
participation, but also of psychic and in some cases even physical involvement. This
predates various tendencies of the Neo-avantgarde which recovered, developed and
modified Marinetti’s concepts in its literary experiments with hypertextual fields and
its fusion of various media, languages and codes in postdramatic theatre. The most
radical realization of this Futurist concept can be found in electronic literature, the
reception of which requires a user / reader able to interpret messages without
decoding them completely, because interactive communication systems based on
hypermedia produce a type of literature that is not linear but rhizomatic and open-
ended. Recent studies on the reception of electronic works and media art suggest that
these unique and unrepeatable events ought to be analysed on a par with theatre
performances.
‘We have yet to understand the interplay between lyric poetry,

generally regarded as the most conservative, the most intransigent
of the ‘high’ arts, and the electronic media.’
Perloff 1991: xii.
264 Matteo D’Ambrosio
My starting point in this chapter is the theory of convergence put

forward by George P. Landow, who sketched out three lines of
development in Western civilization: 1. the achievements of the
scientific discoveries; 2. the meta-languages of literary theory and
criticism; 3. the experimentalism that has characterized the aesthetics
of the avant-garde. According to Landow, the Personal Computer is
not only a logical but also a rhetorical device that re-establishes and
disseminates literary models already utilized by the historical avant-
garde, from Futurism onwards. (Landow 1997) In this chapter, I shall
concern myself exclusively with the third of Landow’s lines of
development, and with the innovative devices that can be found in the
aesthetics of Futurism, as conveyed in the creative prose of
Marinetti’s manifestos and the works of art and literature produced by
the artists who formed part of that movement.
From text to hypertext: A Futurist trajectory
Many times, in the history of art, an artist, a movement or an artistic

trend have aimed at achieving creative results which, at the time, were
impossible to accomplish but which could come to fruition in a later
period, thanks to the availability of more sophisticated technical
devices. The rise of such creative phenomena was already recognized
in 1936 by Walter Benjamin, who wrote: ‘The history of every form
of art shows critical periods, in which a certain art form aspires to
effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical
standard, that is to say, in a new art form.’ (Benjamin 1955: ch. XIV)
When available models reach a point of crisis and advanced artistic
researches are continuously being revealed as inadequate and
restricted, the avant-garde is forced into a state of transition from a
textual mode of discourse to a hypertextual one.
Vilém Flusser suggested that the history of the arts can also be
segmented into periods according to the phenomenology of
communication instituted by different media. (Flusser 2004) The
media have always consequences on the organization of thought and
the world of imagination. These phases can be thus described:
1. indistinctness of the arts; community rituals in which the poetic

discourse fuses orality, music and dance;
From Words-in-Freedom to Electronic Literature 265
2. acknowledgement of the media-specific characteristics of each art;

increased differentiation and individualization of the single arts;
the shared aspects are overshadowed by the perception of their
differences;
3. ‘Total Work of Art’ aesthetics: various arts converge in an avant-
garde Gesamtkunstwerk; the unification of its constituent media is
obtained through a recovery of the theatrical qualities and
performative nature of each art concerned; the fusion of the arts
into a single theatrical whole;
4. confluence of the various arts into a hypertextual field; situation
of indistinction that corresponds to a theatrical spectacle, in which
all the expressive elements that were previously distinct are re-
united.
This final phase completes the cartography of the avant-gardes, at

least temporarily. Various avant-garde movements have attempted to
achieve, in theoretical domains that correspond to selected expressive
practices, a re-vitalization of the meta-historical horizon of the
Primary, or the Original. Such a palingenetic project establishes, in an
innovative, experimental fashion, new artistic institutions, making use
of and paying attention to recently acquired aesthetic parameters,
scientific progress and new technologies. Paul Virilio has singled out
in Futurist aeropoetry ‘a new fusion / confusion of perception and
object, which anticipates the videographic and infographic
performances of the analogical simulation’. (Virilio 1989: 67)
The historiography and criticism of the artistic and literary avant-
gardes seems strewn with proto-hypertextual exercises. Futurism has
been singled out by many critics for having provided substantial
anticipations of the hypertextual field; however, other scholars, more
interested in the examples of trans-linguistic and post-verbal research,
tended to ignore Futurism. George Landow, for example, highlighted
the tradition of advanced literary experimentalism (Joyce, Borges,
Queneau, Calvino, Saporta etc.) for the development of hypertextual
fields without mentioning Marinetti at all (Landow 1997). This,
however, ignores that various tendencies of the Neo-avantgarde have
been protagonists in a process of continuity and development. In a
paper dedicated to digital rhetoric, Richard A. Lanham rightly pointed
out that ‘the aesthetics of computer display were worked out [...] long
before the dominance of the computer itself.’1 (Lanham 1992: 221) In

order to demonstrate his hypothesis, he establishes a line of ‘prophetic
pre-electronic instance[s]’ (Lanham 1992: 225) that runs from
Marinetti’s Free-Word-Table, Le soir, couchée dans son lit, elle
relisait la lettre de son artilleur au front (see ill. 1), to Kenneth
Burke’s Flowerishes, a poetic visual text belonging to the typology of
Concrete Poetry and thus to the Neo-avantgarde of the second half of
the twentieth century (see ill. 2). Johanna Drucker has reminded us of
Marinetti’s ‘nearly proto-electronic and cybernetic’ sensibility
(Drucker 1994: 109), and Agnese rightly pointed out that his literary
reform was the result of his interest in telegraphy, radio and television,
which in turn was a consequence of the new technology of electricity.
(Agnese 2001) Much of what Marinetti did in his transformation of
syntax moved toward the effects of a
condensed telegraphic language
called immaginazione senza fili,
literally ‘a wireless imagination’,
defined as ‘the absolute freedom of
images or analogies, expressed by
means of Words-in-Freedom,
unencumbered by syntactical
conductors or by punctuation.’
(Marinetti 1913a: 124)2
Illustr. 1: F.T. Marinetti’s Free-Word-

Table, Le soir, couchée dans son lit, elle
relisait la lettre de son artilleur au front,
from Les Mots en liberté futuristes
(1919).
1
The author also quotes the well-known passage of La cinematografia futurista, in
which Marinetti prophesizes the overcoming of the book, ‘always tedious and
oppressive’ (Marinetti 1916: 260). The leader of the Futurist movement returned to
the same subject in the manifesto La radia: ‘The book […] is to be blamed for
having made mankind shortsighted, implies something heavy, strangled,
suffocating, fossilized, and stodgy’. (Marinetti 1933: 412)
2
See Lennon 2000: 70. A diverging view is expressed by Christiane Paul, curator of
New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of New York, who prefers to ignore
Futurism and to emphasize the influence of Dada, Fluxus and Conceptual Art.
(Paul 2003)
Illustr. 2: Kenneth Burke Flowerishes. From Collected Poems, 1915-1967,

University of California Press, 1968.
Yevgeny Kovtun tried to underline the pronounced differences

between Words-in-Freedom and the zaum language of Russian
Futurists:
Words-in-Freedom are a simplified technique of linguistic

communication (the ‘telegraph style’) and do not touch upon the logic
and foundations of human thinking. This principle of linguistic
economy has anticipated the theory of semiotic systems. In the best of
all cases, it may lead to (and it has already led to) the computer
(Kovtun 1982: 238).
The Italian Futurists manifested a strong desire to make use of and

to promote all expressive modes that had arisen under the influence of
the mass media, using languages, codes and textual devices that had
not been available in the previous century. For instance, the strategies
employed in painting to achieve the two-dimensional simulation of the
third dimension were so new and astounding that the painters
considered themselves to be ‘the Primitives of a new, entirely
transformed sensibility’ (Boccioni et al. 1910: 29; Boccioni et al.
1912: 49; Boccioni 1914: 176). Marinetti anticipated many times the
artistic use of the television medium. For example, in his manifesto, Il
teatro aereo radiotelevisivo (A Futurist Theater of the Skies Enhanced
by Radio and Television), he mentioned ‘screens for television […]
hung from special airplanes’ (Marinetti 1932: 408).3 And the poet
Escodamè declared: ‘We look forward to seeing our poems being
written across the blue pages of the sky with the smoking tails of
aeroplanes’. (Escodamè 1933) In the manifesto, La radia (The Radio),
signed together with Pino Masnata, Marinetti proclaimed
enthusiastically: ‘We already have television at a resolution of 50,000
dots for every large image on a big screen’ (Marinetti 1933: 411)4.
The French critic Clarisse Bardiot reflected on the role of this
manifesto in media history:
This manifesto is to be considered a precursor of our contemporary

reflection on the Internet and the works of art that are linked to
information and communication technologies and is thus mentioned
regularly in studies on the history of New Media, of telepresence and
Net-Art.
Besides, the first long-distance performance in the history of

theatre was probably carried out by Marinetti when, on 17 May 1914,
he intervened by telephone, from London, in a Futurist soirée taking
place at the Sprovieri Gallery in Rome. (Lista 2003: 6; Berghaus
2007: 108; Berghaus 2008: 134)
3
The first four points of this manifesto can be considered to be a pre-figuration of
Videoart. See Malsch 1990. Other Futurist reflected on the use of radio broadcasts
in the public sphere; e.g. the authors of the Futurist Manifesto for the Musical City
imagined urban centres to be ‘endowed with powerful radio amplifiers placed at
the entrances and exits of the main streets’ (Manca et al. 1933).
4
Another translation of the manifesto can be found in Kahn 1992: 265-268.
Illustr. 3: Poster for a Futurist event at the Sprovieri Gallery in Naples, 17 May 1914,
announcing that ‘Marinetti will telephone from London to the audience assembled at
the exhibition his new Words-in-Freedom’.
Futurist radio drama
La Radia predicts the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial

world, from a machine age to an electronic age,5 and moves into a
5
In 1944, Enrico Prampolini wrote: ‘The mechanical civilization […] has fulfilled its
ethical and historical task; a new civilization is in the making – the scientific
civilization – which, for a long time, we, as innovative artists, have been waiting
for’ (Prampolini 1944: 14). See also Notte 1996.
realm of global information that has since come true. (Lander 1994:
16) A close reading of La Radia reveals this manifesto to be one of
Marinetti’s most forward-looking publications. At a time, when the
traditional notions of time and space had entered into a phase of crisis,
he anticipated a world-wide-web of information and tele-
communication. His five dramas for the radiophonic theatre, Un
paesaggio udito (A Landscape Heard), Dramma di distanze (Drama of
Distances), I silenzi parlano fra di loro (Silences Speak among
Themselves), Battaglia di ritmi (Battle of Rhythms), La costruzione di
un silenzio (The Construction of a Moment of Silence), published
twice in the year 1941 (Marinetti 1941a;6 Marinetti 1941b7),
anticipated many experiments of the post-war avant-garde, such as
musique concrète (see Concannon 1990: 3), a worldwide net of live
radio lines with its ability to be in many places simultaneously, and
various other aspects of contemporary Media Art. Marinetti’s radio
theory and praxis can be seen to anticipate the global information
society which by now has actually become a reality.
These Cinque Sintesi dal Teatro Radiofonico demonstrate an

understanding of the medium that goes much further than its definition
as a distribution medium of phonetic poetry or compositions,
including noise. […] Marinetti underlines the character of sounds
and/or recorded information material, a strategy that continues - even
after all these years - to play an important role in media art, especially
now with the advent of digital equipment such as the sampler. […] In
other words, Marinetti works with the specific characteristics of the
radio medium, its lines and channels, its mix of live and recorded
material [that] can be seen from today's standpoint as referring to
newer communication technologies such as electronic mail and
conferencing systems. (Grundmann 1994: 278 -279)
6
The five dramas are preceded by the article of Armando Zamboni, ‘Il teatro futurista
radiofonico’ and by the Manifesto of the Radia.
7
Presented as Cinque sintesi radiofoniche on the first LP of the anthology Musica
futurista (1980. Lombardi, Daniele (ed.). 1980. Milano: Cramps records; later re-
issued on CD: CRSCD 046), where they are dated 1930 by Luigi Rognoni in the
introduction, and 1933 in the index. The same performance was also issued on the
CD no. 4 of Futurismo: Antologia di rumori futuri (Lombardi, Daniele and
Antonio Latanza [eds.], Fonoteca: FT020201; entitled Cinque Sintesi per il Teatro
Radiofonico; this time the five syntheses are dated 1931 at p. 53 of the presentation
booklet). Kevin Concannon writes: ‘Marinetti wrote five scores for radio syntheses
that same year [1933] although they were not published until 1938’ (Concannon
1990: 5), but he does not provide any further proof on that.
Drama of Distances The Building of a Moment

of Silence
11 seconds of a military
march in Rome 1. Build a left wall with a
11 seconds of a tango drum roll (half a minute)
danced in Santos 2. Build a right wall with a
11 seconds of a Japanese tooting – voices –
religious music played in screeches of metropolis
Tokyo street cars and vehicles
11 seconds of a lively (half a minute)
country dance from the 3. Build a floor with a
province of Varese gurgling of water in
11 seconds of a boxing pipes (half a minute)
match in New York 4. Build a ceiling terrace
11 seconds of street noises with chirp chirp chirp
in Milan srschirp of sparrows and
11 seconds of a Neapolitan swallows (20 seconds)
song sung in the
Copacabana Hotel in Rio
de Janeiro
Two ‘scores’, Drama of Distances8 and The Building of a Silence,

are anticipating some of the most radical works of John Cage9,
especially in its use of silence, which became a subject for many
postmodern artists. Drama of Distances foresees the hearing, in a fast
sequence, of short sound emissions, coming from events that are
taking place in seven cities (Rome, Santos, Tokio, Varese, New York,
Milan, Rio de Janeiro). Marinetti, who had been among the first
Italian authors to produce plays for the radio (see Margaret Fisher’s
8
Kahn 1992: 22-23 invites us to compare this radio drama to a short story by
Guillaume Apollinaire, Le Roi Lune (The Moon King), published in 1916.
9
One of Cage’s best known pieces, 4'33, consists of four minutes and thirty-three
seconds of silence. In 1964, Maurizio Calvesi already wrote about the Futurists
that ‘in modo […] vistoso e sconcertante anticipano le tecniche attuali intorno a
Cage’ (Calvesi 1971: 178-179).
contribution to this volume), had a profound understanding of this

technology’s ability to traverse the globe and to interconnect
dislocated sites in a simultaneous manner.
The Building of a Silence operates with the notion of a physical
environment, a room whose walls, floor and ceiling are made of
sounds. The sculptural, three dimensional quality of this piece would
have been rather ineffective in 1941, given the fact that stereo
separation did not yet exist in either recording or broadcast media. A
truly successful realization of the score would really require
quadrophonic sound (Concannon 1990: 6). As Heidi Grundmann has
written, Marinetti
constructs a terrace open on two sides using recorded sounds, he

displays a very sculptural concern with sound and radio. It is this
sculptural concern that makes it possible for artists today to conceive
of their work with new technologies as art in the electronic or digital
space (Grundmann 1994: 278).
The sonorities alluded to in these syntheses belong to the ‘families

of noises’ indicated in the manifesto by Luigi Russolo, L’arte dei
rumori (Russolo 1913: 86), or they may coherently integrate them. In
the textual model of his Words-in-Freedom it was represented as a
white space, of varying length (Marinetti 1912: 116); in his theatre
sintesi he resorted to interruptions and sudden contrasts as, for
example, in the ‘abstract synthesis’ Lotta di fondali (Battle of Back-
drops), in which the clamour of a revolutionary mob is interrupted by
one minute of complete silence. (Marinetti 1924a: 4)
The Futurist Words-in-Freedom and Free-Word Tables
In the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, Marinetti declared:

‘After Free Verse, here at last we have Words-in-Freedom.’ (Marinetti
2006: 113) This new poetic device was a key element of the Futurist
typographic revolution:
My revolution is directed against the so-called typographical harmony
of the page, which contradicts the ebb and flow, the leaps and bounds
of style that surge over the page. We shall therefore use three or four
different colors of ink on a single page, and should we think it
necessary, as many as twenty different typographical characters. For
example: italic for a series of like or swift sensations, bold Roman

characters for violent onomatopoeias, and so on. With this
typographical revolution and this multicolored variety of characters,
my purpose is to double the expressive power of words. (Marinetti
1913a: 128)
Words-in-Freedom (parole in libertà) were intended to ‘break

through the boundaries of literature, striding away toward painting,
music, and the art of noise, constructing a marvellous bridge between
the word and the real object.’ (Marinetti et al. 1916: 262). The Futurist
poets recited their Words-in-Freedom with a particular musical and
acoustic quality and combined them with sound accompaniment, thus
deforming the materials of verbal language in order to express their
ideas better. They invented new words and verbalized their deepest
emotions in a highly abstract manner. Futurist Words-in-Freedom
were really scores for sonorous performances and could only be fully
effective when being declaimed on stage. (Kahn 1992: 7-8) When
printed, they possessed a free-expressive quality (see ill. 4). For
example, in Zang Tumb Tuum, ideas are expressed through lines and
colours, distorted print-types, geometric figures, arithmetic formulae,
mathematical signs, etc. Thus, the Words-in-Freedom become Free-
Word Tables and mural poems, that is, real images to look at, instead
of being read in a linear fashion (see Belloli 1944, and Lista 1984:
43). They anticipated Visual Poetry (Bootz 1995: 234)10 and Electro-
Acoustic Literature, which Nicholas Zurbrugg considered a genre of
the postmodern avant-garde: ‘Obvious parallels exist between Cage’s
theories11 and the manifestos of avant-garde European modernists
such as the Futurist Marinetti, who likewise envisaged the advantages
of “man multiplied by the machine”’. (Zurbrugg 1993: 13)
10
However, Eric Vos emphasizes that ‘the poetic text itself is already there; it is
presented to the reader in a fixed, final format’ (Vos 1996: 218).
11
In one of his articles, John Cage quoted the Russolo’s ‘art of noise’ as one of the
forgotten experiences of twentieth-century music. (Cage 1946) Cage’s collages of
interferences among radio stations can be considered a reference to the manifesto,
La Radia, where we can read: ‘Utilization of the interferences between stations and
of the intensification and fading of sounds’ (Marinetti 1933: 414). In an interview
given to Richard Kostelanetz, Cage has compared his use of the radio as a musical
instrument to the tradition of ‘rumorismo’, ‘a tendency that has crossed the whole
XX century, from the Futurists onwards’. (Cage 1996: 227)
Illustr. 4: F.T: Marinetti, Futurist March. A typical example of Words-in-Freedom ,

first performed at the Sprovieri Gallery in Rome by Marinetti, Cangiullo and Balla
and published in Vela Latina vol. 4 no. 4 (5 February 1916), p. 14.
The ‘reception, amplification, and transformation of vibrations

emitted by matter’, invoked in the manifesto La radia (Marinetti and
Masnata 1933: 413), can be found again in Henri Chopin’s audio-
poésie, which made ‘the mimetic sound of man’ the basis of poetry
(Chopin 1980), as he himself demonstrated in his most famous works,
Le Corps. (Chopin 1966) In his Futurist Theater of Essential Brevity,
published in 1915, Marinetti invites us to become aware of the fact
that ‘reality pulsates around us and assails us with barrages of
unrelated facts that fall into place, each one locked into the next, fused
together, knotted together, utterly chaotic’ (Marinetti 1915: 203). The
same idea is expressed in the sound poetry of Bernard Heidsieck, who
combines in his creations overlapping fragments of verbal and non-
verbal sounds (see Bobillot 1996).
The amplification of microscopic audio phenomena has been realized

more recently […] Modern microphones and electronics allow the
amplification of the faintest sounds, normally not heard by the human

ear […] today such extreme amplification can be accomplished, in
1933 it would have been quite impossible. (Concannon 1990: 4)
In recent studies of comparative literature, the term ‘ekphrasis’ is

regularly used to characterize the relationships between words and
images.12 This ekphrastic impulse distinguishes all textual models in
which verbal language manifests its semiotic desire to represent that
which is not representable, the Natural, to create that illusion which is
generally associated with the natural sign. (Krieger 1991)
A printed text constitutes a huge simplifying action. […] When the

rich vocal and gestural language of oral rhetoric was constricted into
writing and then print, the whole effort to preserve it was concentrated
into something usually called ekphrasis, dynamic speaking pictures in
words. […] Ekphrasis is once again coming into its own, and the
pictures and sounds suppressed into verbal rhetorical figures are now
reassuming their native places in the human sensorium. The complex
icon/word interaction of oral rhetoric is returning. (Lanham 1992:
224-225)
With the advent of radio, the communicative capacities of the

printed page – a fixed, static, linear, canonical object – was reduced in
significance. Thus, in the 1930s, the Futurist artist found an ally with
whom to accelerate the demise of ‘bookish’ literature. Marinetti had
initiated this process with his Words-in-Freedom, which enhanced the
perceptive aspects of the linguistic sign and transformed poetic
writing through its recourse to non-linear, multidimensional sign
models.
Words-in-Freedom may also be considered a reference point for
experimental cinema, because ‘many recent avant-garde films could
be described quite accurately as ‘cinematic parole in libertà’ (Kirby
1971: 141) The Futurists found in the Words-in-Freedom and, above
all, in the Free-Word Tables, textual models that expressed meta-
linguistically their desire to discover new tools of expression for new
12
Ekphrasis is a verbal description of a visual work of art, or more specifically, a
rhetorical device used when one medium of art is used to relate to another medium.
A piece of prose or poetry may thus highlight the special quality of a work in the
visual arts, or vice versa, a painting may be ‘telling’ a story that is well known
through literature and thereby enhance the artistic impact of the original narrative
through its imitative quality.
artistic concerns. For example, Zang Tumb Tuum can be considered a

hypotyposis,13 which Eco explains as ‘a heightened description of
events entrusted to devices which stimulate the addressee to construct
visual representations’. (Eco 2002) The reader who has not
experienced the Balkan war, is requested by the text to imagine the
battles evoked in the text. This focalization enriches to the perceiver’s
mental activity in a manner that is different from a text-reader
relationship in conventional literature.
A Free-Word Table (tavola parolibera) is a graphic poem that
formed a centre piece of Marinetti’s literary reform as theorized in the
Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature. (Marinetti 1912: 107-119)
After Zang Tumb Tuum (1914), Marinetti focussed his attention on
Free-Word Tables. Initially, we find the object quality of the text
enhanced; words are not used for their semantic or referential
function, but for their communicative and expressive possibilities in a
visual key; the writing is no longer subordinate to the communicative
and expressive functions of language, but tendentially autonomous of
their denotational responsibility.
The Free-Word Table is a physical, hyper-realistic and
semantographic space, a system of notation and an appropriation of
symbols and of mathematical formulae that guarantee pictorial variety
and visual quality. It enables an interaction between artistic sensation
produced by the readers / viewers’ sensitivity, their bodies and the
situation in which they find themselves. Furthermore, it enables a
fusion of 1. a typography which dissociates itself from the alphabet, 2.
various signs and scriptures, 3. space-time simultaneities, 4. visualized
sounds, and 5. signs of transcription of the movement.
The Free-Word Table is the pre-text for a cognitive and emotional
operation that only takes its final shape through an act of personal
involvement of the user / reader (Ballerini 1975: 71), who participates
in a series of mental actions while viewing and taking in the image.
Instead of merely acknowledging the results of an action undertaken
by the artist, the work, prearranged by the author and searched for by
the user / reader, is entrusted to a cooperative effort coming from the
13
Hypotypoein, Greek for ‘to sketch out’, ‘to impress’, ‘to copy a pattern’ (typos =
‘impression, form’), refers to a rhetorical device that uses colourful descriptions or
word-pictures to evoke scenes or events and to give a lively portrayal of an action
or person.
Illustr. 5 and 6: Two typical examples of a Free-Word Table: Giacomo Balla, Trelsì
trelno, from L’Italia futurista, vol. 2, no. 2 (25 February 1917), p. 1; and Ardengo
Soffici, Tipografia, from BÏF§ZF+18 simultaneità e chimismi lirici, Firenze:
Vallecchi, 1915.
latter. The multiplicity of the signification processes and of the

deciphering strategies from the user / reader sets into motion a series
of actualizations that are different with each person confronting the
Table. That process of transforming writing into a ‘gestural method of
an “active” recording of a phenomenology includes either bodily
manifestations or psychic events or [...] material facts.’ (Viazzi 1978:
9)
Marinetti did not consider language to be a reality that simply
speaks about matter, but a specific aspect of reality made concrete in
the gesture of writing. In fact, writing possesses a material reality of
its own, which Marinetti sought to privilege so as to express creatively
the material essence of reality as a whole. Marinetti began this process
in two war poems published in Les Mots en liberté futuristes (1919).
(Caruso and Martini 1977: I.54-55) Critics have generally considered
this book to be ‘the ideological and creative apex of Marinetti literary
researches’ (Diacono 1975: vol. 2: 11), and a claim to a position of
leadership in the international avant-garde.
Illustr. 7: F.T. Marinetti, Après la Marne, Joffre visita le front en auto. From Les Mots
en liberté futuristes (1919).
The first table, Après la Marne, Joffre visita le front en auto, of

1915 (see ill. 7), looks like a stratified surface. The complex
phenomenology of the linguistic matter is instituted by a repertory of
radical procedures. If we consider which textual phenomena survive at
the abrogation of (chrono)syntax, we find that some isolated lexemes,
phonetic lettrisms, onomatopoeic or graphematic morphemes have
been randomly matched; furthermore, there are verbal echoes,
mathematical signs and numbers, handwritten and gestural marks,
reiterations of vowels that act as tonal intensificators, various
operations of simultaneous and calligrammatic mimeticism. Also the
metatextual indication of a dynamic verbalization is present. In the
second table, Le Soir, couchée dans son lit, elle relisait la lettre de son
artilleur au front, of 1918 (see ill. 1), not only the compositional
abstractness is enhanced, but also the strictly functional value of the
materials, their typological diversification and the importance of
spatial distribution on the page. An explosion which occurred in the
war (a ‘modern spectacle’, according to Marinetti) is not only the
main theme, but also upsets the composition of the traditional page. It
symbolizes an attack on the typographical conventions, forces their
deconstruction and fragments its perceptive and plastic materiality
(Bartram 2005).
Just like Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio (Dynamism of a Dog
on a Leash), Giacomo Balla’s well-known painting of the running dog
with dozens of paws (1912), the Free-Word Tables reduce words to a
state of stasis, or what Joseph Frank called ‘still movement’ (Frank
1945, passim); but the expressive strategies used by the poet simulate
the movement, the many-layered depth, the multi-linearism and the
simultaneity of the concepts represented. In such a way, Marinetti
reaches beyond and trespasses the boundaries of the text. The
expressive field called ‘poetry’ is projected beyond the book and the
toil of reading when
1. writing is extended beyond the verbal linguistic system;

2. signs attain an identity as objects, and its elements are used not
for their semantic or referential purpose, but for their
expressive and communicative possibilities, in a visual and
formal key;
3. writing is constituted as a gesture or an action, and the
procedures deployed demonstrate their singularity.
All of this becomes possible by privileging the perceptive aspects

of the linguistic sign, and by transforming poetic writing into a critical
practice, relying upon procedures able to redefine its linear model as a
multidimensional sign process. The contrast to traditional poetry is
remarkable. Marinetti substitutes the linear process of speech with one
of multidimensional perception. The Free-Word Tables are thus an
anticipation of the fate of writing in a post-industrial age.
Performing in the theatre of an electronic text
The development of Futurist aesthetics entailed theorizations and

experiments which redefined the role and the pragmatics of the reader
or viewer allowing them an unprecedented opportunity to be
protagonists of an artistic event, and collaborators with a high degree
of responsibility for the realization of a work of art. This activation of
the viewer / reader was non only the rationale behind the iconization
of verbality in the most sophisticated Words-in-Freedom and Free-
Word Tables, but also in the Futurist serate and the performances of
the Futurist theatre of Variety and Essential Brevity. The whole
artistic endeavour was characterized by participation, involvement,
sharing, and by an avoidance of devices that would favour static,
sequential, linear or hierarchical procedures. Futurist poetry was an art
that tore down barriers, cultivated never-ending transformations and
trusted in a growing complexity of artistic reception processes. It
favoured sensation over intellectual reflection, was open to ‘aesthetic’
evaluation and aspired to nothing less than an anthropological
mutation of the human species, one that radically transforms the
personal identity and psychological constitution of human beings,
their relationships with the environment and with their own bodies.
If it is true that, over time, the individual arts have assumed
systemic specifications that removed them from the universe of
wholeness which had characterized the ritual origins of art, then we
must acknowledge the strategies of the avant-gardes that aimed at
their re-unification. Before the convergence of the arts in a
hypertextual field had taken place, the historical avant-gardes (e.g.
Futurism in their serate, or Dada in their cabaret performances)
already converged towards the mother of all the arts, i.e. the theatre.
This aim was largely achieved through a reclaiming of the
performative means of the theatre, as this composite art fuses in an

ideal union all the expressive arts that otherwise exist in splendid
isolation. Roland Barthes defined theatre as an informational
polyphony, characterized by a remarkable density of dynamic signs
that come from various categories and are made up of numerous
intersections of codes. (Barthes 1972: 262) The complexity of
semiosis in the theatre has spawned a specialist critical literature, in
which the non-repeatability of the mise en scène and the plurality of
codes used in the construction of the performance text have been
examined on various structural levels.14 The theatre, from a semiotic
point of view, is Art par excellence, the art of interaction of various
media, languages and codes, able to produce in the audience an
experience not only of perceptive and cognitive participation, but also
of psychic and in some cases even physical involvement. The
interaction of the different media that constitute the sensual experience
of the theatre is full of synergies and processes that make each
performance a text that is always in the process of Becoming (‘un
texte en train de se réaliser’, as Jean Paul Balpe writes (Balpe 1991:
20).15
Electronic literature has realized some of the aspirations of the
historical avant-garde. Recent studies on the reception of electronic
works and Media art propose a comparison with the theatre as this is
also always a unique and unrepeatable event. The reception modes of
electronic poetry require a user / reader to interpret messages without
decoding them completely, because their properties are those of an
unceasing process of modification.
Brenda Laurel, author of the study, Computer as Theatre, suggests
that we should use the interactive properties of the performance
medium as a model for the process of reception in electronic arts,
because they work almost in the same way: in both cases, the
spectator participates in an event unfolding in a multidimensional
14
Keir Elam has proposed a taxonomy of 29 codes (Elam: 1980: 49-87), and Martin
Esslin: 1987 a system of codes addable in five groups.
15
Three examples of small electronic texts, where the arrangement works according
to the user / reader behavior: Ponto, by Alckmar Luiz dos Santos and Gilbertto
Prado (1997), on line at: http://www.cce.ufsc.br/~nupill/poemas.html; Frame
Work. A Hypertext Poem by Robert Kendall (1999), on line at:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tuweb/hypermedia/robert_kendall; Catch
Dropping Words (date and author unknown), on line at: http:// bookchin. net/
intruder/french/html/b_worddrop.html.
universe. (Laurel 1991) There is an analogical relationship between

the interactions of a spectator with a stage event, on the one hand, and
of a computer user with a software programme, on the other. It is no
coincidence that Eric Vos uses the expression ‘choreographic
playground’ (Vos 1996: 229) to characterize the trans-linguistic
phenomena that converge towards the interactivity of ‘new media
poetry’. Similarly, Michael Joyce writes, with regard to the material
representation in an immaterial medium: ‘This is theater as much as
virtuality […] Theatre, virtuality and interactivity enact nothing less
than reading embodied’ (Joyce 1995: 234)
Conclusion
The Futurist avant-garde has imaged devices that are impossible to

realize, thus expressing a desire to carry our advanced artistic research
using tools which, effectively, only became available in the second
half of the twentieth century. The Futurist manifestos have anticipated
hypertextuality, and the Free-Word Tables have acted as rudimental
devices for an aesthetics of interactive participation. The reader of
such poetry, like the spectator in a Futurist serata, is an activated
addressee of a work of art that demands involvement and thus
achieves transformation of the user / reader. The most radical
realization of this Futurist concept can be found in electronic poetry
and the personal computer’s enfranchisement of its user community.
(Lanham 1989: 279)
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Tabula rasa or Hybridity?
Primitivism and the Vernacular in Futurist and
Rationalist Architecture
Abstract: A number of Futurist and Rationalist architects appropriated the ‘primitive’

vernacular tradition of Italy’s peasantry to forge a new synthesis between the organic
and the machine-age aesthetic while engaging competing notions of ‘Italian-ness’ that
surfaced during Italy’s Fascist dictatorship (1922-1943). This chapter discusses the
contributions of artists and architects such as Fortunato Depero, Adalberto Libera,
Enrico Prampolini, and Virgilio Marchi. These individuals (and others) engaged with
the visual and spatial variety of the natural and built environment of the ‘remote’
island of Capri (as well as other sites around the Mediterranean basin). I shall examine
how and why the work (painting and architectural design) that resulted from this
dialogue valorized tradition while rejecting eclecticism of nineteenth-century
historicism. For these Futurists and Rationalists, searching for the primitive (e.g., a
return to origins) did not imply ignoring history, but meant idealizing history. The
vernacular was viewed as uncorrupted by ‘civilization’ and outside the flux of history
because it had not entered the official (and hence academic) discourse of architectural
history. Furthermore, this chapter will explore how and why the construction of the
‘technological imagination’ of Futurists (as well as Rationalists) drew upon pre-
industrial buildings and objects as well as cues from modern-day industrialization to
forge an Italian modernity between tabula rasa and hybridity.
Rome is the modern world, the West;

Capri, the ancient world, nature before civilization and its neuroses.
Godard 1972: 200
Our art will probably be accused of tormented and decadent

cerebralism. But we shall merely answer that we are, on the contrary,
the primitives of a new sensitiveness, multiplied hundredfold,
and that our art is intoxicated with spontaneity and power.
Boccioni et al 1910: 29
Discourses on the ‘primitive’ and the vernacular played key roles in

shaping Futurism and Rationalism in Italy from the 1920s until the
1940s. By looking to the pre-industrial environment of Capri – Jean-
Luc Godard’s ‘nature before civilization and its neuroses’ – and other
places around the Mediterranean basin for inspiration, Futurists and
Rationalists aligned themselves with the avant-garde rejection of
288 Michelangelo Sabatino
historical eclecticism while engaging competing notions of ‘Italian-

ness’ that surfaced during Italy’s Fascist dictatorship. (Crispolti 1996,
Vergine 2003, Fogu 2008) Despite the rhetoric of tabula rasa that
gained momentum among Futurists with the publication of the 1909
Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism, Capri, with its vernacular
landscape built with rudimentary masonry techniques provided Fascist
artists and architects working under considerably different political
conditions with a way of re-inventing ‘origins’ and engaging a
‘timeless’ building tradition that rejected stylistic historicism (e.g.,
neo-Medievalism, neo-Renaissance, Stile Umbertino). The Casa
Malaparte, completed on Capri’s punta Masullo in 1942, was designed
collaboratively by writer Curzio Malaparte, Rationalist architect
Adalberto Libera, and master builder Adolfo Amitrano. (Talamona
1992) (ill. 1) With its combination of machine-age nautical references
(a rooftop veil, a blunt bow and graduated stern) and indigenous stone
masonry techniques, the Casa Malaparte exemplifies how Futurists
and Rationalists drew from Capri’s environment to construct a new
hybrid Italian modernity that combined future with past. Although
Capri’s natural and built landscape shared little with the verticality of
Sant’Elia’s ‘New City’ (1914), its insularity from ‘civilization’ fuelled
the creative impulses of ‘the primitives of a new sensitiveness’. For
Futurists and Rationalists alike, the primitive meant a return to origins.
While Futurists condemned Classicism, Rationalists sought to engage
creatively with both the classical and vernacular traditions. (Ciucci
1987)
In most narratives of twentieth-century modernism, Futurism (but
not Rationalism) is credited with jumpstarting discussions of modern
architecture and city planning in Italy. (Zevi 1950, Benevolo 1971,
Tafuri & Dal Co 1979, Frampton 1980, Curtis 1982) Shortly after they
were completed, the drawings of Antonio Sant’Elia’s Futurist ‘New
City’ as well as the rooftop track of the Fiat Lingotto plant by
Giacomo Mattè-Trucco in Turin (1915–39) (ill. 2) were featured
prominently in avant-garde magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. Theo
van Doesburg published articles on Sant’Elia in the journal Het
Bouwbedrijf and the Lingotto was featured on the front page of G:
Material zur elementaren Gestaltung. (van Doesburg 1990) Le
Corbusier used three consecutive images of the Lingotto to illustrate
the last pages of his Vers une architecture (Toward an Architecture,
1923). (ill. 3) In an essay on contemporary Italian architecture
Primitivism in Futurist and Rationalist Architecture 289
Illustr. 1: Adalberto Libera (et al), Casa Malaparte, Capri, 1938-42 (photo Gianni
Pettena).
published in 1931, the Swiss art and architecture critic Sigfried

Giedion identified Futurism with the origins of Italian modernism and
assembled a visual analogy between Guarino Guarini’s San Lorenzo
cupola in Turin and an Alfa Romeo radial aircraft engine of 1930 to
prove it. (Giedion 1931) Giedion used collage to suggest, as Le
Corbusier had with the Parthenon in his 1923 manifesto, that the
ingenuity of the past was being replaced by modern-day engineering.
(ill. 4)
In recent years, although scholars in Italy (and abroad) have
dedicated considerable efforts to studying Futurist architecture and its
affiliation with political ideology and utopianism (but focusing
primarily upon Antonio Sant’Elia), Rationalism has also continued to
generate sustained interest. (Godoli 1986, Caramel 1988, Boyd White
2000) For Futurists and Rationalists focussing their attention on
‘Italian-ness’, the primitive vernacular helped to temper the
‘objective’ machine with poetry and lyricism. From the late 1920s
onwards, architects in Italy used the term Rationalism to describe a
movement in modern architecture that valued functional and technical
requirements as well as spiritual qualities derived from cultural

tradition and identity. Although the Rationalists appreciated the
utopian impulse sustaining Sant’Elia’s ‘New City,’ they all agreed on
the need to move beyond the contestation phase of Futurism (hence
the publication Dopo Sant’Elia; see Argan et al. 1935). On the basis of
Sant’Elia’s Manifesto of Architecture (1914), Futurist architecture was
understood to be ‘the architecture of calculation, of audacious temerity
and of simplicity; the architecture of reinforced concrete, of steel,
glass, cardboard, textile fibre, and of all those substitutes for wood,
stone and brick that enable us to obtain maximum elasticity and
lightness.’ (Sant’Elia 1914: 171)
Between 1928, when the first exhibition of Rationalist architecture
was organized by the Movimento Italiano per l'Architettura Razionale
(MIAR), and 1931, the year of the second and final exhibition that
prompted Rationalism's demise, debates raged over the agenda and
validity of the movement with respect to the Fascist political agenda.
After repeated attempts of entering into a dialogue with the gerarchi
(the Fascist leadership), the more progressive Rationalists like
Adalberto Libera and several others found themselves at odds with the
regime’s growing insistence on prescriptive attitudes toward the
banalization of Classicism in State-sponsored buildings.
Illustr. 2: Fiat Lingotto, period photo 1920s, author unknown. From Carlo Olmo ed.,
Lingotto. 1915-1939. L'architettura, l'immagine, il lavoro. Torino: Umberto
Allemandi & C., 1994, illustr. no. 17.
Illustr. 3: Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (1923).

Capri’s Modernity: Remoteness and Presentness in Southern Italy
The island of Capri occupied a special place in discussions of

architectural and artistic modernity. (Vergine 2003) The Austrian
Secession architect Josef Hoffmann was one of many North European
architects and artists such as Karl Friedrich Schinkel, John Ruskin and
Charles Rennie Mackintosh who began to appreciate the importance
of the vernacular in Italy as an equally important source of inspiration
as the classical sites had been for centuries. In 1911, the same year
that the Franco-Swiss architect Le Corbusier embarked to the Eastern
Mediterranean and discovered its vernacular architecture, Hoffmann
delivered a speech in which he described the experience of travelling
in 1896 to places including Capri and Anacapri as a turning point in
his architectural education and career:
Finally I fled into the Campagn [sic] and refreshed myself at the
simple peasant buildings, that without pomp and without stylistic
architecture nevertheless give the land its special character. There, for
the first time, it became clear to me what matters in architecture;
henceforth I studied all the little places on my way with fiery zeal.
(Sekler 1985: 486-92)
On returning from his travels, Hoffmann published in Der

Architekt a series of travel sketches of vernacular dwellings in Capri
and Anacapri which he had observed firsthand, accompanied by a
brief explanatory text, thus jumpstarting the ‘Mediterranean myth’
that inspired the shapes and textures of Viennese modern architecture
up until the first decade of the twentieth century. (ill. 5)
By the early 1920s, Capri had become an important pilgrimage site
for artists and architects who looked with interest at its vernacular
buildings for a number of different reasons. Capri’s climate and the
interaction of architecture and landscape, coupled with its remote
qualities, inspired and relaxed world travellers. After World War I,
due to the efforts of Capri's charismatic mayor Edwin Cerio, an
engineer-turned-politician, the island (like the French Riviera and
other Mediterranean destinations) became a haven for artists,
architects, intellectuals and preservationists from around the world.
Many Futurists like, for example, Fortunato Depero, Virgilio Marchi,
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Enrico Prampolini, visited Capri on a
regular basis during those years. A number of Rationalist architects
Illustr. 4: Sigfried Giedion, ‘Situation de l’architecture contemporaine en Italie’

Cahiers d’art 9-10 (1931): 442-449.
Illustr. 5: Josef Hoffmann, ‘Architektonisches von der Insel Capri’, Der Architekt
3 (1897): 13–14.
including Adalberto Libera, Giuseppe Capponi and Luigi Cosenza

dedicated considerable time to discovering Capri. (Cantone and
Prozzillo 1994)
In an address delivered to the Symposium on Landscape
(Convegno del Paesaggio), concerned with heritage and preservation
and held in 1922 in Capri, Marinetti praised the stile pratico (practical
style) of its indigenous architecture. (Cerio 1923: 66-68) Ironically,
the Futurists who had always sought to break with history found
themselves embroiled in discussions about the architectural patrimony
of Italy. Although the Futurists did not express an interest in
preservation per se, the debate certainly made them aware of the
country’s vernacular traditions. Marinetti celebrated the island's local
vernacular architecture for its rational rather than picturesque qualities
and asserted: ‘I believe that this is a Futuristic island; I feel that it is
full of infinite originality as if it had been sculpted by Futurist

architects like Sant’Elia, Virgilio Marchi, painted by Balla, Depero,
Russolo, Prampolini, and sung and made musical by Francesco
Cangiullo and Casella!’ (Cerio 1923: 37-41)
More than a decade after Marinetti’s war cry to ‘free our country
from the stinking canker of its professors, archaeologists, tour guides,
and antiquarians’ (Marinetti 1909: 14), he exonerated vernacular
architecture, sparing it his anti-historicist wrath and proclaiming the
vernacular to lie outside the flux of historical styles. Marinetti saw
beauty and freedom in the dramatic and unpredictable landscape of
Capri because it rejected, as he put it, ‘any kind of order reminiscent
of Classicism’ (contro ogni ordine vigilante di classicismo) and
embodied a dazzling ‘variety’ (Varietà). (Marinetti 1928: 41-48)
Thus, the Futurists gradually became interested in both the myth of the
machine and the primitive character of vernacular architecture and
peasant art. (Del Puppo 2000: 211-219)
Illustr. 6: Camillo Jona, L’architettura rusticana nella costiera d’amalfi (Turin,

1920).
Illustr. 7: Roberto Pane, Architettura rurale campana (Florence, 1936).
In the same year that the Symposium on Landscape was held in

Capri, Edwin Cerio published his seminal La casa nel paesaggio di
Capri, a book on vernacular domestic architecture of the island. The
use of the term casa in Cerio’s title is significant in a discussion of the
hierarchies of domestic buildings, as the casa was a less grand and
formal type than the villa, and was customarily identified with the
vernacular tradition. Instead of illustrating the text himself, Cerio
enlisted the help of a Venetian artist living in Capri, Gennaro Favai,
who would go on to produce his own book on the subject in 1930,
entitled Capri. That same year, Cerio, Parpagliolo and the artist and
architect Giovanni Ceas prepared another collaborative book on Capri
in which they reproduced numerous colourful, ‘visionary’ pastel
drawings published as part of Capri – Visioni architettoniche di Gio.
Batt. Ceas (1930). A number of other books focused on the vernacular
architecture of Capri and Southern Italy (especially the Campania)
were published during those years, as, for example, Camillo Jona’s
L’architettura rusticana nella costiera d’Amalfi (1920) and, later on,
Roberto Pane’s Architettura rurale campana (1936). Both of these
publications were hand-illustrated by their authors, both of whom

were practicing architects. (ills. 6-7)
In his numerous studies on the topic, Cerio continually praised the
‘minimal’ architecture of builders and went as far as to feature a
photograph of a local stonemason. Thus, anonymity belonged to the
pre-industrial world of the vernacular as well as to the Futurist world
of Taylorization and serial manufacturing. Cerio’s appreciation of
local builders (and not architects) was echoed by Swedish physician
Axel Munthe whose widely circulated autobiographical novel, The
Story of San Michele (1929), also fostered interest in the remote
paradise of Capri. Munthe’s novel recounts his experience of living on
the island, and most importantly, his involvement in the construction
of his home. Munthe prided himself on the fact that he did not hire an
architect and that he laboured along with the maestro (master stone-
and brick-layer) and his workers who could not read or write. He
sensitively described the relationship of the house’s vernacular
features to the surrounding natural elements:
As I saw it again I thought San Michele looked more beautiful than

ever. The house was small, the rooms were few but there were
loggias, terraces and pergolas all around it to watch the sun, the sea
and the clouds – the soul needs more space than the body. Not much
furniture in the rooms but what there was could not be bought with
money alone. Nothing superfluous, nothing unbeautiful, no bric-à-
brac, no trinkets. A few primitive pictures, an etching of Dürer and a
Greek bas-relief on the whitewashed walls. (Munthe 1929: 313)
Interest in Capri and the Mediterranean basin during the 1920s

among English-speaking architects and historians who shared little of
the Futurists’ enthusiasm for primitivism, is attested by the growth of
the permanent settlement of cosmopolitan residents and the
proliferation of articles in English magazines that ranged from the
scholarly to the touristic. A series of brief articles on Amalfi, Ravello
and Capri by the Roman architect and critic, Renato Paoli, appeared in
the British journal, The Architect. (Paoli 1920, 1921) Paoli’s
historicist agenda is revealed in the design of his own villa,
L’Amalfitana, built in the suburbs of Rome several years later. Paoli
employed such elements as loggias and decorative motifs typical of
the rustic architecture of Amalfi.
In addition to being politically active as the mayor and leader of
the local preservationist movement, Cerio also designed several
Illustr. 8: Virgilio Marchi, coverpage, Architettura futurista (1924).

houses using vernacular vaulting traditions. His own house, il Rosaio,

was his most important work. Cerio also encouraged Rationalist
architects like Giuseppe Capponi to design homes for the island.
Capponi’s villa was completed in 1928. Like many other architects
sympathizing with Rationalism, Capponi was captivated by what he
called the semplicità pimitiva (primitive simplicity) of the rural
architecture of Capri (and Ischia). His interest in incorporating this
element in his drawings, paintings and photography informed his
distinct brand of expressionist Rationalism. He incorporated his
distinctive line drawings in the brief article, ‘Motivi di architettura
ischiana’ (Capponi 1927), which investigated the architecture of the
island of Ischia and was to be published as a book (but never
appeared).
These building initiatives set the stage for another amateur
architect and literary figure, Curzio Malaparte. Between 1938-42,
Malaparte worked with Rationalist architect Adalberto Libera (1903–
63) and the local mason Adolfo Amitrano to design and build his Casa
Malaparte overlooking the sea on Capri. Malaparte wrote in relation to
the use of stone for his new house:
I was the first to build such a house. And it was with reverential
trepidation that I set myself to the task, helped not by architects or
engineers (save for legal issues, legal formalities), but by a simple
master builder, the best, the most honest, the most intelligent, the most
upright that I have ever known…. For months and months, teams of
masons worked on that farthest balcony of Capri, until the house
began slowly to emerge from the rock to which it was married, and as
it took shape, it revealed itself as the most daring and intelligent and
modern house in Capri.’ (Talamona 1992: 49)
Malaparte’s praise of his ‘simple master builder’ is not surprising

given that he, and several others, abandoned Massimo Bontempelli's
cosmopolitan journal “900”: Cahiers d'Italie et d'Europe to adhere to
Mino Maccari's Strapaese platform and promoted the values of
‘primitive’ Italian peasantry. (Brunetti 1993: 217-237) A protagonist
of the Strapaese – Stracittà (City vs. Countryside) controversy
spearheaded by Maccari, which pitted cosmopolitan urban values
against provincial rural identities, Malaparte published his Italia
barbara in 1925: ‘The time has finally come to praise Italy’s
barbarians – the creative and free spirits of the peasantry who have
remained loyal to their traditions and customs.’ Although the two
movements Strapaese and Stracittà are usually discussed as

diametrically opposed entities, Carlo Carrà, for one, combined
Classicism with the primitivism of rural buildings to express a
simplified solemnity. With its massive rustic walls and modern flat
roof, the Casa Malaparte evoked Italy’s vernacular architecture. Yet, it
also conjured up powerful metaphysical associations: the building
appears like a floating ship that is marooned in space.
The Art of Architecture: Fortunato Depero, Virgilio Marchi and

Enrico Prampolini
In 1922, Virgilio Marchi, an architect, set designer and self-appointed

heir to Sant’Elia, lauded the vernacular architecture of Capri and the
Amalfi coast as a source for contemporary designers in ‘Primitivismi
capresi’ (Capri Primitivisms), a short, illustrated essay he published in
Cronache d’attualità, Anton Giulio Bragaglia's avant-garde journal
(Marchi 1922). Two years later, in his Architettura futurista, Marchi
elaborated on the ‘innate virtue of primitive builders’ in his discussion
of the relationship between the vernacular tradition and contemporary
design. (ills. 8-9) On the cover he reproduced a design for a
hydroelectric station, one of the most modern of twentieth-century
architectural types, that echoes the sculptural, stereotomic qualities of
the vernacular types of the Capri and Amalfi coast, which he had
recorded in a drawing a few years earlier of the Hotel Luna (Amalfi).
In this book, as well as his Italia nuova architettura nuova of 1931,
Marchi expressed admiration for the ‘ingenious spontaneity’ of the
architecture of Capri. With Architettura futurista (1924) and Italia
nuova architettura nuova (1931), Marchi tried to position himself as
the heir to Sant’Elia, and as the promoter of Futurist architecture after
the latter’s death in 1916. (Danesi and D'Amico 1977)
As a prelude to Marchi’s interest in primitivism and the vernacular
it is worth recalling the debate between Giulio Ulisse Arata, one of the
founding members of the Nuove Tendenze group established in Milan
in 1914, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, and
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Arata was initially supportive of Antonio
Sant’Elia, whom he described as a ‘young artist of great genius’, and
encouraged him to participate in the group’s first exhibition and to
write a preface to the catalogue. But Arata later condemned
Illustr. 9: Virgilio Marchi, Primitivismi capresi (Capri Primitivisms), Cronache

d’attualità, 1922.
Sant’Elia’s manifesto, Futurist Architecture (i.e., his original

Messaggio ‘touched up’ and radicalized by Marinetti), published in
Lacerba (1 and 15 August 1914), arguing that architecture was
intimately related to ethnography and geology, and therefore could not
break completely with tradition as Sant’Elia advocated.
Rejecting the machine-age aesthetic of Sant'Elia's Città nuova
(New City), Arata complained about the Italians’ delay in studying
‘l'arte rustica delle masse rurali’ (the rustic art of the rural masses).
The three essays he wrote in 1921 on the ‘rustic art of Sardinia’ were
eventually expanded and published in a volume entitled Arte sarda
(Art of Sardinia, 1935). This edition, bound in jute in order to recall
the humble origins of peasant art, is illustrated with photographs,
drawings, and paintings of buildings, objects and traditional costumes
by Arata’s co-author, the painter Giuseppe Biasi. Arata's interest in
peasant art was not strictly campanilista (provincial). Having no
personal ties to Sardinia, he likely chose it as his case-study because it
was an island removed from industrial northern Italy. It thus offered
him a virgin, ‘primitive’ fountainhead – as did the island of Capri – of
inspiring materials.
Illustr. 10: Fortunato Depero, Paese di tarantelle (1918) Private collection.
The artist, artisan and stage-set designer Fortunato Depero (1892–

1960) also took inspiration from Capri and Italy’s ‘retrograde’
Mezzogiorno in paintings of the peasantry and their built environs in
his Portatrice caprese (1917), Tarantella (1918-20), and Paese di
tarantelle (1918). (ill. 10) Depero’s interest in the vernacular has been
the object of several scholarly publications (Belli 1988, 1992).
Depero’s enthusiasm for peasant vitality and ingenuity extended to
such folk customs as the tarantella, a lively dance typical of southern
Italian towns. Describing his travels to the ‘paradise of Capri’ and the
Amalfi coast in 1917, Depero wrote: ‘After four hours of sailing from
Capri we landed in Positano on the Amalfi Coast […] On one side of
this small port we noticed a simple windmill that was inactive for
many years and that was transformed into a home. […] It looked like a
primordial machine made of wood built with peasant ingenuity.’
(Depero 1940: 207-208; Vitas 1988) When he set up his professional
workshop in Rovereto in the Trentino-Alto Adige region, he brought
to his playful Cubo-Futurist reading of the northern Italian vernacular
landscape the colour and excitement he had experienced in Capri.
Depero’s depictions of hill towns to the east of Rovereto, including
Serrada (1920) and Lizzana (1923), show his interest in the organic
relationship between vernacular architecture and the natural
landscape. This dialectic relationship is manifested in his Bestetti

Treves Tuminelli book pavilion, built for the third Monza Biennale
(1927). (ill. 11) In many ways, it recalls the sculptural qualities of the
layered, interlocking stone and masonry of the southern Italian
vernacular buildings anchored to the earth from which they rise. (ill.
12)
Depero was one of the handful of ‘modern’ artists who felt that one
could respond to the future without severing relations with the past, a
move most critics at the time deemed impossible. Additionally,
Depero’s own craft extended beyond painting to the applied arts. His
so-called Casa del Mago (House of the Magician) in Rovereto was a
workshop, in which local artisans produced such handicrafts of
vernacular inspiration as tapestries, ceramics and primitive (i.e. low-
tech) furniture, often manufactured with basic materials and
technologies. In Depero’s operation, women had a prominent role in
the execution of items that required sewing – tapestries, cushions,
fashion, theatre costumes andtextiles. Instead of working in new
materials such as glass and steel, Depero employed traditional
materials and techniques such as weaving, wood and ceramic to forge
Illustr. 11: Fortunato Depero, Bestetti Treves Tuminelli book pavilion, Monza
Biennale, 1927.
Illustr. 12: View of the steps of a ‘Trullo’ in Alberobello,

in Myron Goldfinger, Villages in the Sun (New York, 1969).
a novel synthesis of modernity and primitivism. Depero also

employed traditional, elemental techniques of representation. His
portrayals of Italy’s rural landscapes and peasant life are indebted to
the figurative tradition and single-point perspective. He was interested
in such farm machines as the boldly painted horse-drawn carts typical
of rural communities of southern Italy, which also interested the
architect Giuseppe Capitò who published a study on the topic in 1922.
Depero’s framing and use of colour was probably inspired by the
gaudy geometric ornament typical of Sicilian and Neapolitan carts.
Fishermen’s vessels were likewise ornamented with bright colours by
‘amateur’ artists (often the fishermen themselves). Depero’s painting
Carretto napoletano (1918), contemporary with Paese di tarantelle,
celebrates the peasant cart documented by Capitò and others as an
ancient machine of considerable dynamism and vitality.
Another prominent Futurist painter and aspiring architect, Enrico
Prampolini, offered a synthetic Cubo-Futurist interpretation in his
painting, Architettura cromatica di Capri (1921), in which he depicted
the intrinsic relationship between vernacular architecture and
landscape of Capri (Vergine 2003) (ill. 13). Throughout his life,
Illustr. 13: Enrico Prampolini, Architettura cromatica di Capri (1921).
Illustr. 14: Enrico Prampolini, Futurist Pavilion, Turin, 1927.

Prampolini looked to the landscape, light and water of Capri as a

source of poetic inspiration. His multi-story and multi-faceted Futurist
pavilion in Turin (1927) drew from the sculptural and colourful
vernacular landscape of Capri (ill. 14), and in 1935 he went as far as
designing a villa (never built) for Marinetti. (Crispolti, 1992)
Primitivism, Mediterraneità and Rationalism
Despite the profound differences between Futurism and Rationalism

over issues of Classicism and the machine, the vernacular architecture
and landscape of the Mediterranean (Capri, the Gulf of Naples and
beyond) provided both groups with a source of inspiration. Although
Rationalist architects negotiated classical and vernacular sources,
Futurists rejected the former on the basis of its elitism and
associations with ‘civilization’ (Danesi and Patetta 1976; Ciucci 1989)
In the 1930s, a number of Italian Rationalist architects enthralled with
the poetics (and politics) of Mediterraneità expressed interest in the
Pompeian (and thus Mediterranean) courtyard house. Belonging as
much to the classical tradition as the vernacular, the courtyard house
proved to be adaptable to the functional requirements of modern
dwelling, but it also facilitated a traditional Mediterranean lifestyle
that involved spending parts of the day outdoors. Primarily the domain
of wealthy and upper middle class clients, with its common elements
(atrium and blank external walls that serves to protect the house rather
than represent its owners through an elaborate facade), the courtyard-
house type lent itself to repetition and anonymity. For Rationalists,
this architecture was an expression of economical planning with
limited space; for the nationalists and historicists (Pier Maria Bardi's
culturalisti), it was an expression of Italianità that could be flaunted to
the rest of the world.
Writing in the early 1930s for the short-lived periodical, Arte
Mediterranea, the architect Giovanni Michelucci stressed how the
design of the Pompeian house was based on a humanist sense of scale.
He went on to criticize Pompeian revivalism, which he called
Pompeianismo, as being more about style than the experience of
space. Michelucci emphasized the rational, logical dimension over the
ideological: ‘As man felt the need for shelter, he created an
environment that responded to his needs. Humanist principles of
design are the key to Pompeian architecture.’ (Michelucci and Papi

1934: 23-32). Although Michelucci did not design a patio house
himself, but his appreciation for the basic principles of its design
reveal that he was not interested in Pompeian style but rather, how
architecture could facilitate modern life ways.
Although it remained only a prototype, the Villa-Studio for an
artist designed by Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini for the Fifth Milan
Triennale in 1933 was one of the first examples of Rationalist
architecture that revealed the architects' commitment to building a
Mediterranean modernism that was ‘Italian’ and rational. (ill. 15)
Figini and Pollini's one-story, flat-roof house was organized around
several open-air courtyards that could give the inhabitant opportunity
to enjoy external spaces as extensions of the interiors. Significantly,
their plan did not replicate the axial symmetrical qualities of a typical
domus, with its atrium as the dominant spatial element. The architects
(founding members of the Gruppo Sette) recreated spaces that gave
the inhabitant exposure to open-air and shaded outdoor spaces, one of
which contained an impluvium. (Gambardella 1989: 94-100)
Whitewashed surfaces on the exterior elevations were juxtaposed with
exposed brick. Painted walls (light-blue, brown, peach) echoed the sky
and the earth. Figini and Pollini achieved a synthesis of modern
building technologies with traditional models for dwelling like the
courtyard house. Only three years later, the team designed an
‘Environment with living room and terrace’ (1936), for which they
established a conciliatory position between the organic (vernacular)
and the machine-age aesthetic (Savi 1990: 39) and employed a floor-
to-ceiling glass wall along with a rustic flagstone floor and
anonymous vernacular objects like basic reed and wood table chairs.
A subtle yet important difference regarding the use of technology
between Futurist and Rationalist architects working in Italy (and other
Mediterranean countries) and their counterparts working in northern
Europe is seen in their attitudes toward light. Although slogans such
as ‘light, air and openness’ gave northern functionalists many
opportunities for architectural expression (i.e., large plate-glass
surfaces), in the South, the pursuit of light and shadow was less
technocratic and more spiritual. The glow of the natural light that
Illustr. 15: Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini, Villa–Studio for an artist, Fifth Milan
Triennale, 1933.
bathes the Mediterranean shores starkly contrasted with the gleaming

electric light of the machine age and carried a number of symbolic
associations, because southern artists and architects saw in the
Mediterranean basin the birthplace of primitive and/or archaic
vernacular and classical traditions. (Gambardella 1989; Overy 2007) It
is no coincidence that art historians have written extensively on the
topic of southern light and the Mediterranean landscape in painting
from Paul Cézanne to Pablo Picasso, Giorgio De Chirico, and beyond.
(Jirat-Wasiutynski 2007) Most modernists were really interested in
bright interiors that were either naturally or artificially lit. Their
pursuit of light was more functionalist than spiritual. Religion was not
an issue; nor did they wish to restore the ‘lost centre’ much lamented
by the Catholic art and architectural historian Hans Sedlmayr in his
influential book, Verlust der Mitte: Die Bildende Kunst des 19. und
20. Jahrhunderts als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit. (Sedlmayr 1948)
Instead, they related to a new secular spirituality based on enlightened
rationalism. The interest in light and the choice of colour and
whitewash not only echoes vernacular (and classical) traditions
anchored in Italy’s past, but also finds parallels in contemporary
designs of German Expressionists such as Bruno Taut, who employed
colour to express drama and creativity. On the other hand, the
incorporation of primary colours by De Stijl architects such as Theo
van Doesburg and Gerrit Rietveld is altogether different because they
heighten abstraction by using colours not necessarily found in nature.
When Adalberto Libera used deep red stucco in the Casa Malaparte in
Capri, he intended to forge a direct link between the local vernacular
tradition with the not-too-distant ruins of classical Pompei. This was a
far cry from the abstraction of pure red, blue and yellow of the
Rietveld-Schroeder house in Utrecht (1924).
Fifteen years later, Figini's writings on Italian and Mediterranean
vernacular demonstrate both a lingering anti-Futurist attitude as well
as ‘continuity’ between interwar and postwar interests. In two articles
on architecture in Ischia and Ibiza, the author seized the opportunity to
reflect on recent trends in the historiography of modern architecture.
(Figini 1950: 40-43) Citing Sigfried Giedion's Raum, Zeit,
Architektur: Die Entstehung einer neuen Tradition (Space, Time and
Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 1941), Figini
reproached critics for their reluctance to acknowledge what he felt was
the equally significant contribution of the South. Examining the
intellectual premises of Mediterraneità in the development of

Rationalism, Figini saw it as instrumental in the smeccanizzazione
(de-mechanization) and sgelo (defrosting) of modernism. He
concluded his essay with a reminder of the fundamental value of
vernacular architecture:
A lesson of morality and of logic (simplicity, sincerity, modesty,

humility, adherence to necessity, renunciation of the superfluous,
adaptation to human scale, adaptation to local and environmental
conditions). A lesson of life (vast employment of ‘intermediary’
elements between open-air and indoor living: loggias, terraces,
porticoes, pergolas, patios, walled gardens, etc.). A lesson of style
(anti-decorativism, love of smooth surfaces, and for elementary
sculptural solutions, the site and ‘framing’ of buildings in the
landscape). (Figini 1950: 40-43)
In Toward an Architecture (1923), Le Corbusier projected modern

Existenzminimum values onto the Casa del Noce in Pompei which he
visited and sketched during his journey to the Mediterranean:
Out of the clatter of the swarming street which is for every man and
full of picturesque incident, you have entered the house of a Roman.
Majestic grandeur, order, a splendid amplitude: you are in the house
of a Roman. What was the function of these rooms? That is outside
the question. After twenty centuries, without any historical reference,
you are conscious of Architecture, and we are speaking of what is in
reality a very small house. (Le Corbusier 1923; Salerno 1997)
Le Corbusier's interest in the Pompeian house (not too long after he

expressed his passion for houses designed like a ‘machine for living’)
was especially significant in the context of Figini and Pollini's Villa-
Studio. Both architects were founding members of the Gruppo Sette
and had collectively drafted the first manifestos published in 1926 and
1927. Their writings were largely indebted, both in style and content,
to Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture and heralded the advent of a
nuova epoca arcaica (new archaic era). (Gruppo Sette 1926-27;
Talamona 1996: 55-81) These writings powerfully endorsed Le
Corbusier's rejection of academic historicism and embrace of a
‘living’ relationship with the architectures of the past. (Forster 1979:
130-153) Le Corbusier’s conciliatory attitude is key to understanding
why he was so important a mentor to Italian architects who sought to
rethink and not merely reject the past. A passage from the Gruppo
Sette’s 1926 manifesto Architettura reads:
Here, in particular, there exists a classical foundation. The spirit (not

the forms, which is something different) of tradition is so profound in
Italy that evidently, and almost mechanically, the new architecture
will preserve a stamp which is typically ours. And this is already a
great force, since tradition, as we said, does not disappear, but changes
appearance. (Gruppo Sette 1926)
Tradition and lyricism were what allowed these Rationalists to go

beyond functionalism and Futurism.
Summary
In translating anonymous vernacular sources into signature styles

during the 1920s to the 1940s, Futurist and Rationalists transformed
the traditions they appropriated, which had been constructed by and
for common people, often socially and economically marginalized
from the urban bourgeoisie. Thanks to the rediscovery of remote Capri
(and the Mediterranean), Futurists and Rationalist artists and
architects were able to transform the dramatic expressiveness of
vernacular forms in order to align themselves with the avant-garde
rejection of historical eclecticism while engaging contentious and
competing notions of ‘Italian-ness’ that surfaced during Italy’s Fascist
dictatorship (1922-1943). These Futurists and Rationalist embraced
hybridity over tabula rasa, and in so doing achieved a unique
synthesis that was suspended precariously between tradition and
modernity. For more details on the issues discussed in this essay see
my forthcoming book entitled Pride in Modesty: Modernist
Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy (University of
Toronto Press, 2010).
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Beyond Futurism:
Bruno Munari’s Useless Machines
Pierpaolo Antonello
Abstract: This essay discusses Bruno Munari’s understanding of the relationship between
art and technology in the light of his early collaboration with the Futurist movement. It
explores the legacy and influence of Futurist experimentation in Munari’s opus, starting
from his early works in the late 20s, up to mid-century. It also discusses Munari’s
progressive distancing from the Futurist aesthetics and the more encompassing
integration of his art with other aesthetic trends in Europe at the time. In particular, the
essay focuses on the epistemological implications at the base of his famous ‘useless
machines’, which Munari developed from the early 30s, and which marked a departure
from the main thrust of Futurist ‘technolatry’, towards a broader understanding of
technology, which is more pragmatic and structuralist in nature, and which seems to
question any dualistic separation between nature and technology, between the artificial
and the natural.
Bruno Munari was an eclectic artist, designer and pedagogue of the

period before and after the Second World War. His ability of combining
a holistic understanding of artistic praxis with a dose of irony and
lightness earned him the reputation of being ‘the Leonardo and the Peter
Pan of twentieth century Italian art’ (Restany 1999: 254).1 He was one of
the front-runners of an artistic movement that helped to invigorate the art
scene in Italy, in particular industrial design, and to move it towards a
more thorough integration with the productive world of technology and
industry. His exploration of the continuities that link artistic production
with nature and ‘natural’ design was ground-breaking. However, many
critical and historical accounts and analyses2 ignore the fact that, at the
beginning of his career, Munari joined Marinetti’s Futurist circle, and
1
For Pierre Restany, Munari ‘è stato il Leonardo e il Peter Pan del design italiano’ che ‘ci
ha dato, con eleganza pari alla levità, la più magistrale lezione d’umanesimo: in piena
epoca di globalizzazione culturale ha saputo, nel corso di un’intera vita, conciliare
l’esprit de géométrie con l’esprit de finesse’; (Restany 1999). Also in Finessi 1999: 254.
See also Rizzi 2007: 89.
2
In the famous 1986 exhibition on Futurism at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, curated by
Pontus Hulten, Munari was present with only one work, and he is barely mentioned in
the catalogue.
316 Pierpaolo Antonello
that his work represented within that art movement – and within early
twentieth century Italian culture in general – an interesting turning point
with regard to the relationship between art and technology. An analysis
of Munari’s œuvre, particularly of his famous ‘useless machines’,
demonstrates how, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a different modality
in the conceptualization and artistic use of technology became available
within Italian culture: one that was less based on myth and more on
reason, more on materiality and less on spirituality. It also signals a
departure of Futurist aesthetics and ideology towards an integration with
other major trends in the broader European context such as Russian
Constructivism, Surrealism, Dadaism, and the Bauhaus.
Munari Futurista
Munari’s relationship with the Futurist movement was far from being
forthright and heartfelt as, from an ideological standpoint, he was never
fully integrated within the movement. His temperament was quite
removed from the bombastic rhetoric and clownesque elements of
Futurist propaganda. Riccardo Castagnetti (aka Ricas), Munari’s assistant
and business partner in the 1930s, remembers the total lack of vis
polemica in Munari and the fact that he seemed to watch the Futurist
‘brawls’ and ‘riots’ with a detached smile (Ricas 1999: 63). In
interviews, Munari tended to evade questions that referred to his ‘Futurist
years’ and to downplay his initial attachment to the movement,
characterizing it as a phase in his career that had only historical
significance.3 He claimed – and the oxymoron was consciously and
ironically chosen here – that he had had a ‘Futurist past’ (Dorfles 1999:
192). The few historical accounts available of Munari’s early career
show, on the one hand, a relationship of proximity towards and
participation in the Futurist movement, and on the other hand a gradual
distance towards and emancipation from Marinetti’s group. This was
3
As Meneguzzo pointed out ‘Munari non vuole correre il rischio che tutto quello che ha
fatto nel corso di più di sessant’anni di lavoro venga catalogato come un derivato
futurista per il solo fatto di avere partecipato — dal 1927 al 1936 circa — ad alcune
mostre del movimento […], come esponente del gruppo, ma al contrario pretende che il
suo lavoro venga considerato quasi secondo in andamento che vorrei definire
‘orizzontale’, cioè slegato da un prima e dopo troppo determinati, troppo scanditi da un
percorso storico costruito senza scossoni, senza scarti laterali […], magari a distanza di
decenni’ (Meneguzzo 1995: 7).
Bruno Munari’s Useless Machines 317
primarily due to aesthetic rather than political reasons (Meneguzzo 1993,

Tanchis 1986). Although he played lip-service to Futurism and, above
all, to Fascism in some of his writing of the period,4 there were no
ideological motivations behind Munari’s artistic activities. He roamed
the world of art with a genuine curiosity, trying to integrate his
experience and knowledge with the most stimulating elements of what
was on offer in Italy and in Europe at that time. He once claimed in an
interview that for him ‘it was a matter of ‘trying things out’, of wanting
to know as much as possible’, including Futurism, Surrealism and
Abstractionism (Quintavalle 2008: 243). There may have been also self-
promotional reasons for joining the Futurist group, although later he
commented quite caustically on Marinetti’s abilities as an artistic
entrepreneur: ‘Marinetti used to summon us imperiously […] although
the art shows he organized were held in the summer, during the low
season of art galleries’ (Meneguzzo 1995: 10).
When, in 1925, Munari moved from his Veneto home town Badia
Polesine to Milan, Futurism was one of the driving artistic forces in Italy
and possessed some of the most active groups in the country. It is likely
that he felt drawn towards Futurism because of its links with the cultural
industry (design, advertisement, graphics, architecture, etc.). He found
the Futurists’ heterogeneity of methods, their ability to mix different art
forms and techniques, their exploration of new media and new avenues
of expression quite congenial to his own conception of art.Munari was
soon recognized as a versatile and multifaceted artist and became
involved in a variety of Futurist projects. He participated in the Venice
Biennale (1930, 1934, 1936), the Rome Quadriennale (1931, 1935) and
the Milan Triennale (1933, 1936, 1940), as well as in various Futurist
group exhibitions in Italy and abroad. In an article published in La rivista
illustrata del Popolo d’Italia, the editor Manlio Morgagni commented:
He is very young; with little life experience and still in a phase of

development, at least in the field of art. […] His paintings have been
widely discussed; some people found them naïve; others think they are
the product of an intense and well thought-through style. Everybody
4
See for instance the ‘Manifesto dei futuristi venticinquenni’ (1934), signed by Munari,
Carlo Manzoni, Gelindo Furlan, Ricas and Regina: ‘secondo i nuovi progetti […] che
glorificheranno nei secoli la potenza politica e artistica di questa formidabile Italia
fascista in cui abbiamo la gioia immensa di vivere!’ Autograph Manuscript, in Marinetti
Libroni, GEN MSS 475 / 10608-01, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library,
Yale University.
though agrees about his extraordinary imagination and balance, typical of

an authentic artistic character. […] Munari is ingenious; he will surely
find his way if he will show strong character and willingness to
constantly improve himself, if he will not try to follow other people’s
taste, distrust obliging flattery and act in accordance with his innermost
urges. (Morgagni 1929: 57)
Illustr. 1: The wall with Munari’s paintings at the exhibition ‘Trentatrè pittori futuristi’,
Galleria Pesaro, Milan, October 1929.
Also Marinetti offered some approving remarks when, in his review

of the 1929 Futurist show at the Galleria Pesaro in Milan, he wrote that
‘the Milanese Futurist painters, guided by the young and very ingenious
Munari, are present in full force’ (Marinetti 1929: 57). In that article,
however, Marinetti failed to mention that Munari’s work was far from
being Futurist in style and spirit. His Architettura femminile, for instance,
was an exercise in geometrical investigation of the human (female) form,
much in the Cubist tradition where movement and dynamism are
suppressed in favour of analytical abstraction. The same was remarked
upon with regard to some other paintings exhibited at the Galleria Pesaro
(see illustration 1), and to later exhibitions of the period such as the
‘Mostra futurista arch. Sant’Elia e 22 pittori futuristi’, also held at the
Galleria Pesaro in 1930: Munari was ‘[d]ialoguing with Klee, [he had] an
awareness of Georges Braque’s research, who was by then part of
synthetic cubism’, and he also presents in his art ‘aspect of surrealist
experimentation’ (Bianchino 234). As a matter of fact, Munari’s natural
curiosity for different techniques and styles meant that he would not let
himself be regimented. He was

unwilling to comply with any
prescriptive terms (be they
Futurist or other) or to let himself
be put into any aesthetic
straightjacket. Already in 1927,
when Munari was only 20 years
old, one can discern elements
that were indicative of an ironic
distance towards the aesthetic
theories of Futurism and the
practice of aeropainting, which
was then a dominant trend in
Futurist art. In his collage rRrR
[Rumore di aeroplano] (Noise of
the Aeroplane) (see illustration 2)
Illustr. 2: rRrR [Rumore di aeroplano]. one can clearly see the ironic and
Copyright Massimo & Sonia Cirulli
Archive, New York and Bologna. parodic allusion to the
onomatopeic experimentation in
Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tuuum
(1914), but also a reference to
Carlo Carrà’s manifesto The
Painting of Sounds, Noises and
Smells (1913) – starting from the
very name he adopted to sign the
painting: ‘BUM’, which is both
an abbreviation of his name and
the most common onomatopoeia
in Italian usage associated to an
explosion. The letters ‘R’ are
written in ink, capitalized or in
small capitals, italicized, as if it
were part of a table in a first
grade spelling-book. The airplane
Illustr. 3: Munari’s illustration for Il does not show any dynamism;
suggeritore nudo by F.T. Marinetti,
reproduced in Comoedia. Rassegna the wheels are those of a bicycle
mensile del teatro 11-12 (1929-1930): 38- and the perspective is overtly
44. askew. The drawing does not
reflect the oblique vision
provoked by flight, much dear to painters such as Tullio Crali or Tato,

but mimics in parodic terms the drawings of elementary school kids.5
In 1929, Munari also executed the stage and costume designs for
Marinetti’s play Il suggeritore nudo (The Naked Prompter). The
preparatory drawings, which also served as illustrations to the published
version of the play in Comoedia, reduced the human figure to geometric
and mechanical forms that seem to prefigure many of the robots in
science fiction books and magazines in the years to come (see illustration
3). They also bear close resemblance to the works of Depero,
Diulgheroff, Fillìa and Prampolini, and especially Ivo Pannaggi’s
costumes for the Ballo meccanico futurista (Mechanical Ballet, 1924) or
for Ruggero Vasari’s L’angoscia delle macchine (The Anguish of the
Machines, 1926) (Lista 2001: 146-49). However, Munari’s stylistic
options did not have any ‘militant’ purpose. His propensity for
geometrical shapes was not guided by any Futurist agenda. A similar
mechanical and geometrical stylization of human characters was
employed in his illustrations to a sentimental and romantic short story by
Lyana Cambiasi, Fra due mantelli (Between Two Capes, 1929),
published in a very ‘unfuturistic’ women’s magazine Lidel which, for a
few issues, counted Munari amongst its collaborators (Cambiasi 1929).6
As a matter of fact, at that stage of his career, Munari worked more as a
commercial graphic designer than as a fine artist. He was not in the
business of ‘self-expression’, as this entails a romantic and idealistic
notion of art and the artist. Rather, his art was the result of an attitude of
playfulness and experimentation.
Since 1929, Munari had worked in various advertising agencies,
including Carlo Cossio’s IPC, ‘pioneer in the use of the animated cartoon
in Italian advertising’ (Tanchis 1986: 128). The following year, together
with the above-mentioned Ricas (Riccardo Castagnetti), he opened one
of the first Italian advertising agencies, the R+M, and started to
collaborate on a variety of projects. He was commissioned, for instance,
to design and illustrate Tullio d’Albisola’s L’anguria lirica (The Lyric
Watermelon, 1934), futuristically printed on tin foil, or Marinetti’s Il
5
The same ironic attitude towards aeropainting will be also visible in a series of later
sketches and photomontages made in 1936, like ‘La gioia poetica del volo’, ‘L’odore
del velivolo’, ‘All’ora l’areoplano era di bamboo e di tela’ and ‘Ci porremmo dunque in
cerca di una femmina d’areoplano‘. See Becker 2008: 72-73.
6
Cfr. also Luciana, ‘Bibite estive’ in Lidel 7 (1930): 25; L. Ridenti, ‘Sotto un tetto
amico’, in Lidel 8 (1930): 50-51; Dancing, ‘Quest’anno balleremo’, in Lidel 9 (1930):
47; Luciana, ‘In cerca di funghi’ in Lidel 9 (1930): 23.
poema del vestito di latte (The Poem of the Milk Dress, 1937), a volume
brilliantly enhanced by graphic overlays and transparencies.7 He also
illustrated a collection of love poems by Renato Simone, Il cantastorie di
Campari (The Storyteller of Campari, 1932), as well as advertising signs
and catalogues for various companies such as the Società del Linoleum.
In the early 1930s, Munari produced some of his most famous works,
the so-called useless machines. Their artistic originality signalled his
departure from Futurism and a move towards Abstractionism (Solimano
1997: 62):
In 1933, the first abstract paintings were made in Italy; they were nothing
more than geometric forms or colored spaces without reference to so-
called exterior nature. Often these abstract paintings depicted still lives in
geometric forms painted in realistic manner. (...) Personally, I thought
that instead of painting squares, triangles and other geometric forms
which still had a realistic feel (take Kandinsky, for instance), it might be
interesting to free abstract forms from the staticity of paintings and
suspend them in the air, joining them together so that they might inhabit
our environment with us, sensitive to the actual feel of reality. (Munari
1966: 10)
The reference to Kandinsky is revealing, since Munari was influenced by

many artists outside the Futurism circle, and his interest in
Abstractionism came to the fore quite early on in his career. It is not by
chance that his first solo show was held at the Milione Gallery in Milan.
This venue was founded in 1930 by Gino Ghiringhelli and directed by
Edoardo Persico, who was also the editor of Casabella, a magazine
which was to become – alongside Domus, founded in 1928 by Gio Ponti
– a point of reference for architects and designers worldwide. It was
7
Contrary to the stage designs for Il suggeritore nudo, the graphics in the book show
more autonomy on the part of Munari, and are not simply meant to illustrate the text. In
this book, Munari juxtaposed human digestive organs with industrial boilers, the flow
of milk with the flow of tanks and aerial squadrons, but also materials like wood,
clouds, flowers and butterflies vis-à-vis machines. There is a juxtaposition of traditional
and mechanical milking, of nature vs technology. Munari is more interesting in
developing the idea of transformation, of the passage from natural to artificial matter,
but also developing his epistemological perspective of an intrinsic continuity between
nature and technology. This attitude it is also visible in other ‘amphibological’
montages such as ‘Ci porremmo dunque in cerca di una femmina d’aeroplano’ (1936),
in which a woman is represented as a mermaid, but with an aeroplane tail; or in ‘All’ora
l’areoplano era fatto di bambù e tela’ (1936), in which the wings, the propeller and the
horizontal stabilizer are made of butterfly wings (Becker 2008: 72-73).
thanks to Persico that the works of Gropius, Le Corbusier and Frank

Lloyd Wright were discussed and analysed in Italy, and in Milan
particularly. The Milione Gallery was not only an exhibition space, but
also a meeting point, a workshop and a library (Pontiggia 1988), where
people like the young Munari could read the famous Bauhausbücher (14
volumes published between 1925 and 1931), and where he could
familiarize himself with the experimental graphics of Moholy Nagy and
Herbert Bayer, director of the print workshop at the Bauhaus. At the
Milione it was also possible to have access to influential French journals
such as Abstraction - Création (1932), Cercle et Carré (1930) and
Cahiers d'Art (1926-1960), which allowed Munari to become familiar
with the artistic research of Surrealism, Dadaism, and the Dutch De Stijl
group (Quintavalle 2008: 34).
These contacts may explain the genealogy of the Dadaist and
Surrealist elements in some of Munari’s early works. Already in his
illustrations for La rivista illustrata del Popolo d’Italia – e.g., Il tifoso
(The Fan), L’inutile acrobazia (Useless Stunt), or Per il quinto di
secondo (For the Fifth of a Second) – abstract elements and the use of
collage and photomontage were widely employed. Works like Movement
and Space (1928) were similar to the style that Paladini and Pannaggi
experimented with (Lista 2001: 195), but also to the early
experimentation of Moholy-Nagy, while Surrealist elements can be
found in his Self Portrait (1930) or in the later Painter at the Easel
(1937) (Tanchis 1986: 15). In the gallery’s house magazine, Il milione:
Bollettino della Galleria del Milione, Persico also published some
fundamental texts of the abstract art movement, such as Kandinsky’s
Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (Point and Line to Plane, 1926) or Paul Klee’s
Tagebücher (Notebooks, 1920). In fact, many of the people gathering at
the Galleria Milione, such as Lucio Fontana, Atanasio Soldati, Mauro
Reggiani and Luigi Veronesi became leading figures in Italian abstract
art, whereas Giuseppe Terragni, Alberto Sartoris, Luigi Figini and Gino
Pollini developed into key representatives of Italian rationalist
architecture. Besides conferences and art exhibitions, and very much in
the spirit of the Bauhaus, the Milione Gallery also organized music
concerts, fashion shows, displays of graphics, modern furniture and
crafts. The gallery became an institution that gathered an intellectual,
cultural and artistic élite who were well connected to the European art
scene and in opposition to the provincial and nationalistic rhetoric
extolled by the Fascist régime, by the Novecento art movement, and to
some degree also by the Futurists (Caramel 1982). In that sense, Munari
was a conspicuous example of an artist who tried to integrate various
sources of inspiration into his artistic vocabulary and to channel those
influences into his rigorous artistic research that was tending towards
existentialism, geometrical abstraction, functionalism and natural forms.
From a critical standpoint, it is important nonetheless to acknowledge
the role that Futurism played in the development of Munari’s work.
Although later in life, Munari underplayed that phase in his career, there
can be no doubt that it had an influence on his œuvre, as it offered him
many inspirational ideas and fostered a certain attitude towards artistic
creation. In the sketch L’uomo che cammina (Man Walking, 1932), for
instance, it is evident that Munari was trying to study and replicate
Boccioni’s famous sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space
(1913). Munari also repeatedly cited Enrico Prampolini as an
inspirational figure and an artist who was far more up-to-date and aware
of the wider international artistic scene than Marinetti. It was thanks to
Prampolini that Munari embarked on some of his most innovative
experimental activities, related to the so-called ‘polymaterial art’, which
was a novelty in the European contexts of the early twentieth century:
Polymaterial art is not a technique but – like painting and sculpture – a

basic and elementary means of artistic expression, whose evocative
power is based on the plastic orchestration of different materials. Matter
is to be understood both in its biological immanence and in its formal
transcendence; it is, in its multi-expressive basic aspect, matter-as-object:
from the most humble and diverse (almost a relict of life) to the most
refined and elaborate (achieved both in a handcrafted and mechanical
manner). (Prampolini 1944: 9).
In the light of Prampolini’s early use of multiple techniques and

materials, from enamel to cork, from sponge to galalith8, one can better
understand the basis of Munari’s 1952 Manifesto of Machinism (in itself
a Futurist gesture), in which he claimed that he wanted to abandon the
traditional categories of painting and sculpture and move towards a
closer relationship with technology, doing away with ‘romantic brushes,
the dusty palette, the canvas and the easels’, in favour of new tools such
8
Galalith, known as Erinoid in the UK, was a trade name for an early form of plastics. It
was invented in 1897 and patented in 1899 and is made from the milk protein casein. At
the beginning of the twentieth century, it was used to imitate more expensive materials,
such as tortoiseshell or ivory. It was also used for jewellery, pens, umbrella handles, etc.
as ‘the oxy-gas torch, chemical agents, chrome plating, oxidation,

anodizing, thermal alterations’ (Munari 1952). However, like Prampolini,
Munari had no ideological preference for the new materials produced by
modern industry (like steel, rayon or plastic), as he was indifferent to the
‘Futurist’ dimension of the materials to be used (Meneguzzo 1993: 8). He
showed a never-ending curiosity and tested the limits of traditional and
new materials alike, in formal and constructive terms, both for sensorial
and psychological reasons. The materiality and texture of an object was a
significant aspect of Munari’s art, and this interest also prompted one of
his most famous didactic experiments, the so-called ‘tactile laboratories’
(i laboratori tattili), themselves an open tribute to the ‘tavole tattili’
produced by Marinetti and Benedetta in the 1920s and to Marinetti’s
manifesto, Il tattilismo (1921) (Munari 1985: 4).
Another important Futurist source of inspiration for Munari was the
manifesto Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo (The Futurist Re-
fashioning of the Universe, 1915), that can be considered one of the first
theoretical texts of abstract art produced in Italy, as it was signed by the
two authors as ‘Giacomo Balla, Fortunato Depero, astrattisti futuristi’.
Tanchis and Raggianti suggested that in Ricostruzione futurista
dell’universo we can see Munari in a nutshell (Tanchis 1986, Raggianti
1962), for instance in the suggested use of lowly materials such as
strands of wire, cotton, wool, silk of every thickness and coloured glass,
tissue paper, celluloid, metal netting, every sort of transparent and highly
coloured material. Fabrics, mirrors, sheets of metal, coloured tin-foil,
every sort of gaudy material. Mechanical and electrical devices; musical
and noise-making elements, chemically luminous liquids of variable
colours; springs, levers, tubes, etc. (Balla and Depero 1915: 198)
Balla and Depero’s description of the dynamic three-dimensional

constructions (complessi plastici dinamici) point in their technical
affinities towards Munari’s ‘useless machines’ series of the 1930s and
40s. The same could be said about Balla and Depero’s ‘rotoplastic noise
fountain’ (fontana giroplastica rumoristica), as Munari was going to
build several fountains in the 1950s, for example the one in front of the
book pavilion at the Venice Biennale of 1954, inspired by traditional
Chinese water meters, or the large rotating fountain, with brightly
coloured vertical blades, for the Fiera di Milano of 1955 (Munari 1971:
58-63). Another element of continuity between Balla and Depero’s
manifesto and Munari’s experimentation is the focus on toys, crafted in
order to broaden children’s sensitivity, imagination and physical

dynamism – ideas that Munari developed and expanded in his widely
praised ‘pedagogical artistic laboratories’ for children. Moreover, in
1953, he designed for Pirelli what is possibly his most famous toy, Zizi
the Monkey, made of foam rubber and wire and sometimes described as
‘the world’s first interactive sculpture’ (Finessi Meneguzzo 2007: 99).
Useless Machines
From a formal and artistic viewpoint, Munari’s art developed with both
open references and dialectical distancing from many of the ideas and
suggestions produced within the Futurist movement. From an ideological
and epistemological perspective, Munari’s work, in particular his ‘useless
machines’, must be considered a radical break with the Futurist
experience, as they were not only a formal response to both Futurism and
Abstractionism, but also express a radically different understanding of
technology and its function in the modern age. While Futurist
representations of technology and machinery were, at least in the early
period, attached to aggression, power, speed, dynamism and war, and
later to idealistic spirituality, Munari’s conception was moving in quite
the opposite direction, towards an un-ideological, understated
comprehension and manipulation of the primary and basic constituents of
technological apparatuses and mechanisms, which came very close to the
ideas espoused by Gropius and the Bauhaus. As a matter of fact,
considering that Futurism was the very first movement in Europe to place
technology and machines at the centre of its artistic and philosophical
interests, Munari – by choosing to craft artistic ‘machines’ – explicitly
entered a discursive matrix that was already saturated by the Futurist
imagination and artistic language. Munari’s macchine inutili could be
seen as a counter-argument to the technophile and euphoric rhetoric of
Futurism. Indeed, he later conceptualized them in direct opposition to the
Futurist movement: ‘I overcame my Futurist phase because I became
conscious of the fact that working in accordance with Futurist methods
meant using static techniques to show dynamic things. Thus, back then, I
came to realize that what the Futurists were doing was to freeze a
specific moment of dynamism’. (Hajek 1999: 136)
Illustr. 4: Macchina inutile (1945).

Historical Archives of the Jacqueline Vodoz and Bruno Danese Foundation, Milan.
For the same reason, he expressed a critique of Russolo’s musical

instruments, which he considered to be ‘cranky’ machinery, ‘like big toys
[…] they were simply wooden blocks, while I was more interested in
something that changes its shape’ (Hayek 1999: 138-39). In fact,
Munari’s ‘useless machines’ could also be read as surreptitious ironic
gestures against Futurism, more Dadaist in spirit than the grandiose
machines, made of iron and steel that Marinetti and his fellow Futurists
praised in their manifestos. Munari’s macchine inutili were built with
very light materials like paper, blown glass, thin wooden sticks and silk
threads. The entire structure had to be ‘very light in order to be able to
move in the air, and the silk thread was perfect for dispersing the torsion’
(Munari et al. 2000: 38) (see illustration 4). Munari’s useless machines
have gone down in art history, basically as forms of ‘mobiles’, in the
tradition of Alexander Calder, although Munari emphasized that he
conceived them before Calder and that they were quite different in
nature: both types of sculptures were hanging objects, but they were
made of very different materials; also, Munari constructed abstract,
geometrical contraptions in which all the elements were in harmonic
relationship with each other, while Calder’s had a ‘organic’ inspiration

and possessed the same structure as a tree: ‘Take a branch with its leaves
and observe one of Calder’s mobiles – they have the same principle, they
have the same sway, the same dynamic behavior’ (Munari et al. 2000:
40).
Spiritual modernism
As one would expect, Munari’s work did not receive much critical
attention at the time:
Created in the midst of classical, monumental, heroic and ‘granitic’

Italian Novecento, my ‘useless machines’ have always been considered a
sort of joke […]. They were not made of bronze or marble, as would be
expected of true sculpture. They weren’t even painted with oil colours,
but finished with tempera. They were not to be hung on the walls like
paintings, but from the ceiling like chandeliers. People didn’t know how
to classify them. (Munari in Finessi Meneguzzo 2007: 36)
As a matter of fact, ‘in those days the Novecento art movement, with its
solemn masters, reigned supreme. All art journals spoke of nothing but
irrelevant artistic displays, and I, with my useless machines, was a
laughing stock’ (Munari 2000: 38). The Novecento movement was a
conservative trend in the arts, endorsed and promoted by the art critic
Margherita Sarfatti, an acolyte, lover and biographer of Mussolini. She
demanded a return to more harmonic and classic forms of expression and
opposed the radicalism of avant-garde or experimental art. To arrive at a
better understanding of Munari’s secession from Futurism, and to be able
to chart out the innovative epistemological implications of his artistic
relationship with technology, it is important to situate his early
experience within the wider context of the cultural and political climate
of the period, in particular its relation to the rise of Fascism in Italy.
Despite the fact that many Fascist leaders saw in Futurism a form of
‘degenerate art’, many members of the second wave of the Futurist
movement operated within the ideological remits set by the regime,
relinquished their radical iconoclasm and subversive attitude, and yielded
to the so-called ‘return to order’ (retour à l'ordre). The régime was
seeking to develop rhetorical and cultural instruments to handle the
complex epistemological and social changes fostered by modernization
and industrialization. For this reason, they promoted and sustained a

pragmatist attitude toward technology. According to Emilio Gentile, the
Fascist régime’s attempts to modernize the nation ‘meant not just giving
it new instruments of economic and social development, but regenerating
it from archaic habits […], furnishing it with a modern consciousness by
means of a new culture’ (Gentile 1994: 60). The peculiar Italian
modernist nationalism fostered by the régime in order to promote its
cultural revolution did not resort to the rationalist tradition of the
Enlightenment, but ‘to the energy of feelings and emotions; it sought to
reactivate the mythopoetic faculties in order to create new and modern
myths of the nation – a secular religion of the nation – to oppose the
negative consequences and disgregatory effects of the crisis of traditional
society’ (Gentile 1994: 60). In order to compensate for the social tensions
produced by industrialization, urbanization and technological
innovations, the Fascists tried to infuse a heavy dose of ‘spiritualization’
into the general discourse on modernity, as a sort of antidote to the ‘side-
effects’ of modernization. As Jeffrey Herf argued with regard to National
Socialism in Germany, technological and industrial development was
incorporated in the Kultur (nation, spirit, race, will) rather than in the
Zivilisation (reason, intellect, internationalism, materialism). Therefore,
discourses and representations of technology had to be constantly infused
by Geist und Seele (spirit and soul), resulting in an oxymoronic rhetorical
combination of rationalism and idealism, of material pragmatism and
para-religious spirituality (Herf 1984: 16).
This was particularly visible in the conceptualization of technology by
the second generation of Futurists. An early example was the Manifesto
of Futurist Mechanical Art, published in a first version by Ivo Pannaggi
and Vinicio Paladini in La nuova Lacerba (20 June 1922), and later
edited and expanded, following Marinetti’s suggestions, by Enrico
Prampolini. In this second version, all references to a Marxist perspective
on technology as a means of proletarian emancipation were eliminated.
Similarly, Russian Constructivism, much dear to Pannaggi, no longer
featured in the text, obviously for ideological reasons (Pizzi 2008). The
aggressive and forceful dimension of the machine – typical of the early
Futurist imagination – was reduced in favour of the spiritual and ideal
dimensions of technology:
WE FUTURISTS WANT:
1. that the spirit and not the exterior form of the machine be reproduced,
creating compositions which employ all manner of expressive means as
well as mechanical elements;
2. that these expressive means and mechanical elements be coordinated
by an original lyrical canon, not a studied, scientific one;
3. that the essence of the machine be understood as its forces, rhythms
and the infinite analogies which it suggests;
4. that the machine conceived of in this manner become the source of
inspiration for the evolution and development of the plastic arts.
(Paladini, Pannaggi, Prampolini 1923)
This spiritual drift in the understanding of technology, alongside the

representation of a strict epistemological dualism, was to become even
more evident in the genre of Futurist aeropainting of the 1930s and its
theoretical basis, a manifesto co-signed by Balla, Benedetta, Depero,
Dottori, Fillìa, Prampolini, Somenzi and Tato. Originally conceived to
express the new ‘aerial visual perspective’ produced by flight,
aeropainting was eventually coupled with the emerging interest in sacral
art and religious iconography, and developed into a kind of ‘cosmic
idealism’, in which mystical elements were pervasive (Miracco 2004).
A similar perspective was extended in several theoretical texts
published by Marinetti in his Edizioni Futuriste di ‘Poesia’ series, as for
instance, L’uomo e la macchina (Man and the Machine, 1941) by
Augusto Platone, one of the many air pilot-artists enlisted in the Futurist
group, or Poesia della macchina (Machine Poetry, 1942) by Maria
Goretti. For Platone, machines were less about matter than about spirit,
because they were inspirational for ‘great endeavours like Italo Balbo’s
[1933 flight from Rome to Chicago with twenty-four flying boats]’.
Naturally, the Futurists were ‘the first to react against dominant
Positivism in order to create a new aesthetics of the machine’ through a
‘beautiful synthesis’, by which the machine was freed of its practical
functions, to rise to the spiritual and selfless life of the arts’ (Platone
1941: 21).
Technology as art and craft
The majority of Munari’s theoretical reflections on art and design was

published after the Second World War, in books such as Da cosa nasce
cosa (Things Born from Things, 1961), Arte come mestiere (Art as
Profession, 1966), and Artista e designer (Artist and Designer, 1971).

However, the basic epistemological assumptions of Munari’s conception
of art and technology, and their mutual interaction, were already present
in his early works, starting from his macchina aerea (1930) and his first
macchine inutili (1932). Both, in fact, can be regarded as an artistic
implementation of a new, Leonardesque understanding of technology as
a form of art.
It has to be remembered that when, in 1925, Munari moved to Milan,
he worked for a year with one of his uncles who was an engineer. This,
surely, had an influence on him, not only because this relative of his
‘freed him from the temptation to create a style of his own, easily
recognisable in the art market but in the long run sterile’ (Tanchis 1986:
11), but also because it shaped his understanding of technology and
developed his technical ability to manipulate mechanisms and materials.
This is explicitly stated by Munari also regarding another of his uncles,
Vittorio, who was a luthier:
I was going quite often to his studio to see how he bent the maple sheets
to make the lateral curve of the violin […] I loved to work with materials
and with the tools of an artisan. I liked the smell and the texture of wood,
the smell of the varnish […] I liked to make things, to cut, to glue, to
design. (Munari 1986: 74).
In another text, dated 1924 and later included in Arte come mestiere, he
reported about his childhood and described a ‘Leonardesque Machine’.
He capitalized the word ‘Machine’, possibly because of its archetypical
nature: an old wooden watermill on the banks of the Po river, an archaic
machine ‘that looked like it had been built by Robinson Crusoe’, with
slow circular movements, synchronized with natural cycles:
The entire Machine was made of old wood, now faded grey, its grain in
high relief from exposure to the weather. Only the metal hinges of the
wheel and the millstones, polished from continuous friction, shone inside
the cabin […]. The whole Machine creaked, squeaked, sighed, rumbled
and gurgled, and you could distinguish the rhythms produced by the
rotation of the wheel. The Great Wheel was a constantly changing
spectacle. (Munari et al. 2000: 28)
One should not underestimate the fact that Munari was possibly one of
the few Futurists who had practical, hands-on experience of machines
and machinery. Therefore it is not surprising that Munari considered his
useless machines to be, before anything else, machines, because they

were built with several interconnected moving parts, and their
movements were coordinated by levers which for Munari, possessed the
most simple form of a machine, a sort of ‘first degree machine’. Just like
Leonardo’s study of machines starting from basic forms like screws,
Munari’s starting point was the simple geometric and dynamic principle
that held different elements together in an organic, interconnected whole
(Meneguzzo 1993: 125). All of Munari’s projects were meticulously
planned and designed before being actually executed. In spite of the
many Dadaistic elements in his art, Munari’s conceptualization of
technology was basically structuralist, in the sense that his point of
departure was always the limits and the constraints of a given technology
and/or the given materials, considered as the very root of artistic
invention:
The secret is that I always start from engineering, not from art. Many
people start with an idea that they want to realize at all costs. That’s not
my method. If you start with the engineering, you know how far you can
go. An industry has specific technologies and techniques, so you try and
make something different with what you have to work with […]; this is
the essence of creativity. You carry out the project by applying your
technical capabilities and creativity. (Munari 1993: 106)
Such considerations moved in the opposite direction to the anarchic

genius Marinetti and his fellow Futurists saw as the source and driving
force of the technological imagination. For Munari, technology was not
an ideal or a myth but in the first instance an instrument. Also, he never
tried to impose any abstract ideas onto his technicians, but always sought
their collaboration, by making any object, any work of art, ‘on the field’
(‘cercavo la collaborazione, volevo fare l’oggetto sul campo’), working
alongside with people who used these technologies in their everyday
trade (Munari 1993: 106). As Meneguzzo pointed out:
Munari approaches technology – any form of technology – with that

mental disposition that etymologically could be called ingenuity: it is
from the custodians of machines, from the employers and workers, who
know them as real instruments and not as production data on the drawing
board, that Munari, as a designer, seeks information, even on their
malfunctions. (Meneguzzo 1993: 23)
Here we can also find the root of Munari’s formalism, often derived from
technological solutions. For him, there was no distinction between ‘pure
art’ and ‘applied art’. In the spirit of the democratic and anti-elitist ethos
of the Bauhaus, Munari thought that ‘‘beautiful’ is what is ‘right’. Any
good project produces a beautiful object’ (Munari 1966: 31). Munari
undertook an explicit deconstruction of the romantic notion of the artist
as genius, of art as inspiration, which still pervaded much of Futurist
rhetoric. Instead, he favoured an active, pragmatic and ethical
engagement, resorting to a vocabulary that was quite at odds with the
majority of Futurist theorization:
We ought to demolish the myth of the artist as a star, who only makes
masterpieces for intelligent people [...] The artist should relinquish any
romantic aspects of his art to become an active man among other men;
someone who is informed about present technologies, materials and
working methods; someone who, without abandoning his instinctive
aesthetic sensitivity, would respond with humbleness and competence to
the questions that his fellow human beings will ask him. (Munari 1966:
19)
Finally, Munari’s machines are ‘useless’ because ‘unlike other machines,

they don’t produce consumer goods, they don’t make workforces
obsolete and don’t contribute to the growth of wealth or capital’ (Munari
1966: 15). Munari argued the same with regard to the so-called ‘a-
rhythmic machines’ which he constructed in the 1950s. Their movements
‘are released by regular and rhythmically functioning mechanism and
that serve to maintain regular mechanical running, discharging excessive
energy from the machine’. The idea was to make ‘fortuitous’ energy ‘act
by encouraging a-rhythmic movements […] so as to make the
functioning of a machine less regular, especially if its functioning is
totally useless and unproductive’ (Tanchis 1986: 33).
Munari explored his interest in the playful and gratuitous dimensions
of technology a stage further in his macchine umoristiche, twelve
‘amusing machines’ that he drew – again in parallel to Leonardo’s
mechanical projects – and published in book format with Einaudi in
1942: a mechanism to tame alarm clocks; a lizard-propelled engine for
lazy turtles; a machine to smell artificial flowers; a mechanism to play
the flute even when one is not at home, and so on (Munari 2001).
Leonardo Sinisgalli, a poet and engineer who, in the 1950s, was the
editor of one of the most prestigious industrial magazine of post-war
Italy, Civiltà delle macchine, eloquently praised Munari’s work, listing
him within a whole genealogy of fantastic and comical machinery: from
the surreal work of Raymond Roussell to the amphibian and absurd
machines of Francis Picabia; from the comical illustrations of Rowland

Emett to Franz Kafka’s ‘optimistic’ nightmares, like the Odradek in Die
Sorge des Hausvaters (The Worries of a Family Man) or the bizarre
machinery of In der Strafkolonie (In the Penal Colony) (Sinisgallli 1954,
1956; Mucci 1955). According to Vittorio Orazi (pseudonym of
Prampolini’s brother, Alessandro), the true merit of artists like Picabia or
Munari was to bring machines back to the ‘syntax of poetical emotions’,
from which they were unjustly excluded, because they have been always
conceptualized ‘under the umbrella of utilitarian contingencies’ (Orazi
1955: 76-77).
By placing the machine within a gratuitous realm not subject to
economic rationality, Munari presented a covert form of Marxist critique
of the capitalist use of technology and of ‘surplus value’. He sought also
to liberate technology from that understanding that was so dominant in
twentieth century philosophy – Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers or
Gunther Arehns – according to which technology was a superimposed
form of teleological rationality. Very much in the spirit of Norbert
Wiener’s concept of ‘creative invention’ (Wiener 1994), Munari pursued
the idea that technical and artistic innovation are often the product of
chance, of contingent and unpredictable conditions: ‘Reason and calculus
will surely be used to give shape to this four-dimensional object, but the
general idea emerged by chance, from sensorial receptors, from
contextual conditions, from food, light, health, temperature. Art emerges
when one doesn’t know what one is doing’ (Munari, in Bellasi 2004: 33).
On the other hand, Munari did not question the relationship between
art and the capitalistic means of production, but on the other hand he saw
technology and industrialized mass production as an instrument of
emancipation rather than alienation:
If we want to arrive at an art made by everybody (which is not the same

as an art made for everybody), we need to find the instruments to
facilitate artistic production and, at the same time, to train everybody and
provide them with a production methodology. Bourgeois Art with a
capital A, handmade by a Genius only for rich people, makes no sense in
our age; Art for everybody is still this kind of art but cheaper: it still
bears the imprint of the Genius, while leaving everybody else with a
sense of inferiority. The technological possibilities of our age allow
everybody to produce something with an aesthetic value; allow everyone
who got rid of his/her inferiority complex to put his/her creativity,
humiliated for far too long, into action. (Munari 1971: 105)
A final interesting element in Munari’s epistemology is the intrinsic

monism in his understanding of the relationship between technology and
nature – which is the opposite of the spiritual, religious and cosmic drift
dominant in Futurist art of the 1920s and 30s. For him, there was no
dualistic separation between nature and technology, between the artificial
and the natural. In his view, both are nothing but segments on the same
continuity (see note 6). Very much like Leonardo’s projects, Munari’s
ventures started off with an observation of nature, which provided the
defining elements of intrinsic organicity and unity to the project under
hand (Munari 1966: 6). Nature is in fact flexible, adaptable, able to
produce an infinite variety of forms starting from a few given elements.
This is also the root of the spontaneous empiricism so typical of
Munari’s method: thought itself, he claimed, comes from nature and
from the observation of its structures and laws (Munari 1997: 104). This
is possibly the reason why, when discussing the principles of ‘form
following function’ – one of the key principle of twentieth-century
industrial design and modern architecture – Munari does not refer to John
Sullivan, one of the fathers of American modernism, who coined the
phrase, or to the Bauhaus theorization which extensively applied this
principle to industrial design, but to the French biologist Jean-Baptiste
Lamarck (Munari 1966: 29).9 For Munari, the integration of art and
technology in the modern world could only be achieved by returning to
their organic unity with natural principles, so that in the end they may
become an effective, life enhancing part of our everyday human
existence.
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Futurism and Nature:
The Death of the Great Pan?
Marja Härmänmaa
Abstract: This chapter is concerned with the relationship between Futurism and
Nature and the representation of the latter in the works of F.T. Marinetti. Initially,
Futurism’s glorification of technology and the modern city entailed a complete
rupture of the relationship between humankind and organic Nature, a relationship that
had been central in nineteenth century philosophy and literature. Futurism abandoned
the myth of Pan, which symbolized the cult of Nature and was based on a concept of
cyclical time, and adopted the one of Prometheus (the civilizing power) and of
Ulysses (the heroic force) – which operated with a linear conception of history and
emphasized the idea of progress. Marinetti replaced the bucolic landscape of
mountains, rivers, fields and sea with an ultra-modern cityscape of steel and concrete.
But did this really mean that there was no place for organic Nature in the Futurist
world view? This chapter suggests that Marinetti’s conception endorsed the idea of
Nature as an enemy that needed to be tamed and controlled by humankind.
‘Come on! Let’s go!’ I said. ‘Come on, my lads, let’s get out of here!’
At long last, all the myths and mystical ideals are behind us. […]
And we, like young lions, chased after Death…
F.T. Marinetti: The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism
The kingdom of Pan
In the philosophical debates that accompanied the transition from

Rationalist Enlightenment to Idealist Romanticism, pantheism played
a major role. German philosophers substituted the Cartesian
mechanical conception of the world with one that was characterized
by its organic and dynamic features. The ‘occult’ and ‘mysterious’
forces that French philosophers, among others, had removed from
Nature, were re-instated by the Germans who interpreted Nature
teleologically and considered her both as a spiritual and physical
entity. A central role in the development of Naturphilosophie as a
‘spiritualized pantheism’ is to be accorded to Friedrich Wilhelm
Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854). For him, Nature was a system of
spiritual forces, and life a continuous process from inorganic
338 Marja Härmänmaa
unconscious Nature (matter) to the organic conscious Nature (spirit),

and then back again. Nature gained such a fundamental position in
Schelling’s ontology that he considered the analysis of the interaction
between Man and Nature to be the main task of philosophy (Tavoillot
1995; Bouton 2005). In addition to these philosophers, writers such as
Goethe and Schiller popularized new ways of perceiving Nature. The
Romantics attempted to resuscitate heroism and creativity and thereby
to rediscover the sense of the Divine that had been destroyed by
Reason during the Age of Enlightenment. Their eager search for God
led many of them into the realm of Nature, and thus gave birth to a
creed that Carlyle baptised as ‘Natural Supernaturalism’.
In Italian literature of the nineteenth century, Nature was a
fundamental concern for several poets, who saw in contemporary
society the opposite of Nature and as a result something which they,
as artists, had to separate themselves from. Giacomo Leopardi for one
equated Nature with (physis, or life). Its contemplation provided
him with new aesthetic paradigms; to approach it with an intellectual
attitude came close to a betrayal of poetry. Giovanni Pascoli also
made the mysterious forces of Nature a key theme of his poetics.
Considering Nature as an alternative to contemporary society, he
withdrew to his home in Castelvecchio to contemplate ‘small things’,
such as birds, plants, and ordinary people dealing with ordinary
things. Gabriele D’Annunzio neither detached himself from the
readers of his literary works, nor did he completely manage to hide his
repugnance towards the society that surrounded him. However, the
‘authentic’ D’Annunzio was a devotee of Pan, as can be seen in
Alcyone. This collection of poems glorifies ‘Mother Nature’ within the
concept of cyclical time. It can be seen as a homage to the eternal and
infinite universe compared to which human beings appear small and
insignificant.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, during his pre-Futurist years, was also
an heir to the Romantic cult of Pan. Strongly influenced by Belgian
symbolism, especially that of Rodenbach and Verhaeren, he
developed his very first poetical myths from the endless celestial
spaces and cosmic rites of Nature. They were particularly central to
the collection of three poems and one poetical prose work that
Pasquale Jannini has called ‘Padanian micro-cycle’ (Jannini 1983: 19-
21). These idealistic works are dominated by the charming and
melancholic atmosphere of the Northern Italian plain (Pianura
Futurism and Nature 339
Padana or Val Padana). The crucial motifs of the sunset, twilight,

evening and the moon create a psychological landscape of pessimism
and moral ennui.
Dark shadows on the horizon
However, along with the pastoral image of Nature as an alternative to

decadent contemporary society, or as a heavenly paradise where
human beings can enter into contact with the divine, Nature also
aroused negative feelings. Already in Leopardi there was an obverse
face to Nature, a more mechanistic and materialistic one. Nature could
be a malicious ‘stepmother’ who does not care for her children but
rather ignores the individual and focuses on the furtherance of the
species and the conservation of the world. This conception prompted
Leopardi’s cosmic pessimism, where Nature is an insensitive and
cruel mechanism that allows human beings to be born only to lead a
life of suffering.
In Marinetti’s cosmology, from an early stage onwards, Nature is
characterized by aggressive and violent forces. This culminates,
during his Futurist period, in the figure of the Vulcan in L’aeroplano
del Papa and in the earthquake in Zang Tumb Tumb. Yet in his pre-
Futurist epic poem, La Conquête des étoiles (1902), the landscape is
formed by the monster-like ‘Sovereign Sea’ which has a spongy face,
burning pupils and a mouth that opens like a plunger (ventouse). [71]
In the ‘crepuscular nightmare’ when the Night ‘dribbles the flows of
shadow’ and ‘licks the light with his brown tongue’, ‘the Fatidic
Mountain’ seems to vacillate as ‘a cathedral constructed by Titans’
(Marinetti 1983b: 92-93). Similarly, in Mafarka il futurista (1910),
Nature is energetic and violent, dominated by ‘chaotic mountains’
[37] and by the monster-like sea that has ‘sparkling blue teeth’ [37].
The moon and the sunset are replaced by the fierce Sun that in the
African sky ‘[rides] bareback on its untameable black mare, convulsed
with speed’. [9]
As a consequence, respect if not fear towards the forces of Nature
seems to be a fundamental element in Marinetti’s ideology. In The
Necessity and Beauty of Violence (1910) he spoke of ‘the dark forces
of Nature, ensnared in the nets and traps of chemical and mechanical
formulas, and therefore enslaved by mankind’. However, the control is
not complete, nor necessarily enduring, and the risk that these
enchained forces one day or another will ‘wreak a terrible revenge,
leaping at our throats, with all the impetuous savagery of mad dogs’,
persists. (Marinetti 1910b: 64)
These ‘furious dogs’ to which Marinetti compares the forces of
Nature made their first appearance in Mafarka the Futurist, where
they come into view on different occasions. In the third chapter,
named ‘The Sun Dogs’, there are several battles between human
beings and the forces of Nature. First the simoom, the fierce African
wind that furiously wraps the city in sand and unleashes other
‘fantastic apparitions’ arrives, giving an impression as if he had
‘uprooted a forest and set it tumbling pell-mell across the open sky,
with hordes of capering demons, juggling red firebrands’ (Marinetti
1997: 63). Then follow the hungry dogs of the desert which Faras-
Magalla pushes towards the city in order to attack Mafarka and his
men. The chapter concludes with a ten-page long description of the
fight between men and dogs, and the victory of the former.
Of all the elements of Nature, wind is the most aggressive, and
repeatedly appears in Marinetti’s writings – although with different
connotations. For instance, already in La Conquête des étoiles, ‘the
Insane Winds of hatred and madness’ support The Sovereign Sea in
the battle against the Stars. In Gli indomabili (1922), the wind, the
same simoom as in Mafarka, is an ally of the Sun and an emblem of
modernization, for it destroys the Oasis of the Moon and covers it
with sand. (Marinetti 1983: 935) On the other hand, in Spagna veloce
e toro futurista (1931), Surly Wind (Vento Burbero) has a twofold
meaning. At the beginning of the poem, the Wind symbolizes all the
forces of the past which it commandeers. It tries its best to prevent
Marinetti’s car journey into Madrid where the poet is supposed to give
a lecture on Futurism. Later on, it attacks the Spanish capital which,
on the one hand, has a modern face and is ‘pulsating with fast cars’
(Marinetti 1983: 1033), but on the other remains traditional with its
Arabian architecture and Flamenco folklore. At this point, the Surly
Wind contributes to the modernization of the city by dispersing the
saetas (public religious wailing during Semana Santa) and by
transforming them into the roar of motorcars echoing back from the
rocky haunches of the Sierra. The poem ends in a somewhat
emblematic way, as the vast mountain ranges become slender and
metallic, grow aluminium wings and fly up into the sky (Marinetti
1983: 1036).
The battle between humans and Nature continues to be an
important element in Marinetti’s representations of war. Already
during the First World War it was a salient feature of Futurist
propaganda, which presented the forces of tradition as the true enemy
rather than a foreign Nation. During the period of the Ethiopian
campaign of 1935 - 41, this trait became even more pronounced. By
the mid 1930s, Marinetti had come to accept the influence of the
Catholic Church on Italian society (which had been consolidated by
the Lateran pact of 1929). Henceforth, the Futurist superman –
formerly a machine-like, immoral and insensible being – transformed
into a missionary of good will and justice, imbued with love towards
his neighbour. Thus, in Marinetti’s depictions of the African
campaign, the Italian soldier takes a merciful attitude even towards the
enemy and gives his final drop of water to a prisoner who suffers of
thirst under the hot African sun. (Marinetti 1937: 204) In Marinetti’s
writings of the period, the Abyssinians appear only very occasionally
as the enemy. The true battle is fought between Man and Nature: the
sun and especially the thirst that assumes human form metamorphoses
into ‘prodigious daughters of the Sun, with her endlessly extended
body made of zinc opening up like a blade’ and becomes the Italian
soldier’s worst adversary. (Marinetti 1937: 135-136; Härmänmaa
2000; 235-237; Blum 1996: 147)
On a poetic level, the transformation of ‘Mother Nature’ into an
enemy helps to understand the motivations for the creation of the
kingdom of Prometheus based on the conception of Nature as the
‘Other’ to be subjugated and defended by the warrior figure Ulysses.
The conquest of the Absolute
With the foundation of the Futurist movement, Marinetti abandoned

the Kingdom of Pan, and devoted himself to new Gods: the civilizing
Prometheus and the adventurous Ulysses. (Micali 2007). The natural
landscape of mountains, rivers and forests was abandoned and
condemned; in its stead, Futurism glorified the artificial environment
created by humans. The Futurist universe of asphalt, brick and steel
gives evidence to human alienation from Nature and expresses the
enlightened conception according to which Nature is no more a divine

Other endowed with a proper will, but rather an inanimate enemy that
needs to be dominated and exploited (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997:
3-42).
Futurism was vehemently opposed to the pessimistic view that,
during the nineteenth century, had so often accompanied the
contemplation of Nature. They propagated a new faith in the
potentialities of humankind and thus gave rise to an optimism ‘at any
price’, as Bruno Sanzin called it (Sanzin 1938), that is, of an attitude
of ‘artificial optimism’ towards the future and to life in general. It also
meant the end of the artist’s isolation in the proverbial ‘ivory tower’
and the beginning of his active engagement in social life. In
Marinetti’s case, this culminated in the foundation of the Futurist
Political Party and his collaboration with the Fascist régime.
To be able not only to survive but to promote, in a vanguard
fashion, the values of a new mechanized society of the masses, human
beings need to change. Consequently, the beginning of the reign of
Prometheus also meant the birth of a race of supermen. This was to
take place precisely through the alliance of humans with the machine,
for it was due to technology (cars, aeroplanes, wireless and
telephones) that humans not only master the sinister forces of Nature,
but also finally conquer the Absolute. In Romantic ideology, the
concept of the ‘Absolute’ often coincided with ‘Nature’ and it was the
former that in so many cases led to pessimism. According to John
Stuart Mill, the Romantic movement was simply a reaction against a
certain ‘narrow’ kind of understanding of the world, epitomized by the
‘scientific’ Enlightenment. The ‘geometric thinking’ that in the arts
manifested itself in Neo-classicism and in philosophy in Lockean
Empiricism, subjugated life to reason, and thus mechanized and
debased it. The Romantics’ adoration of the Infinite and the Absolute
had somewhat controversial results, though. Whereas the Infinite was
understood to be immanent to reality, it provoked in human beings an
ever-lasting and all-consuming thrust toward the Absolute. This can
be compared to the Titans’ efforts to liberate themselves from
Tartaros, in which Zeus had cast them. However, the impossibility of
reaching the Infinite ultimately created a feeling of horror and
impotence, which sought to seek refuge in the interiority of the Self.
The conquest of the Absolute was also a prominent theme in
Marinetti’s œuvre, and already formed the core of the epic poem, La
Conquête des étoiles. On this occasion, the battle of the primordial

forces of Nature, the Sovereign Sea against the Stars, is the metaphor
of the battle of humankind and earth (reality) against infinity and
melancholic daydreaming represented by the Stars. Consequently, in
Mafarka the Futurist, Marinetti expressed his ‘artificial optimism’
towards the potentialities of humanity in extremely terms. The novel
is full of romantic motifs, many of which will be parodied. For
example, the Futurist hero transforms himself into a pseudo-Titan,
capable of dominating Infinity, whereas ‘the concept of the infinite
universe fits perfectly well within the margin of [his] head… just as
strong perfumes that could stir a whole town by themselves are
contained in one tiny pastille.’ [35] Also in the Foundation and
Manifesto of Futurism, Marinetti returns to the question of the
Absolute writing that, with the help of technology, humankind had
become its master: ‘Smash down the mysterious doors of the
Impossible. Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in
the realms of the Absolute, for we have created infinite, omnipresent
speed.’ (Marinetti 1909: 14).
With this allusion to time, Marinetti trivializes Einstein’s relativity
theory according to which time will stop when the speed of light has
been attained. Consequently, Marinetti suggests that humans, with
their ever faster vehicles, will be able to reach a timeless state and thus
become immortal. Also, thanks to technology, distances diminish and
the world becomes ever smaller, which is proof of the birth of the
Superman who has conquered the Absolute. (Härmänmaa 2001) Some
twenty years later, he still repeats the same idea, stating that the pilots,
the Futurist heroes par excellence of the interwar period, with their
flights around the world had ‘compressed the earth into a wrinkled,
fresh orange that could be squeezed into juice and enjoyed with
pleasure’. (Marinetti 1932: 2)
Reconsidering the countryside
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the ‘machine’ was an

exclusive object rather than an everyday commodity. For this reason, a
person in an automobile overtaking a horse-drawn carriage could
easily feel as if s/he were the master of the machine – if not of the
whole world. Such optimistic views towards progress and technology
were shaken when the hyper-efficient machinery of war caused the

death of millions of soldiers on the battlefields of the First World War.
Doubts arose as to whether it was human beings who control
machines, or vice versa. For instance, in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis
(1926), the protagonist, seeing the central machine of the city for the
very first time, cries out: ‘Moloch!’ Rather than being man’s servant,
this ogre is like a cruel Phoenician divinity demanding human
sacrifices.
During the interwar period, America exercised an increasing
influence in Europe, and consequently progress became associated
with capitalism, utilitarianism and materialism. Even within the Soviet
Union, doubts concerning the marvels of technology arose. When the
writer Ilya Ehrenburg met Vladimir Mayakovsky who had just visited
the United States, the latter told him that the country was a good place
for machines but not for men. Ehrenburg asked, whether Mayakovsky
had started to doubt ‘their program’. ‘No’, answered Mayakovksi, ‘but
there are many things that need to be reconsidered. Especially our
attitude towards technology.’1
The ever-growing suspicion toward progress and industrialization
gave way to different kinds of anti-modernistic movements which,
during the interwar period, tried to offer an alternative to the Futuristic
adoration of the kingdom of the machine. In Italy, towards the end of
the 1920s, the strapaese movement propagated its pessimistic outlook
on urban society and defended traditional and ‘authentic’ life-styles,
which they believed could still be found in the countryside. Since
most of them were of Florentine origin, their ‘new Italian’ was to be
found in the rural areas of Tuscany. Mino Maccari, painter and
journalist and one of the leading figures of the movement, wrote in the
programme of the strapaese movement that they would defend, ‘with
sword in hand, the rural essence of Italian people’ against the threat of
‘foreign and modern ideas and fashions that might subjugate, poison
or even destroy the genuine Italian character’. (Maccari 1929; Luti
1972: 156-170; Mangoni 1974: 136-149)
1
This conversation is reported in a Finnish collection of the articles Ehrenburg
published in the review Novyj mir, entitled Ihmisiä, vuosia, elämää III Ilja
Ehrenburg Novyj mir- aikakauskirjassa vuosina 1960-1961, 1961-1962, 1963
julkaistusta alkutekstistä suom. Juhani Konkka. Vol. 2 Tampere: Kansankulttuuri,
1980, 111.
Such views were opposed by a group called stracittà who favoured

the modernization and urbanization of the country. (Luti 1972: 148-
156: Asor Rosa 1975: 1500-1513) Like Marinetti, who also
disparaged nostalgic attitudes towards the countryside, they glorified
technology and progress as signs of power and dynamism, while the
countryside was considered synonymous with peace and tranquillity.
This kind of association was already present in Marinetti’s War, the
Sole Cleanser of the World (1911), in the sarcastic comments on the
ideal state of peace longed for by the Anarchists. According to
Marinetti, the latter denied ‘the infinite principle of human evolution’
and hankered after ‘a ludicrous paradise composed of warm embraces,
under rustling palm leaves, out in the country’. (Marinetti 1911: 53) In
Il paesaggio e l’estetica futurista della macchina (1931), Marinetti
satirized the countryside as an environment of ‘smooth and green
meadows where the sun walks with solemn steps among the beautiful
country lasses and chubby little children, in the circle of hills
decorated with serene, umbrella-like pine-trees’, imbued with an
atmosphere ‘luxuriant and enchanted without stress nor ambitions.’
(Marinetti 1983: 1151-1152) A similar deprecation of the countryside
can be found in the manifesto of the Futurist Naturist movement in
which it is characterized as ‘bovine, dull and discontented’, harmful as
‘the degeneration of brain and joints caused by long and smoky bridge
games and by crosswords’, for both signified immobility and thus
‘deteriorated muscles and brains cluttering them up with parasitic
superimpositions, such as obscenity and nostalgia.’ (Marinetti &
Ginna 1934)
On a political level, the battle between the forces for and against
modernization started in Italy immediately after Fascism had sized
power. After the economic crisis during the years 1929-1934, in the
name of the campaign called ‘ruralism’, the government took severe
measures to slow down emigration from countryside to city and to
support agriculture. To assist the campaign, the press started to
disseminate a negative image of the city as a cradle of all sinfulness, a
place of pale and degenerate inhabitants. The opposite of ‘Gomorra’
was the tranquil and serene countryside where people lived a hale and
hearty existence. (Zunino 1985: 281-288)
Although, at the beginning of the 1930s, many Fascist politicians
seemed willing to transform Italy into a pastoral paradise, in reality
there was no return to the Kingdom of Pan, for the era was one of
Prometheus. The majority of the country’s leaders were fully aware of

the fact that the power and importance of the nation rested on its
industrial rather than rural base. To defend the drive towards
modernization, Arnaldo Mussolini stated in 1931 that ‘machines
create no danger in Italy.’ (Mussolini 1931) And a couple of years
later, his brother Benito wrote in a similar vein that Fascism was able
to create a harmonic relationship between Man and machine, for even
though the latter could subject the former, the Fascist State was able to
control the machine and turn it into a germinator of freedom and
welfare rather than misery. (Mussolini 1934)
This may explain why Futurism gained such an important position
in the cultural life of Fascist Italy. It may also offer an explanation for
Marinetti’s somewhat changed assessment of technology in the period
of Aerofuturism. It is true that despite the generally critical outlook on
modernization during the 1930s, aeroplanes were among the few
products of industrialization and technology that were able to arouse
enthusiasm. Yet the glorification of aviation also reinforced the
spiritual dimension of Futurist ‘macchinolatria’ and helped detach it
from mere utilitarianism and materialism. (Härmänmaa 2007) Finally,
it also explains Marinetti’s somewhat changed attitude towards the
countryside during the decade.
Nature as a resource
Regardless of the glorification of technology and the industrialized

city, in Marinetti’s early Futurist writings Nature is present in
different ways. First of all, animals occupy a dominant position in the
representation of technology as cars and locomotives metaphorically
transform into serpents and lions. (Micali 2007: 104) Secondly,
Marinetti locates several of his works in wild Nature, insisting on the
study of the relationship between humankind and Nature. This is the
case in Mafarka the Futurist, which is situated in Africa and has the
battle between humans and Nature as one of its main themes.
Successively, savage, primordial Nature returns in the play Il tamburo
di fuoco (1922) and in Gli indomabili (1922), an allegorical novel
about the development of humankind, of revolution and the arts.
Whereas in the former, one of the main motifs is the civilization of a
wild continent, in the latter work, the countryside is further censured
as an Oasis, with its ‘one thousand years old darkness’, symbolizing

an ambience in which human beings remain ignorant and uncivilized.
On the opposite side of the coin, there is a reward for the Untamables
to reach the city of ‘Spiritual Freedom’, as it symbolizes to them the
‘centre of wisdom and enlightened minds’. (Marinetti 1963: 919-
1012)
The primitive component of these works, especially the African
heroes Mafarka and Kabango in Il tamburo di fuoco (1922), is to be
taken as a rejection of Western civilization deemed too decadent.
Instead, Marinetti propagated a return to a primordial state in which
the creative forces lie dormant. His condemnation of intellectualism
also signified the denunciation of middle-class cultural values and of a
world that does not grant any space for originality or creativity and
had eliminated adventure and heroism. In this context, however,
Marinetti showed no signs of nostalgia towards the reign of Pan, nor
later, when he became inspired by the movements propagating a
return to Nature.
In other European countries, dissatisfaction with contemporary life
styles catalyzed a search for alternative ways of living in harmony
with Nature, and a birth of different Naturist movements. The term
‘Naturism’ was probably used for the first time by the Belgian doctor
Jean Baptiste Luc Planchon (1734-1781), and implicated a natural and
healthy style of life.2 At the same time, in Germany, the professor of
experimental physics, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799),
recommended regular sunbathing as a means of improving one’s state
of health. In France, some one-hundred years later, the poet Saint-
George de Bouhélier (whom Marinetti seems to have known
personally) published in Le Figaro the Manifesto of Naturism (1897).
This movement was predominantly a literary one and was directed
against Symbolism. But it also had an important political and
nationalistic dimension in as much as it concretized the idea of a
rebirth of the national spirit and of new heroes from the fertile soil of
the fatherland. On the pages of La Revue naturiste, with certain
affinities to the Anarchist movement, Bouhélier attacked the ruling
social and political institutions and the cultural influence of Germany
in France. (Orlandi 1981; Jannini 1983: 15-16)
2
As he outlined in his book Le Naturisme, ou la nature considérée dans les maladies
et leur traitement conforme à la doctrine et à la pratique d'Hippocrate et ses
sectateurs (Tournay: Varlé, 1778).
Finally, Germany was the country where, at the end of the

nineteenth century, numerous Naturist movements came to the fore.
The art historian Julius Langbehn had exposed in Rembrandt als
Erzieher (Leipzig: Hirschfeld, 1891) his idea of the spiritual-cultural
degeneration of the German people as a result of industrialization and
urbanization.3 Langbehn appreciated the English for their way of
taking care of their body with sports, and blamed the Germans of their
bad habits, of beer drinking, for instance. For Langbehn, physical and
spiritual sanity were Hellenic and aristocratic characteristics, and also
an imperative for a peaceful life. (Langbehn 1891; Härmänmaa 2000:
39, 216-217)
At the turn of the century, Langbehn’s ideas influenced different
Lebensreform movements which, as a reaction to the urbanization of
German society, glorified the healthy life-style in the countryside. The
Wandervögel movement, founded in 1896 by Hermann Hoffmann,
promoted an ideology that combined fitness with nationalism. The
‘freebirds’ or ‘ramblers’ were young men and women, who organized
themselves in small groups without the leadership of grown-ups. Their
main activities were hiking, sitting at camp fires and making music
together, as a self-defined way of living outside the restraints of a
fixed and regulated bourgeois existence. Like the German Naturist
movement, the Wandervögel aimed at the regeneration of humankind
and society with vegetarianism, abstention from alcohol and with
alternative medicine. The movement condemned the city as a centre of
immorality and glorified nudism in the name of a ‘natural’ way of
living. (Mosse 1985: 50; Toepfer 1997)
At the beginning of the 1930s, Naturism began to arouse some
interest in Northern Italy, as several publications can testify.4
3
For Langbehn, Rembrand represented a mystic-romantic counterweight to the
aberrations of the modern age; he was therefore seen as the ideal ‘tutor’ and his art
as a spiritual model for a Germanic rebirth.
4
In 1923, the journal Il ginnasta: Rivista mensile della Federazione Ginnastica
Nazionale reported for the first time on German nudism, which seems to have
inspired the Austrian-born citizen of Trieste Ernesto Guido Gorischegg (1901-1988)
to promote an Italian version of Freikörperkultur. Ettore Piccoli outlined its medical
objectives in Naturismo: igiene dell'anima e del corpo secondo natura (Milan:
Bolla, 1931) and translated Jørgen Peter Müller’s Freiluftbuch (Leipzig: Grethlein.,
1927) as La vita all'aria aperta (Milan: Sperling e Kupfer, 1931). The same year,
Lamberto Paoletti founded the review L'idea naturalista. Rivista illustrata mensile.
Organo ufficiale dell’Unione Naturista Italiana (1931-1943) and soon afterwards
However, it was the Futurists who were particularly responsible for

popularizing the movement in Italy.
Sons of Prometheus
In 1934, Marinetti founded the Futurist Naturist movement together

with Arnaldo Ginna, Fillìa and, serving as secretary, Federico De
Filippis. Already at the end of the 1920s, Ginna had showed an
interest in alternative medicine and directed the journal Il Nuovo that
in 1934-35 became the official mouthpiece of the Federazione
Naturista-Futurista (followed by La Forza, directed by Fillìa). Futurist
Naturism was mainly a movement without artistic orientation,
approved by Mussolini and, at least to some extent, tolerated by the
régime. A conspicuous number of doctors, artists, architects and
farmers joined the association and contributed articles dealing with
health, demography and other social questions. On 29 September
1934, they held their first congress and used the occasion to publish a
Manifesto del naturismo futurista and to organize an exhibition (a
second followed in Genoa in January 1935, and a third in Turin in
October 1935). (Salaris 1992: 178-181; Härmänmaa 2000: 39-41)
Futurist Naturism was the logical consequence of Marinetti’s
interest in the intellectual and physical improvement of humankind.
During the period in which pseudo-scientific trends such as eugenics
were gaining ground in Europe, Marinetti’s very first version of ‘the
brave New Man’ had been the Utopian uomo moltiplicato, an
immortal, insensible machine-like being – like the immortal
Gazourmah in Mafarka il futurista. Over the next fifteen years, this
Utopian anthropoid was to disappear almost completely. Yet some
traces of it can still be found in the pilots of Aerofuturism who were
‘masters of the machine, fused with it, a-hundred-times multiplied by
it’, who possessed ‘lungs that extend into the exhaust pipes of the
aeroplane’, and had ‘hearts that functioned like the pump of the
aeroplane’s carburettor’. (Marinetti 1931)
During the interwar period, in order to contribute towards the
improvement of the quality of life of the Italian people, Marinetti
published Naturismo, arte di vivere (Milan: Corbaccio, 1934). Another activist was
Eugenio Paulin, whose book Nudità e naturismo (Trieste: Moscheni 1934) became
the bible of the small Italian Naturist movement.
became somewhat more serious. For many Western States – both

totalitarian and democratic ones – the mental and physical health of its
citizens became a key concern. The fight against an imagined
degeneration of mass society varied from promoting sports activities
to prohibition laws, from advanced social policies to eugenics, and
finally to concentration camps for citizens deemed unwanted. In
accordance with the Naturist movements of other countries, the
Futurists sought to improve the ways of life and thus the health of the
Nation. Already before the inception of the Naturist movement, from
the beginning of the 1930s, Marinetti had showed an interest in issues
of health and had written several articles about nutrition and medical
questions. (Härmänmaa 2000: 34-43) Yet Futurist Naturism had very
little in common with the German Naturist movements that
emphasized life in harmony with Nature, for the former was – as Fillìa
put it – a Naturist movement ‘understood in an Italian way’ that
rejected all the forms of foreign Naturism and instead focussed on the
problems of the Italian race and Italian Nature’. (Fillìa 1935)
Whereas in the German version of Naturism the centre of attention
was an attempt to return to primordial Nature, for the Italian Futurists
there was neither possibility nor will to escape from mechanical
civilization. Ginna wrote that the Futurists wanted to modernize
Naturism. They knew the laws of Nature; they admired and studied
them, but did not obey them. The Futurists wanted to ‘help the laws of
Nature with every possible modern means instead of leaving them in a
savage condition’. From this point of view, Futurist Naturism did not
offer an alternative to the modern world, but instead regarded
technology to be ‘an unavoidable product of Nature’ that ‘cured and
extended the human body’. (Marinetti and Ginna 1934)
Nudism, a ‘culture of sun and light’, was born around mid-
nineteenth century and gained popularity both in Germany and in the
United Kingdom, as well as in the Scandinavian countries. In 1906
Richard Ungewitter had published the book Die Nacktheit in
entwicklungsgeschichtlicher, gesundheitlicher, moralischer und
künstlerischer Beleuchtung (Nudity with Regard to its Developmental,
Salutary, Moral and Artistic Aspects), in which he had presented his
theories about a healthy lifestyle. The core of it was nudity, not only
because nakedness symbolized a natural and primordial way of living,
but also because it meant exposing the skin to the sun. As George
Mosse writes, nudism was however an anti-modernist movement, for
nudity was seen as a search for authenticity and for overcoming the
artificiality of modern life. (Mosse 1985) For this reason, it was
rejected by the Italian Naturists; but another major factor was the ever-
growing influence of the Catholic Church in Italian society.
In the Manifesto of Futurist Naturism, Marinetti and Ginna
criticized nudism as a ‘desertion from real life’, as an absurd effort to
return to a pre-industrial society prompted by the fear of mechanical
civilization. In addition to this, Marinetti and Ginna characterized
nudism as synonymous with pacifism, as a sign of harmful adoration
of foreign fashions, as unaesthetic, detrimental to sex appeal and as a
factor that is conducive to sexual ambiguity and, thus, to degeneration.
Marinetti parodied nudism in several literary and theatrical works of
the 1920s and 1930’s, for example, in the short story ‘Fa troppo caldo’
(It is too hot, 1922) and in a play Il suggeritore nudo (The Nude
Prompter, 1929). (Härmänmaa 2000: 42-44) It also seems that
Marinetti had a peculiar attitude towards the human body in general.
Although he treated procreation as one of the basic principles of the
Futurist movement, in his social reform he attached far more
significance to the spirit and mind. Obviously, his main aim was to
create courageous heroes for the war, but also creativity and elasticity
were regarded as virtues of the new Italian race. It is quite significant
that during the period in which muscular males were about to conquer
other European countries, Marinetti continued to show little interest in
the human body. Especially when it came to male bodies he displayed
a certain aversion towards muscularity and seemed to prefer almost
feminine lightness and agility. As he wrote in the Manifesto of
Futurist Cuisine:
We think it necessary to prevent Italian men from becoming stolid,

leaden hunks, dull and insensitive. They need to be more in tune with
the Italian female, who is a slender, spiraling transparency of passion,
tenderness, light, strong will, impulsiveness, and heroic tenacity. We
must make the Italian body agile, in keeping with the super-
lightweight aluminium trains that will take the place of the heavy iron,
wood, and steel trains currently in use.’ (Marinetti 1930: 395)
Whereas agility instead of muscularity was the key word in

Marinetti’s characterization of the ideal Futurist body, it also
conditioned his ideas about sports. The latter, being one of the new
religions of twentieth century’s mass society, obviously found a place
in the all-encompassing programme of the Futurist revolution of art

and life. The aim was to ‘modernize’ and ‘spiritualize’ physical
exercises, mainly by combining them with art. In the Manifesto of
Futurist Naturism, Marinetti and Ginna presented the idea of daily
gymnastics that consisted of movements that would be both aesthetic
and athletic. To make the sports more exciting, the Futurists promoted
the so-called ‘simultaneous sports’ which consisted of combining two
different activities such as running and reciting poems. (Härmänmaa
2000: 46) This was meant to counteract the influence of traditional
sports and athletic spectacles that started to become popular in the
1930s, especially in the form of the Olympic Games which Marinetti
explicitly condemned as ‘masturbation’. (Marinetti 1932b)
Natural autarchy
Another important component of Marinetti’s reform programme was

nutrition. A healthy, vegetarian diet was a central element of the
Naturist movements, and eating with different meanings had also
interested Marinetti since his pre-Futurist days. For example, in the
play Re Baldoria (King Guzzle), social conflicts are represented by
allegories of eating. The people, metonymically called Gli affamati
(the Hungry Ones), guided by the Socialist and Anarchist leaders,
Béchamel and Famone (namely Antonio Labriola and Enrico Turati),
rebel against the egotistical king, whom they finally devour and then
vomit out, thus creating a new social order. (Marinetti 1910a)
Following in the steps of eating as a metaphor of possession or
conquest, Marinetti’s interest in nutrition started to assume concrete
forms. At the beginning of the 1930s, Marinetti organized several
Futurist banquets, both in Italy and abroad, and finally created the
Futurist restaurant, La Taverna Santopalato (The Tavern of Holy
Palate) in Turin. The name of the restaurant parodies the Lateran Pact
of 1929, signed by Mussolini and Pope Pius XI, with which the
Catholic Church consolidated its position in Fascist Italy. The
restaurant, as well as the banquets, are to be seen as realizations of the
Futurist concept of ‘arte-vita’ (art-life) that aimed, on the one hand, at
aestheticizing everyday life, and on the other at rejuvenating art by
bringing it closer to real life. In this way, dishes and drinks were
turned into works of art. But also the whole event, made out of an
appropriately decorated dining space, music and other sounds, odours

and accompanying spectacles became an artistic manifestation. (F.T.
Marinetti and Fillìa 1932; Berghaus 2001; Härmänmaa 2004)
But eating had a more practical dimension, too. The gastronomic
revolution aimed at making the Italian diet healthier, and in the
Futurist Cookbook Marinetti explicitly roused his reader to ‘revolt
against excess weight, big stomachs and obesity’. The Italians needed
to be ‘strengthened, dynamized, lightened and spiritualized’ with new
dishes in which ‘the experience, intelligence and fantasy would have
replaced economically the quantity, banality, repetitiveness and
expensiveness’. (Marinetti and Fillìa 1986: 23-36.) While in these
suggestions the economic crisis of the early 1930s is palpably present,
Marinetti was convinced of the necessity of changing Italian eating
habits. For this reason, too, he founded Naturism, and already in the
first manifesto the authors recommended a light diet with plenty of
vegetables and fresh fruits.
Marinetti’s campaign against pasta, ‘that idiotic gastronomic fetish
of the Italians’ (Marinetti 1930: 395), was both aesthetically and
nationalistically motivated. Probably the first time Marinetti attacked
the sacred status of pasta was in 1930, in a radio broadcast from the
restaurant La Penna d’Oca, in which he stated: ‘Pasta, although
delicious, is a passéist dish, for it makes people dull, gives a wrong
idea of nutritional values, makes people sceptic, slow, heavy and
pessimistic.’ (Marinetti and Fillìa 1986: 25) In the Manifesto of
Futurist Cuisine, he suggested that ‘the abolition of pasta will liberate
Italy from the costly burden of foreign grain and will work in favor of
the Italian rice industry.’ (Marinetti 1930: 396)
The anti-pasta campaign was further justified by his claim that it
had a negative effect on the Italian spirit. Thus, all pasta eaters (and
critics of Futurist cuisine) were considered ‘melancholic spirits,
pleased with their melancholy and promoters of melancholy.’ Pasta
was not virile, for a full and a heavy stomach repressed any desire for
the female body and made the male loose his interest in conquering
her. (Marinetti and Fillìa 1986: 23-36) Marinetti’s statements were
even approved by a Neapolitan professor, Dr. Signorelli, who stated
that pasta ‘induces sluggishness, depression, inertia brought on by
nostalgia, and neutralism.’ (Marinetti 1930: 396)
In addition to its healthy and artistic dimension, the Futurist
gastronomic revolution was also a part of Marinetti’s larger campaign
against esterofilia (passion for all things foreign) in the name of

italianità. The campaign was targeted against foreign raw materials,
scientific inventions, works of art and artists that were adored in Italy.
Marinetti, the patriot, wanted more preference to be given to Italian
products and even italianized foreign terminology related to
gastronomy, for example by suggesting bars to be named quisibeve
(here one drinks) and a cocktail polibibita (mixed drink). (Marinetti
and Fillìa 1932, 245-252; Härmänmaa 2000: 256-260)
During the 1930s, the Futurists promoted Italian products, such as
wines, and opened an Italian restaurant at the International Colonial
Exposition in Paris (1931). When in June 1936, as a result of the
Second Italo-Abyssinian War, the League of Nations invoked
sanctions against Italy, Marinetti intervened in the campaign for
Italian agricultural autarchy. Consequently, the Futurist journal La
Forza hosted articles in favour of Italian agriculture, considered as the
most healthy and profitable profession, both for the individual and for
the State. The Naturist exhibition held in Turin in October 1935 was
organized in order to glorify the natural resources of Piedmont and
was partly financed by the city of Turin and the Ministry of
Agriculture. The aim of the exhibition was to make the Italians reduce
their consumption of meat, increase their intake of vegetables and of
Italian products in general, and to this end a whole room was reserved
for the display of Italian rice.
The dark side of Prometheus
Marinetti’s philosophy of life was based on the idea of conquest and

battle: conquest of the Absolute and conquest of Nature; the battle of
humans against Nature, and of Italy against other nations. For all of
these reasons he drew on the support of technology. Consequently,
from the very beginning of his artistic career, the sinister dimension of
macchinolatria was evident in his works. Erich Fromm, in his study
about the destructive character of human beings, demonstrates that the
cult of technology is per se a form of necrophilia, in which libidinal
forces are projected from living things onto inanimate objects. Thus, a
man may fall in love with a machine instead of a woman. When it
came to Futurism, Fromm identified elements of necrophilia in the
Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism and in The New Ethical
Religion of Speed, such as the cult of speed, racing, poetry as a

weapon, the destruction of culture, the glorification of war, of
misogyny, of locomotives and aeroplanes as living forces. (Fromm
1973: 342-346)
The destructiveness of Futurism is two-dimensional. On the one
hand, it is directed towards the Other that can assume different forms
labelled as ‘passéist’ (traditionalist) in the Futurist rhetoric; and on the
other hand, towards the Self. The self-destructiveness is quite obvious
in the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism, where the first person
narratives are ‘haunting the death’, for death’s sake, for not having
any other reason to die in addition to getting rid of the excess of
courage. (Marinetti 1909: 12) Furthermore, by stating that there was
no reason, only a will to die, Marinetti also expresses the lack of
ideals (or ‘religion’), characteristic of his whole generation, that
ultimately contributed to the transformation of Fascism into a
secularized religion. (Gentile 1993)
In order to comprehend the aggressivity that is correlated to
technology in general, and in Marinetti’s case in particular, it is
essential to bear in mind that Marinetti’s glorification of the machine
(as a metonym of technology and progress) was based on practical,
nationalistic principles. As Emilio Gentile demonstrates, since the
time of the Risorgimento the central aim of Italian Nationalism had
been to modernize the country by means of intensified
industrialization. (Gentile 2003) This conception was fully approved
by Marinetti who already in 1910, in his lecture on The Necessity and
Beauty of Violence, had declared:
You don’t need me to tell you that Patriotism means above all else
fortifying national industry and commerce and intensifying the
development of our intrinsic qualities as a race in the forward march
of our victory over competing races. (Marinetti 1910b: 421)
In this way, Marinetti’s devotion to Prometheus also meant the end of

every kind of escapism from the society of mortal beings, the ultimate
return from arcadian paradise to the real world. According to the
Futurist principle of ‘arte-vita’, art and artists were to introduce ‘real
life’ into their works and involve themselves socially. The transition
from Panism to Prometheanism metaphorically reflected the birth of
the modern intellectual, who breaks out of the proverbial ivory tower
where he had fled in order to avoid contact with middle-class
materialism. In Marinetti’s case, it also meant the discovery of a new

religion with which to substitute the cult of Nature: Patriotism.
(Härmänmaa 2000)
Prometheus was a hero who not only controlled Nature by
introducing the technology of fire, he was also a civilizing deity. This
side is equally present in Marinetti’s hero figures, yet compounded
with patriotism. In Il fascino dell’Egitto, king Fuad pays attention to
the development of Egypt; in Il tamburo di fuoco, Kabango, aims at
modernizing the whole continent. Instead, the destructiveness of
Prometheus, which at the beginning of Futurism was evident in
Marinetti’s glorification of war, became ever stronger during the
Second Italo-Ethiopian War (October 1935 to May 1936).
The idea of a civilizing mission also served Mussolini’s political
propaganda for the Italian Empire that had been one of his goals since
the inception of Fascism. Indeed, one key factor in Fascism’s seizure
of power was the disappointment caused by the peace treaty after the
First World War. The dream of a powerful Italy had faded, and instead
of being a victorious force of international importance, Italy had been
disgraced by the vittoria mutilata (the mutilated victory), to use
Gabriele D’Annunzio’s phrase. The thirst for revenge was felt by
many Italians and was one of the significant factors that helped
Mussolini’s seizure of power. It was clear from the very beginning of
the Fascist era that, sooner or later, such a revenge would take place.
The Italians wanted retribution, and most of all, colonies. For the
Italian Nationalists, the conquest of foreign territory was a ‘historical
necessity’ and ‘proof of the natural changing of the balance of power
between the nations’. (Perfetti 1984: 53) The Catholics wanted
colonies in order to promote the Christian faith. (Cagnetta 1979: 59-
62) Marinetti wanted colonies because they were a prerequisite for
being considered a superpower. (Marinetti 1983: 433) For Mussolini,
imperialism was an ‘eternal and immutable law of life’, a sign of
‘every vital nation’s necessity to expand’. (De Felice 1974: 333) And
once the empire had been established, not even the best known
antifascist of the country – Benedetto Croce – disapproved it, nor the
thousands of Italian women who voluntarily gave their wedding rings
to the State after the League of Nations had imposed its sanctions on
Italy.
According to Marinetti, as he stated in The Necessity and Beauty of
Violence, ‘pacifism and fear of war’ had caused Italy’s ‘grievous
political enslavement’. Since war was inevitable, it was better to

‘desire it as a soldier than suffer it like sheep’. (Marinetti 1910b: 67)
In order to arouse the will to fight, from the very beginning of
Futurism, Marinetti had aesthetizised war and portrayed it as a healthy
experience for the Nation. When the Abyssinian campaign started in
the Autumn of 1935, Marinetti again, as he had done twenty years
before, extended an invitation to artists to participate in the war which,
in his eyes, had become ‘a great celebration’, ‘a sentimental
adventure’, ‘the greatest source of inspiration for the arts’. (Marinetti
1935)
Such propaganda may have been appropriate for the Great War
which many of the so-called ‘Generation of 1914’ had longed for.
(Wohl 1979; Isnenghi 1997) But it was not apposite in 1930s Italy,
when the country was permeated by Catholicism and had testified a
revival of Christian spirituality. To make an objectionable war
palatable, especially for the Catholic Church, Imperialism had to be
morally justified. This was understood by Marinetti as well.
Consequently, the Futurist Naturist journal, La Forza, became a tool
for propagating the Promethean nature of Imperialism. The activities
of the Futurist Naturists serving as volunteers in Africa were portrayed
not as an act of military aggression, but as a civilizing force that
would inaugurate a period of progress for the continent. (Härmänmaa
2000: 223)
The Death of Great Pan
The whole tragedy of the European twentieth century is rooted in the

death of Pan. Humankind detached itself from Nature and replaced the
search for harmony with the dialectic of power that Western society
applied both in the relationship with Nature and with other nations.
Metaphorically it could be said that in the clamour of the modern
metropolis, the silent voice of Nature was forgotten. The new religion
of the century was ferocious nationalism and the new gods were
imperialistic Prometheus exporting Western values and the warrior
Ulysses who helped the former. Regardless of the disasters produced
by the new creed, the West still continues to cultivate imperialism,
and thus to produce new disasters. Marinetti did not invent the cult of
these deities, but he propagated them in his own Futurist manner. It
was an effective and noisy way of expressing an anxiety that was

shared by many of his contemporaries. If we want to learn something
from the errors of the past, the case of ‘Marinetti’ is worth
remembering.
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Illustrations
Günter Berghaus: Futurism and the Technological

Imagination Poised between Machine Cult and Machine Angst
Illustr. 1: Michele Lanza in his ‘Victoria’ of 1898, Coll. Bassignana, Turin.

Illustr. 2: Marinetti at the wheel of his BN 30/40 HP FIAT Isotta Fraschini ‘Gran
Lusso’ in 1908.
Illustr. 3: Brescia car race in 1907. From a contemporary postcard.
Illustr. 4: Léon Delagrange on 24 May 1908 on piazza d’Armi in Rome. Coll.
David Lam.
Illustr. 5: Delagrange 's flight with sculptor Thérèse Peltier as the first woman on
a passenger seat in Turin on 8 July 1908; Coll. David Lam.
Illustr. 6: Airshow in Verona, 1910. From Illustrazione italiana vol. 37 no. 26 (6
June 1910): 564-565.
Illustr. 7: Two posters for the International Airshow in Milan 1910.
Illustr. 8: Piazza Duomo in Milan during an airshow in 1910. On the left we see
the entrance to the Victor Emanuel Gallery. From Illustrazione italiana
vol. 37, no. 41 (9 Oct. 1910): 359.
Illustr. 9:International Exhibition of 1906. The figure on the cathedral is
Meneghino, a figure from the Milanese popular theatre and carnival
tradition. From a contemporary postcard.
Illustr. 10: Main entrance to the Sempione park, where the Expo 1906 was held.
From a contemporary guidebook.
Domenico Pietropaolo: Science and the Aesthetics of

Geometric Splendour in Italian Futurism
Illustr. 1: Henry Selby Hele-Shaw and Alfred Hay. ‘Lines of Induction in a

Magnetic Field’ in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of
London, Series A, Containing Papers of a Mathematical or Physical
Character. Vol. 195 (1900), plates 17, 18, 23 and 24.
Illustr. 2: Lines of force and equipotential surfaces of two circuits in proximity.
From Alfred Daniell, A Textbook of the Principles of Physics, London,
Macmillan 1884: 597.
Vera Castiglione: A Futurist before Futurism: Émile

Verhaeren and the Technological Epic
Illustr. 1: Linze’s Méditations sur la machine (Liège: Éditions “Anthologie”,

1931) with a dedication to F.T. Marinetti: ‘Amicalement au poète F. T.
362 Illustrations
Marinetti qui sait bien que la poésie comme toute verité n’a pas de
frontière. G. Linze.’ Coll. Luce Marinetti.
Illustr. 2: Marinetti's letter to Verhaeren, relating the ‘Poesia’ group’s enthusiasm
for Verhaeren’s ‘vehement genius’. The letter is undated, but it says
that it was written about twenty days before the publication of the first
1908 issue of ‘Poesia’. Manuscript FSXVI 148/773, Bruxelles,
Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Archives & Musée de la Littérature,
fonds Emile Verhaeren.
Illustr. 3: Brussels, end of 19th century. Belgium played a leading role in the
development of urban transport, a sector closely connected with its
thriving steel industry. From a contemporary postcard.
Illustr. 4: The giant telescope, the centrepiece of the 1900 Paris Universal
Exhibition that Verhaeren visited as a Mercure de France writer. From
Illustrated London News, 5 May 1900, p. 600.
Illustr. 5: Brussels, 1835. The inauguration of the Gare de l'Allée Verte, the first
railway station in continental Europe.
Illustr. 6: Brussels’ Stock Exchange in construction, 1871. The country’s rapid
economic growth during the second half of the 19th century led to a
demand for bigger stock exchange premises. The new building also
completed the capital’s major urban renewal designed by the architect
Léon Suys, the Belgian ‘Haussmann’.
Patrizia Veroli: Loie Fuller’s Serpentine Dance and Futurism:

Electricity, Technological Imagination and the Myth of the
Machine
Illustr. 1: Ewald Thiel, Stage lighting used for the Serpentine Dance, from Für
alle Welt: Illustrierte Familienzeitschrift (Wien; Berlin; Leipzig), no. 1
(1895) p. 14. Brygida Ochaim Collection, Munich.
Illustr. 2: Aldo Mazza, Loie Fuller, from Numero: Settimanale umoristico
illustrato (Torino), vol. 2, no. 14 (29 March 1914). Collezione Augusto
Traina, Viareggio.
Maria Elena Versari: Futurist Machine Art, Constructivism

and the Modernity of Mechanization
Illustr. 1: Ivo Pannaggi and Vinicio Paladini, Proletario from ‘Manifesto of

Futurist Mechanical Art’. Courtesy of Anna Caterina Toni.
Illustr. 2: Ivo Pannaggi and Vinicio Paladini, ‘Manifesto of Futurist Mechanical
Art’ featuring the drawings The Proletarian by Paladini and
Mechanical Composition by Pannaggi, as it first appeared in La nuova
Lacerba, no. 1 (20 June 1922), p. 7. Illustration courtesy of Anna
Caterina Toni.
Illustrations 363
Illustr. 3: Vinicio Paladini, 1º Maggio (International Workers’ Day), illustration

published in Avanguardia, n. 16, 1 May 1922 (Illustration courtesy of
Biblioteca Universitaria Alessandrina, Roma).
Illustr. 4: Vinicio Paladini, Il Proletario, illustration published in Avanguardia
(27) 16 July 1922 (Illustration courtesy of Biblioteca Universitaria
Alessandrina, Roma).
Illustr. 5: Vinicio Paladini, Proletario della III Internazionale, illustration
published in Het Overzicht 13 (November 1922). Illustration courtesy
of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Illustr. 6: Enrico Prampolini, Cover design for the journal Broom, (3) November
1922 (Illustration courtesy of Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript
Library, Yale University).
Gerardo Regnani: Futurism and Photography: Between

Scientific Inquiry and Aesthetic Imagination
Illustr. 1: Giorgetti G., gg23.

Illustr. 2: Massafra S., 0??????1.
Illustr. 3: Saccoccio A., 7tn4CC.
Illustr. 4 Giannetta F., 3Pfnk mn733.
Illustr. 5: Terzo manifesto netfuturista, 2008.
Illustr. 6+7: ‘Non-Opening’ of a ‘Non-Exhibition’ of NetFuturism in Rome, 3-7
December 2008.
Margaret Fisher: Futurism and Radio
Illustr. 1 + 2: F.T. Marinetti in the broadcast studio. From Radio Corriere vol. 8,
no. 15 (9-16 April 1932) and vol. 10, no. 10 (6 March 1934).
Illustr. 3: Children, listening to a radio broadcast in a gymnasium, are portrayed
as a faceless and passive audience, contrasted to their earlier portrayal
as engaged individual participants in all aspects of radio technology.
From Radio Corriere, vol. 9, no. 8 (19-26 February 1933).
Illustr. 4: Armando Dal Bianco - Radio (1934) from Collection Lucien Peinetti:
53 tableaux futuristes italiens. Ancienne collection du comte
Emmanuele Sarmiento. Sales catalogue. Lyon: Hôtel Sofitel, 23 octobre
1984. Lyon: J. Verrière, 1984.
Illustr. 5: Eriberto Carboni - illustration for postwar Italian radio, RAI (1950)
(RAI Teche). The picture redraws, whether intentionally or not, the
adventures of the two protagonists of Marinetti’s Violetta e gli
aeroplani. We see the seaside colony, and two children flying atop a
radio receiver. The dreams of air flight are portrayed as synonymous
with radio, as they were generally in Futurist drama. Only Marinetti has
been rubbed out in this palimpsest of early Italian radio.
364 Illustrations
Matteo D'Ambrosio: From Words-in-Freedom to Electronic

Literature: Futurism and the Neo-Avantgarde
Illustr. 1: F.T. Marinetti’s Free-Word-Table, Le soir, couchée dans son lit, elle
relisait la lettre de son artilleur au front, from Les Mots en liberté
futuristes (1919).
Illustr. 2: Kenneth Burke Flowerishes. From Collected Poems, 1915-1967,
University of California Press, 1968.
Illustr. 3: Poster for a Futurist event at the Sprovieri Gallery in Naples, 17 May
1914, announcing that ‘Marinetti will telephone from London to the
audience assembled at the exhibition his new Words-in-Freedom’.
Illustr. 4: F.T: Marinetti, Futurist March. A typical example of Words-in-
Freedom, first performed at the Sprovieri Gallery in Rome by Marinetti,
Cangiullo and Balla and published in Vela Latina vol. 4 no. 4 (5
February 1916), p. 14.
Illustr. 5: Two typical examples of a Free-Word Table: Giacomo Balla, Trelsì
trelno, from L’Italia futurista, vol. 2, no. 2 (25 February 1917), p. 1.
Illustr. 6: Ardengo Soffici, Tipografia, from BÏF§ZF+18 simultaneità e chimismi
lirici, Firenze: Vallecchi, 1915.
Illustr. 7: F.T. Marinetti, Après la Marne, Joffre visita le front en auto. From Les
Mots en liberté futuristes (1919).
Michelangelo Sabatino: Tabula rasa or Hybridity?

Primitivism and the Vernacular in Futurist and Rationalist
Architecture
Illustr. 1: Adalberto Libera (et al), Casa Malaparte, Capri, 1938-42 (photo Gianni
Pettena).
Illustr. 2: Fiat Lingotto, period photo 1920s, author unknown. From Carlo Olmo
(ed.), Lingotto. 1915-1939. L'architettura, l'immagine, il lavoro.
Torino: Umberto Allemandi & C., 1994, illustr. no. 17.
Illustr. 3: Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (1923).
Illustr. 4: Sigfried Giedion, ‘Situation de l’architecture contemporaine en Italie’
Cahiers d’art 9-10 (1931): 442-449.
Illustr. 5: Josef Hoffmann, ‘Architektonisches von der Insel Capri’, Der Architekt
3 (1897): 13–14.
Illustr. 6: Camillo Jona, L’architettura rusticana nella costiera d’amalfi (Turin,
1920).
Illustr. 7: Roberto Pane, Architettura rurale campana (Florence, 1936).
Illustr. 8: Virgilio Marchi, Primitivismi capresi (Capri Primitivisms), Cronache
d’attualità, 1922.
Illustr. 9: Virgilio Marchi, coverpage, Architettura futurista (1924).
Illustr. 10: Fortunato Depero, Paese di tarantelle (1918) Private collection.
Illustrations 365
Illustr. 11: Fortunato Depero, Bestetti Treves Tuminelli book pavilion, Monza
Biennale, 1927.
Illustr. 12: View of the steps of a ‘Trullo’ in Alberobello, in Myron Goldfinger,
Villages in the Sun (New York, 1969).
Illustr. 13: Enrico Prampolini, Architettura cromatica di Capri (1921).
Illustr. 14: Enrico Prampolini, Futurist Pavilion, Turin, 1927.
Illustr. 15: Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini, Villa–Studio for an artist, Fifth Milan
Triennale, 1933.
Pierpaolo Antonello: Beyond Futurism: Bruno Munari’s

Useless Machines
Illustr. 1: The wall with Munari’s paintings at the exhibition ‘Trentatrè pittori
futuristi’, Galleria Pesaro, Milan, October 1929.
Illustr. 2: rRrR [Rumore di aeroplano]. Copyright Massimo & Sonia Cirulli
Archive, New York and Bologna.
Illustr. 3: Munari’s illustration for Il suggeritore nudo by F.T. Marinetti,
reproduced in Comoedia. Rassegna mensile del teatro 11-12 (1929-
1930): 38-44.
Illustr. 4: Macchina inutile (1945). Historical Archives of the Jacqueline Vodoz
and Bruno Danese Foundation, Milan.
Abstracts
Günter Berghaus
Futurism and the Technological Imagination Poised between
Machine Cult and Machine Angst
This chapter deals with the great changes that affected Italy during the ‘second
Industrial revolution’, presents some of the proto-Futurist visions of life and art in the
machine age and discusses how Marinetti experienced the first stages of
industrialization in Italy. It surveys Marinetti’s theoretical writings on technology and
on a Futurist art and literature of the machine age. It highlights some contradictions in
Marinetti’s ideology of the machine and discusses developments in the second and
third phase of Futurism, when some of the sceptical views on modernity that were a
mere undercurrent in the years 1909-1915 became a major and significant aspect of
the movement.
Science and the Aesthetics of Geometric Splendour in Italian
Futurism
This chapter explores aspects of the Futurist imagination that are conditioned by
science, with a view to illustrating the formative power of the scientific culture of the
time in the special configuration that it was given in contemporary Italy. The
superimposition of the scientific on the artistic intellect occurred chiefly through the
mediation of institutions for the dissemination of science and was articulated in
imaginative configurations of experience grounded in principles at once humanistic
and scientific. In pursuing its goal of aesthetic self-expression, Futurism elaborated
new forms of art, such as photodynamism and tactile theatre, by following an
imaginative course parallel to that of contemporary geometry and science.
Serge Milan
The ‘Futurist Sensibility’: An Anti-philosophy for the Age of
Technology
Futurism did not restrict itself to seeking a renewal of the arts; it aimed at nothing less
than a ‘Re-fashioning of the Universe’, that is: a complete renewal of human society
and its physical environment. The two complementary aspects of art changing life and
life changing art, which at first glance may appear like a circular argument, have been
elaborated in many manifestos and articles, particularly those of F.T. Marinetti and
Umberto Boccioni. This chapter demonstrates how the highly ambiguous notion of
368 Abstracts
sensibilità was developed by the Futurist avant-garde in order to overcome a fixation

on the faculties of reason, memory and perception. It also show how this notion of
sensibilità allowed the first avant-garde movement to establish conceptual links
between its aesthetics and gnoseology, physiology and ethics, and in doing so, to
propose a broad and Utopian anthropological project.
Roger Griffin
The Multiplication of Man: Futurism’s Technolatry Viewed
Through the Lens of Modernism”
This chapter focuses on the epiphanic nature of the Futurist attempt to create not just
of a new aesthetic but a new moral universe and a new secular mysticism. It argues
that the Nietzschean bid to overcome nihilism has been projected by Marinetti onto
the latest technologies of speed to the point where they are identified with the capacity
to overcome the conventional bounds of time and space. In the light of this analysis,
Futurism’s technolatry emerges as an outstanding example of programmatic
modernism, and the composition of the first Futurist manifesto is revealed to be a
typically modern act of ‘mazeway resynthesis’ carried out by Marinetti as a later-day
propheta.
Vera Castiglione
A Futurist before Futurism: Émile Verhaeren and the
Technological Epic
The many correspondences between Verhaeren’s œuvre and Futurist literature raise
important questions regarding the origins and identity of Futurism. This chapter
considers the place of Verhaeren’s œuvre within the history of Futurism and suggests
that the Futurists’ perception of the movement’s identity was in reality more far-
ranging than is conventionally accepted. It argues for a critical re-engagement with
the concept of ‘Futurism’, using an inclusive approach that would enable us to cover
under one umbrella both Verhaeren’s ‘epiphanic’ Futurism and Marinetti’s
‘programmatic’ Futurism. This approach will ultimately allow us to make sense of the
particular paradox of a Futurist literature that had made its breakthrough before
Futurism was founded.
Patrizia Veroli
Loie Fuller’s Serpentine Dance and Futurism: Electricity,
Technological Imagination and the Myth of the Machine
The American dancer Loie Fuller was responsible for a radical, conceptual innovation
in the field of dance that exerted an important influence on the Futurists. Her
Serpentine Dance (1892) achieved the suggestion of a prosthetic body, exploiting
Abstracts 369
electricity in a phantasmagoric way. Fuller made her costumed body shift in space as
if it were a rhythmically moving shape that existed independently of herself as an
animated, chromo-luminous mechanism. This chapter analyses how Fuller’s dances
influenced Ginna and Corra, inspired the stage-set of Balla’s Feu d’artifice (1917) and
played a significant role in Prampolini’s staging theories. But it also demonstrates
that, paradoxically, Loie Fuller’s influence did not fully materialize in the field of
Futurist dance, where the model of the robot prevailed over her subtle strategy of
allusive effects.
Maria Elena Versari

Futurist Machine Art, Constructivism and the Modernity of
Mechanization
This chapter addresses the theoretical and ideological development of the so-called
‘machine art’, which was outlined in 1922 in a homonymous manifesto by the
painters Ivo Pannaggi and Vinicio Paladini and revised later that year in a version
signed by Enrico Prampolini. While scholars have largely tackled the thematic
specificity and visual impact of this text within the general development of Italian
Futurist art in the course of the 1920s, they have failed to take up the issue of its
specific place in the ongoing construction of the European artistic framework of the
1920s. This chapter aims to redefine the history of the concept of Futurist machine art
from a different perspective, by highlighting its complex and contradictory relations
with contemporary artistic practices in Europe and with the emergence of
Constructivism.
Gerardo Regnani
Futurism and Photography: Between Scientific Inquiry and
Aesthetic Imagination
Futurist photography promoted the idea of a dynamic world influenced by technology

and led to the creation of ‘Photodynamism’ which, however, did not enjoy the same
successful fate as conventional photography. Despite some Futurist painters’, and in
particular Umberto Boccioni’s aversion to the medium of photography, photodynamic
portraits became an element of continuity that runs from the early twentieth century to
the present day. As an example of this revival of Futurist photography, the chapter
discusses Italian NetFuturism, developed mostly on the Internet and sharing with the
historic movement of Futurism a struggle against artistic conventions and a demand
for a fusion of art and life.
370 Abstracts
Wanda Strauven
Futurist Poetics and the Cinematic Imagination: Marinetti’s
Cinema without Films
This chapter discusses Marinetti’s ambivalent attitude towards the cinematic medium
as a possible explanation for the failure of Futurist cinema. Although the leader of
Futurism appeared to profoundly understand the workings of the film language, he
never fully promoted the development of Futurist cinema. He practiced a kind of
‘cinematization’ of Futurist theatre, but never openly acknowledged the inspiration of
the new technology in his creative writings. And although cinema played an important
role in Marinetti's intellectual and artistic formation, the new medium was often
forgotten or repressed. This chapter analyses not only Marinetti’s concrete filmic
achievements, but also his Futurist poetics as developed in various theatre and
literature manifestos, thus revealing Marinetti’s intuitive theorization of cinema.
Margaret Fisher
Futurism and Radio
This chapter assesses the condition of Italian radio in the 1920s and 30s, examines the
influence of broadcast programs and policies on Futurist radio output, and asks to
what degree Italian radio may have embraced, at least partially, Futurist aesthetics.
Many key elements of Futurist aesthetics matched the innate qualities of the new radio
technology; vice versa, radio contained many features that held the promise of an
ideal Futurist medium. Historians have accorded the Futurists unqualified recognition
for their influence over Italian radio. This study challenges that point of view by
examining the context and problems associated with Futurist radio broadcasts in Italy.
Politics and economics affected radio institutions in ways that did not offer Futurism
the chance to contribute to the new medium in the manner Marinetti was keen to do
and foiled any Futurist attempt to dominate a cultural discussion of technology.
Matteo D'Ambrosio
From Words-in-Freedom to Electronic Literature: Futurism and
the Neo-Avantgarde
The Futurist avant-garde desired to put into practice complex concepts using
languages and media that at the time were only in their infancy. F. T. Marinetti
promoted not only radically innovative textual models and composition strategies, but
also the creation of works of art in media such as radio and television which, given the
technological facilities at his disposal, remained Utopian ideas. The Futurist Words-
in-Freedom and Free-Word Tables produce an experience not only of perceptive and
cognitive participation, but also of psychic and in some cases even physical
involvement, thus predating various tendencies of the Neo-avantgarde which
recovered, developed and modified Marinetti’s concepts in its literary experiments.
Abstracts 371
This chapter suggests that these unique and unrepeatable events ought to be analysed
on a par with theatre performances
Tabula rasa or Hybridity? Primitivism and the Vernacular in
Futurist and Rationalist Architecture
A number of Futurist and Rationalist architects appropriated the ‘primitive’

vernacular tradition of Italy’s peasantry to forge a new synthesis between the organic
and the machine-age aesthetic while engaging competing notions of ‘Italian-ness’ that
surfaced during Italy’s Fascist dictatorship (1922-1943). This chapter discusses artists
and architects such as Fortunato Depero, Adalberto Libera, Enrico Prampolini, and
Virgilio Marchi and examines how and why their work valorized tradition while
rejecting eclecticism of nineteenth-century historicism. Futurists and Rationalists did
not ignore but idealize history. This chapter explores how and why the vernacular was
viewed as uncorrupted by ‘civilization’ and outside the flux of history. It also analyses
why the Futurists’ construction of the ‘technological imagination’ drew upon pre-
industrial buildings and objects as well taking cues from modern-day industrialization
to forge an Italian modernity between tabula rasa and hybridity.
Pierpaolo Antonello
Beyond Futurism: Bruno Munari’s Useless Machines
This chapter discusses Bruno Munari’s understanding of the relationship between art
and technology in the light of his early collaboration with the Futurist movement. It
explores the legacy and influence of Futurist experimentation in Munari’s opus, his
progressive distancing from the Futurist aesthetics and the more encompassing
integration of his art with other aesthetic trends in Europe at the time. In particular,
the chapter focuses on the epistemological implications of Munari’ ‘useless
machines’. It examines the artist’s departure from the main thrust of Futurist
‘technolatry’ towards a broader understanding of technology, which questioned any
dualistic separation between nature and technology, between the artificial and the
natural.
Marja Härmänmaa
Futurism and Nature: The Death of the Great Pan?
This chapter is concerned with the relationship between Futurism and Nature and the
representation of the latter in the works of F.T. Marinetti. Futurism’s glorification of
technology and the modern city entailed a complete rupture of the relationship
between humankind and organic Nature. Futurism operated with a linear conception
of history and emphasized the idea of progress. Marinetti replaced the cult of Nature
372 Abstracts
with an ultra-modern cityscape of steel and concrete. But did this really mean that
there was no place for organic Nature in the Futurist world view? This chapter
suggests that Marinetti’s conception endorsed the idea of Nature as an enemy that
needed to be tamed and controlled by humankind.
Notes on Contributors
Pierpaolo Antonello is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of

Cambridge and Fellow of St John’s College. He specializes in
contemporary Italian literature and intellectual history, and has written
extensively on the relationship between science, technology and
literature. His books include: Il ménage a quattro: Scienza, filosofia e
tecnica nella letteratura italiana del Novecento (Florence: Le Monnier,
2005); Science and Literature in Italian Culture: From Dante to Calvino
(Oxford: Legenda, 2004), co-edited with Simon Gilson; and with René
Girard and João Cezar de Castro Rocha, Evolution and Conversion:
Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (London: Continumm, 2008),
translated into six languages. With Marja Härmänmaa is currently editing
a special issue of The European Legacy on ‘Future Imperfect: Italian
Futurism between Tradition and Modernity’.
Günter Berghaus was, for many years, a Reader in Theatre History and
Performance Studies and is now is a Senior Research Fellow at the
University of Bristol. He has directed numerous plays from the classical
and modern repertoire and devised many productions of an experimental
nature. He has been principal organizer of conferences on ‘Cabaret,
Caricature and Satire in Wilhelmine Germany’ (London 1985), ‘German
Exile Theatre in Great Britain, 1933-1945’ (London 1986), ‘Fascism and
Theatre’ (Granada 1994), ‘Futurism in an International and Inter-
disciplinary Perspective’ (London 1995), ‘New Approaches to Theatre
Studies and Performance Analysis’ (Bristol 1997). He held several
research awards from the Polish Academy of Sciences, the German
Research Foundation, the Italian Ministry of Culture, the British
Academy, the Brazilian Ministry of Education, and has been Guest
Professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro and at Brown
University, Providence/RI. He has published some 15 books on various
aspects of theatre history, theatre anthropology, and theatre politics,
amongst others Theatre and Film in Exile (1989), The Genesis of
Futurism (1995), Fascism and Theatre (1996), Futurism and Politics
(1996), Italian Futurist Theatre (1998), On Ritual (1998), International
Futurism in the Arts and Literature (2000), Avant-garde Performance:
Live Events and Electronic Technologies (2005), Theatre, Performance
374 Notes on Contributors
and the Historical Avant-garde (2005), F. T. Marinetti: Selected

Writings (2006). For the Futurism centenary in 2009 he is editing a
Bibliographic Handbook of Futurism, 1945-2009.
Vera Castiglione is a lecturer in French and Italian at the University of

Bristol and the University of the West of England. She studied in Italy at
the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and in France at Paris X. After
being awarded a scholarship from the University of Bristol she moved to
England, where she completed her PhD with a thesis on the Belgian poet
Emile Verhaeren, currently in the process of being published. Since then
her research has focused on Comparative Literature, particularly in the
field of French and Belgian Futurism, and Contemporary Genre Theory.
Matteo D’Ambrosio is Professor in History of Literary Criticism at the

University of Naples ‘Federico II’. Semiotician and avant-gardes
historian, he is at the moment a member of the ministerial committee for
the centenary of Futurism. He has published six volumes on the
relationships between the Futurist movement and Neapolitan culture
(Nuove verità crudeli. Origini e primi sviluppi del Futurismo a Napoli
1905-1912, Alfredo Guida Editore 1990; Emilio Buccafusca e il
Futurismo a Napoli negli anni trenta, Liguori 1990; Futurismo a Napoli.
Indagini e documenti, Liguori 1995; Il Futurismo a Napoli 1909-1944,
Morra 1996; Marinetti e il Futurismo a Napoli, De Luca 1996; I
Circumvisionisti. Un’avanguardia napoletana negli anni del fascismo,
CUEN 1996). He has also published Futurismo e altre avanguardie, and
Le ‘Commemorazioni in avanti’ di F. T. Marinetti. Futurismo e critica
letteraria (both Liguori 1999) and Roman Jakobson e il Futurismo
italiano (Liguori 2009). Forthcoming is the collection of essays Nuovi
studi sul Futurismo (Liguori 2009). He is also the editor of three volumes
dedicated to the methodologies of literary studies, entitled Il testo,
l’analisi, l’interpretazione (Liguori 1995, 2002 and 2009).
Margaret Fisher is a choreographer, video director and independent

researcher specializing in experimental performance and radio. She is
currently recipient of the Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies (2008-
2009). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for
the Arts, California Arts Council, Japan-U.S. Artist Exchange Program,

and Fulbright Commission, and was artist-in-residence at the San
Francisco Exploratorium. She received her Ph.D. from the University of
California at Berkeley in 2003 and is author of Ezra Pound’s Radio
Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931-1933 (MIT Press, 2002), The
Recovery of Ezra Pound's Third Opera, Collis O Heliconii (Second
Evening Art [SEA], 2005), Ezra Pound Composer: Ego Scriptor
Cantilenae (Other Minds audio CD, 2003). With Robert Hughes she co-
authored Paroles de Villon: Two performance Editions of Le Testament
(SEA 2008), and Cavalcanti: A Perspective on the Music of Ezra Pound
(SEA 2003).
Roger Griffin is Professor in Modern History at Oxford Brookes

University (UK), having obtained a BA (First) from Oxford University in
Modern Languages (French and German) in 1970 and his DPhil from
Oxford University in 1990. Since then he published over 80 works on a
wide range of phenomena relating to generic fascism, including the two
monographs The Nature of Fascism (Pinter, 1991), Modernism and
Fascism. The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler
(Palgrave, 2007), and the collection of essays A Fascist Century
(Palgrave, 2008). He also edited the anthologies of primary and
secondary sources relating to fascism Fascism (OUP, 1995),
International Fascism. Theories, Causes and the New Consensus
(Arnold, 1998); and (with Matthew Feldman) the 5 volumes of Critical
Concepts in Political Science: Fascism (Routledge, 2003). His next book
will be a volume on terrorism for the Palgrave series he is editing called
'Modernism and'.
Marja Härmänmaa is a University lecturer in Italian at the University

of Helsinki. Her research is mainly focussed on Futurism, D’Annunzio
and the cultural life in Fascist Italy. She has published the volume Un
patriota che sfidò la decadenza: F.T. Marinetti e l’idea dell’uomo nuovo
fascista (Academia scientiarum fennica 2000) and has co-edited several
books about early-twentieth century European culture. Currently she is
working on the representation of the city in the works of Gabriele
D'Annunzio.
Serge Milan studied philosophy and Italian literature at the Sorbonne,

where he completed his PhD in 2001. He is now Maître de Conférences
at the Université de Nice – Sophia Antipolis. He edited the anthologies
Fiori futuristi (Genova, 2003) and La mia anima è puerile e altre poesie
genovesi di F.T. Marinetti (Genova, 2004), as well as Ovabere –
sincopatie futuriste di Farfa (Genova, 2005) and a special issue of the
journal Trasparenze on Futurism (December 2007). He also published a
dozen essays on Futurist manifestos and ideology and is currently chief
editor of the open access journal, Cahiers de Narratologie He recently
published L’Antiphilosophie du futurisme (L’Âge d’Homme, 2009).
Domenico Pietropaolo is Professor of drama and Italian literature at the

University of Toronto, where he is the current Chair of the Department of
Italian Studies and a former director of the Graduate Centre for Study of
Drama. His chief research interests are in the areas of dramaturgy and
Italian literary history, and include the relationship between science and
the arts. His publications include numerous articles on Italian literature
from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, and on various periods of
theatre history, as well as Dante Studies in the Age of Vico (1989), and
several editions of essays, including The Science of Buffoonery: Theory
and History of the Commedia dell’Arte (1989), Goldoni and the Musical
Theatre (1995), and The Performance Text (1999). He has co-edited
Theatre and the Visual Arts (2001) and Modernism and Modernity in the
Mediterranean World (2006). He is currently co-authoring a reference
volume on the baroque libretto.
Gerardo Regnani is a scholar, journalist and curator specializing in

visual communication and mass media. After his studies at the Istituto
Superiore di Design in Turin, the Museo di Arte Moderna di Rivoli and
the Museo dell’Immagine e delle Arti Visuali (at the Università degli
Studi di Roma ‘Tor Vergata’) he graduated in Communication Studies at
the Università degli Studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’ and was awarded an
Executive Master in Marketing, Public Relations and Organizational
Communication. He is a collaborator of NIM (Newsletter Italiana di
Mediologia), MediaZone, Comuniclab and Technology Review. He is a
co-founder of the Associazione culturale ‘FINE’ (Fotografia e Incontri
con le Nuove Espressioni). Some notes about his photographic work

appeared in Marina Miraglia's volume, Il ‘900 in fotografia (Turin 2001).
Michelangelo Sabatino is Assistant Professor at the Gerald D. Hines

College of Architecture, University of Houston. He has contributed
widely to journals and co-authored publications in the field (Casabella,
Cite, Harvard Design Magazine, Journal of Architecture, Journal of
Architectural Education, Journal of Design History, Journal of the
Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada, Places); his forthcoming
books include Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the
Vernacular Tradition in Italy (University of Toronto Press), and a co-
edited volume of essays (with Jean-François Lejeune) entitled Modern
Architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular Exchanges and
Contested Identities (Routledge).
Wanda Strauven is Academic Director of the Amsterdam School for

Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and Associate Professor of Film Studies in the
Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her
research interests include early and avant-garde cinema, technological
fantasies, synaesthesia, media archaeology and media dispositifs. Her
most recent publications are Marinetti e il cinema: Tra attrazione e
sperimentazione (Udine: Campanotto, 2006), The Cinema of Attractions
Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), and Mind
the Screen: Media Concepts According to Thomas Elsaesser (with Jaap
Kooijman and Patricia Pisters) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2008).
Patrizia Veroli is a dance historian who graduated from the University

La Sapienza of Rome (1971) and is an adjunct professor of dance history
at the University of Rome 1. She was a co-editor of the journal La danza
italiana (1998-99) and directs a book series, ‘La danza: Studi e
documenti’ for the publisher L’Epos (since 2005). Her books on dance
include Milloss (Lucca 1996, Bagutta Award for Literature ‘Opera
Prima’ 1997), Baccanti e dive dell'aria: Donne danza e società in Italia
1900-1945 (Città di Castello 2001). She was also a co-author of a
number of volumes, including Les Archives Internationales de la Danse
1931-1952 (Paris 2006) and most recently Il balletto romantico. Tesori

della Collezione Sowell (Palermo 2007). She has curated a number of
exhibitions including Five Hundred Years of Italian Dance at the New
York Public Library (2006, with Lynn Garafola). A monograph on Loie
Fuller will published by Edizioni Epos in Palermo in autumn 2009.
Maria Elena Versari is the Lynette S. Autrey Visiting Professor in the

Humanities Research Center at Rice University and a Visiting Scholar of
the Getty Foundation. She received a PhD in Art History at the Scuola
Normale Superiore di Pisa in 2006 with a thesis devoted to the
international relations of Futurism in the 1920s. She has been a visiting
lecturer at the University of Udine and has worked as a Fellow at the
Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Institut National d'Histoire de
l'Art in Paris and the Wolfsonian Museum and Library. More recently,
she held the position of Assistant Professor of 19th- and 20th-century art
at the University of Messina and was the Scholar-in-Residence at the
Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University.
She is the author of Constantin Brancusi (Firenze, 2005) and Wassily
Kandinsky e l’astrattismo (Firenze 2007; French transl., Paris 2008) and
has written several articles devoted to Italian Futurism, avant-garde
internationalism, Cubism, Fascist aesthetics and architecture. She has
produced a new edition of Ruggero Vasari's seminal Futurist dramas of
the Ciclo delle Macchine (Palermo 2009) and is preparing a collection of
essays on the politics of iconoclasm and conservation in relation to
totalitarian architecture in the 20th century. She’s currently working on a
book manuscript, The Foreign Policy of the Avant-garde: International
Networks, National Politics and the Development of European Art in the
1920s, and is pursuing research for a volume on the historiography of the
avant-garde.
Index
This index lists the names of persons referred to in the essays, including those
of scholars whose works are discussed in the text (but not the names listed in
the bibliographies). Filippo Tommaso Marinetti has been omitted as he is
referred on nearly every page of this volume.
Abruzzese, Alberto, 190 Baldassari-Tedeschi, Giuseppina,

Adamson, Walter, 95 253
Agnese, Gino, 266 Balestrieri, Lionello, 256
Alessio, Luigi, 21, 26 Balla, Giacomo, 65, 73, 96, 125,
Alfieri, Vittorio, 239-240 142, 143, 155, 184, 212, 222, 223,
Allen, Richard Hinckley, 44 274, 277, 278, 295, 324, 329
Allende-Blin, Juan, 245 Ballerini, Luigi, 276
Almieri Calza, Celeste, 255 Balpe, Jean Paul, 281
Altomare, Libero (Remo Mannoni), Barbetti, Cesare, 255
121 Bardi, Pier Maria, 306
Ambrosi, Alfredo Gauro, 256 Bardiot, Clarisse, 268
Amitrano, Adolfo, 288, 299 Bardou, Jean-Pierre, 4, 5
Antoine, André, 140 Barquissau, Raphael, 104
Antonello, Pierpaolo, 315-336 Barthes, Roland, 104, 180, 281
Apollinaire, Guillaume (Wilhelm Bartoccini, Mario, 251
Albert Vladimir Popowski de La Bartram, Alan, 279
Selvade Apollinaris de W - Baudelaire, Charles, 102, 132, 155,
Kostrowicky), 133, 271 178
Apollonio, Umbro, 91, 96, 205, Bauman, Zygmunt, 88
221, 222 Bayer, Herbert, 322
Arata, Giulio Ulisse, 300, 301 Beaumont, André, 12
Archipenko, Aleksandr Becker, Lutz, 320, 321
Porfyrovych, 155 Bellasi, Pietro, 333
Arehns, Gunther, 333 Bellini, Gianfranco, 255
Argan, Giulio Carlo, 290 Bellini, Vincenzo, 215
Aristotle, 74 Belloli, Carlo, 273
Armstrong, Tim, 139 Beltramelli, Antonio, 93
Arnheim, Rudolph, 240 Ben-David, Rachel, viii
Artioli, Umberto, 218 Benedetta (Benedetta Marinetti),
Aumont, Jacques, 208 see Cappa, Benedetta
Beneke, Sabine, 14
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 215 Benelli, Sem, 131
Balbo, Italo, 235, 254, 260, 329 Benevolo, Leonardo, 288
380 Index
Benjamin, Walter, 81, 89, 90, 92, Braga, Dominique, 104

132, 133, 170, 171, 172, 177-179, Bragaglia, Alberto, 181
188, 264 Bragaglia, Anton Giulio, 47-48,
Benson, Timothy, 163 142, 155, 159-160, 169, 181-185,
Benz, Carl, 3, 13 187-189, 224, 300
Berger, Peter, 88 Bragaglia, Arturo, 181
Berghaus, Günter, 1-39, 84, 95, Bragaglia, Carlo Ludovico, 181-185
126, 150, 153, 160, 163, 172, 226, Brandstetter, Gabriele, 129
245, 256, 260, 268, 353 Braque, Georges, 318
Berman, Marshall, 88, 129 Breda, Ernesto, 18-19
Bernardi, Enrico, 3 Breton, André, 63-64, 218
Bernardini, Aldo, 215 Briano, Italo, 2
Bernhardt, Sarah, 215 Bronne, Carlo, 112
Bertetto, Paolo, 207, 208, 210 Brow, Robert, 134
Bestetti-Treves-Tuminelli Brunetti, Fabrizio, 299
(Publishing house), 303 Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., 158
Bianchi, Edoardo, 3 Bugatti, Ettore, 3
Bianchino, Gloria, 318 Buggeri, Antonio, 190
Biasi, Giuseppe, 301 Buñuel, Luis, 212
Bielovucic, Juan, 13, 23 Burke, Kenneth, 266-267
Biguzzi, Stefano, 251, 253 Burzio, Eugenia, 66
Blake, William, 52, 82 Buzzi, Paolo, 12, 28, 242, 255
Blériot, Louis, 13
Blissett, Luther, 193 Cage, John, 271, 273
Bobillot, Jean-Pierre, 274 Cagno, Umberto, 12
Boccioni, Umberto, 21, 26, 29, 49, Calder, Alexander, 326
50, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70-71, Calderara, Mario, 10
96, 108, 116, 127, 132, 144, 150, Caligaris, A.C, 21
155, 177, 183-185, 212, 268, 287, Calvesi, Maurizio, 271
323 Calvino, Italo, 265
Bogdanov, Alexander Cambiasi, Lyana, 320
Aleksandrovich (Alyaksandr Canali, Mauro, 261
Malinouski), 153 Cannavo, Ada, 255
Bohr, Niels, 42, 58-59 Cannistraro, Philip V., 236, 243
Bonnefont, Gaston, 137 Cantone, Gaetana, 294
Bonnot, Jules, 68 apek, Karel, 160
Bontempelli, Massimo, 299 Capitò, Giuseppe, 304
Bootz, Philippe, 273 Cappa, Arturo, 153
Borges, Jorge Luis, 265 Cappa, Benedetta, 73, 153, 254,
Born, Max, 42 255, 324, 329
Boyd White, Iain, 289 Cappa, Innocenzo, 254
Bozzolla, Angelo, 243 Capponi, Giuseppe, 294, 299
Bracci, 167 Caracciolo, Alberto, 2
Index 381
Caramel, Luciano, 289, 323 Cigliana, Simona, 141, 181, 185

Caravaglios, Nino Florio, 251 Cinquegrana, Pasquale, 248
Carboni, Eriberto, 259, 412 Ciucci, Giorgio, 288, 306
Carli, Mario, 155 Clair, René, 205, 212
Carpi, Umberto, 151 Clough, Shepard Bancroft, 2
Carrà, Carlo, 19, 69, 150, 213, 300, Coady, Robert, 166
319 Cocteau, Jean, 155
Carrel, Alexis, 26, 66, 139 Coffmann, Elizabeth, 128
Carus, Paul, 47 Colombo, Luigi (Fillìa), 21, 31, 32-
Caruso, Enrico, 66 33, 73-74, 166-168, 170, 172,
Caruso, Luciano, 278 320, 329, 349-350, 353-354
Casavola, Franco, 251, 252-253, Concannon, Kevin, 270, 272, 274-
254 275
Casella, Alberto, 255 Cooper Albright, Ann, 129
Casella, Alfredo, 249, 251, 295 Cordero, Tina, 225
Castagnetti (aka Ricas), Riccardo, Corra, Bruno (Bruno Ginanni
316, 317, 320 Corradini), 43, 125, 141-143, 221,
Castelnuovo, Guido, 48 222, 255, 369
Castiglione, Vera, 101-124 Corradini bothers, see Corra, Bruno
Cavacchioli, Enrico, 26, 28, 85, 93 and Ginna, Arnaldo (Arnaldo
Cavalieri, Enrico, 172 Ginanni-Corradini)
Cavallini, Giorgio, 16 Cosenza, Luigi, 294
Cavallotti, Cesare, 255 Cossio, Carlo, 320
Ceas, Giovanni, 296 Costantini, Vittore, 252
Ceirano, Giovanni Battista, 3 Craig, Edward Gordon, 140
Celant, Germano, 185 Crali, Tullio, 320
Cenzi, Giannina, 21 Crary, Jonathan, 135
Cerio, Edwin, 292, 294-299 Crispo, Antonio, 2
Cézanne, Paul, 309 Crispolti, Enrico, 28, 33, 154, 170,
Chaperon, Danielle, 134 288, 306
Chasseloup-Laubat, Gaston de, 8 Croce, Benedetto, 166, 356
Chávez Dartnell, Jorge (Georges), Crusoe, Robinson, 330
10, 12 Current, Marcia Ewing, 129
Cherchi Usai, Paolo, 220 Current, Richard Nelson, 129
Chéret, Jules, 130 Curtis, William J. R., 288
Chessa, Luciano, 247, 260 Curtoni, Pino, 21
Chiodelli, Raoul, 232-233, 245,
255, 260 D’Albisola, Tullio (Tullio
Chopin, Frédéric, 215 Mazzotti), 320
Chopin, Henri, 274 D’Ambrosio, Matteo, 263-286
Ciano, Costanzo, 232, 237, 240, D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 10, 12, 77,
260 95, 204, 224, 234, 338, 356
Ciano, Galeazzo, 232
382 Index
Da Vinci, Leonardo, 315, 331, 332, Dionysus (Greek god), 84

330, 334 Diulgheroff, Nicola, 320
Dal Bianco, Armando, 247 Doctor, Jennifer, 250
Dal Co, Francesco, 288 Donarelli, Ugo, 243, 250
Dalcroze, Émile, see Jaques- Dorfles, Gillo, 316, 379
Dalcroze, Émile Dreier, Katherine, 169
Dalì, Salvador, 212 Dreyfus, Alfred, 207
Daneff (Danev), Stoyan, 217 Drucker, Johanna, 266
Danese, Bruno, 326 Du Camp, Maxime, 14, 15, 16
Daniell, Alfred, 53 Duce, see Mussolini, Benito
Danzker, Jo-Anne Birne, 129 Ducrey, Guy, 130, 132
Dario, Rubén, 103 Duncan, Isadora, 125
Daru, Pierre-Bruno, 202 Dürer, Albrecht, 297
Darwin, Charles, 74, 139, 334 Durkheim, Émile, 88
Dauguet, Marie, 121 Duse, Eleonora, 215
Dawkins, Richard, 84
De Broglie, Louis (Louis-Victor- Eco, Umberto, 276
Pierre-Raymond, duc de Broglie), Edison, Thomas Alva, 128, 135
42 Ehrenburg, Ilya Grigoryevich, 163,
De Chirico, 158-159, 309 164, 344
De Dion, Jules, 8 Einaudi, Giulio, 332
De Kerckhove, Derrick, 197 Einstein, Albert, 42, 46, 47, 54, 58,
De Maria, Luciano, 218 239, 343
De Pansaers, Clément, 102 Eisenstein, Sergei, 207-210, 213
Debord, Guy, 67 El Lissitzky, El (Lazar Markovich),
Deed, André, 160, 214, 216 163-164, 169
Deharme, Paul, 257 Elam, Keir, 281
Dekeukeleire, Charles, 213 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 139
Delacroix, Ferdinand Victor Emett, Rowland, 333
Eugène, 71 Enriques, Federigo, 45, 54-56, 58
Delagrange, 8, 9, 10 Ensor, James, 103
Demanins, Ferruccio, 190 Enver-Bey (
smail Enver Efendi;
Depero, Fortunato, 65, 96, 142, 155, Enver Pasha), 217
217, 222, 245-247, 254, 287, 292, Escodamè (Lescovich, Michele),
295, 300, 302-304, 320, 324, 329 268
Descartes, René Cartesian, 63, 68, Esslin, Martin, 281
337 Etrich, Igo, 13
Diacono, Mario, 278 Euclid of Alexandria (Eukleíds),
Diaghilev, Sergei, 125, 143 53, 54, 55
Diana, Princess of Wales, 190 Evangelisti, Silvia, 31
Diatto, Guglielmo, 3
Diderot, Denis, 140 Fabbri, Paolo, 187
Diesel, Rudolf, 3 Faccioli, Aristide, 9
Index 383
Faraday, Michael, 50 Gambardella, Cherubino, 307, 309

Farman, Henri, 9, 13 Garelick, Rhonda K., 129
Fauley Emery, Lynne, 126 Garros, Roland, 12
Favai, Gennaro, 296 Gasco, Alberto, 250
Federico, Giovanni, 2 Gaumont, Léon, 12, 128
Ferrara, Patrizia, 141 Gautier, Théophile, 14
Ferrera, Patrizia, 253 Gavotti, Giulio, 12, 14
Ferrieri, Enzo, 239, 240-242, 246, Gentile, Emilio, 95, 328, 355
248 Gentile, Giovanni, 46
Figini, Luigi, 307-310, 322 Gerschenkron, Alexander, 2
Figuier, Louis, 137 Ghil, René, 103
Fillìa (Luigi Colombo), 21, 31, 32- Ghiringhelli, Gino, 321
33, 73-74, 166, 167-170, 172, Giannetti, Renato, 2
320, 329, 349-350, 353-354 Giddens, Anthony, 88
Finkeldey, Bernd, 162 Gide, André, 112
Fiorda, Nuccio, 251 Giedion, Sigfried, 289, 293, 309
Fiorentino, Giovanni, 186 Ginestier, Paul, 14
Fisher, Margaret, 229-262, 271 Ginna, Arnaldo (Arnaldo Ginanni-
Flammarion, Camille, 134 Corradini), 125, 142-143, 222-
Flaubert, Gustave, 87 224, 242, 345, 349-352
Flusser, Vilém, 264 Giroud, Vincent, 253
Fogu, Claudio, 288 Giuntini, Aldo, 251, 252, 253, 254
Folgore, Luciano, 244, 246-248, Gobetti, Piero, 211, 226
261 Godard, Jean-Luc, 287
Fontana, Lucio, 322 Gödde, Christoph, 170
Ford, Henry, 7 Godoli, Ezio, 289
Forlanini, Enrico, 8 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 135,
Forlin, Corrado, 256 338
Fornari, Antonio, 154, 155, 170 Goldfinger, Myron, 304
Forster, Kurt, 310 Goodstein, Judith, 46
Fort, Paul, 136 Goretti, Maria, 329
Frampton, Kenneth, 288 Gough, Maria, 154
Francastel, Pierre, 14 Gourmont, Rémy de, 108
Frank, Joseph, 279 Graham, Frank, 239, 258
Fraschini, Vincenzo, 6 Grahame, Kenneth, 77, 96, 97
Fregoli, Leopoldo, 215-216 Gramsci, Antonio, 153-154, 158,
Freud, Sigmund, 27 167, 171
Friedman, David, 82 Grandi, Luigi, 251
Fuller, Loie, 125-147 Grant, Elliott Mansfield, 14
Furlan, Gelindo, 317 Griffin, Roger, 77-99
Gropius, Walter, 30, 169, 322, 325
Gahame, Kenneth, 96 Grosso, Albino, 256
Galitzky, Thaïs, 224 Grosz, George, 158
384 Index
Grundmann, Heidi, 244, 270, 272, Ibsen, Henrik, 77

300, 301, 316 Illiano, Innocenzo, 251
Gruppo Sette (Luigi Figini, Guido Isola, Gianni, 241
Frette, Sebastiano Larco, Gino Isotta, Cesare, 3, 6
Pollini, Carlo Enrico Rava, Israel, Giorgio, 46
Giuseppe Terragni, Ubaldo
Castagnola), 307, 310-311 Jameson, Fredric, 88
Guarini, Guarino, 289 Jammer, Max, 58
Guarino, Carmine, 253 Jannini, Pasquale Aniel, 131, 338,
Gunning, Tom, 127, 133, 136, 140, 347
141 Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile, 125
Hadermann, Paul, 101, 103 Jarry, Alfred, 103, 140
Haile Harris, Margaret, 129 Jaspers, Karl, 333
Hajek, Miroslava, 325 Jenatzy, Camille, 8
Hale, George C., 136 Jirat-Wasiutynski, Vojtech, 309
Härmänmaa, Marja, viii, 31, 34, Jona, Camillo, 295, 296
337-360 Jones, Terry, 98, 103
Harvey, David, 88 Jouve, Pierre Jean, 108
Hauser, Arnold, 213 Joyce, James, 90, 265
Haussmann, Georges Eugène, 16, Joyce, Michael, 282
117 Jung, Carl Gustav, 27
Hay, Alfred, 51
Heartfield, John (Helmut Herzfeld), Kafka, Franz, 333
170 Kahn, Douglas, 268, 271, 273
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 24 Kahn, Gustave, 107
Heidegger, Martin, 1, 333 Kandinsky, Wassily, 321, 322
Heidsieck, Bernard, 274 Kant, Immanuel, 24, 72-73
Heisenberg, Werner, 42 Kendall, Robert, 281
Helena (Helén, Helen of Troy; Kern, Stephen, 88
Greek heroine), 217 Khnopff, Fernand, 103
Hele-Shaw, Henry Selby, 51 Kirby, Michael, 275
Herf, Jeffrey, 328 Klee, Paul, 318, 322
Herzfeld, Leni, 170 Klein, Laurie, 172
Heumann, Albert, 109 Klieneberger, Hans Rudolf, 79
Höch, Hanna, 158 Klingender, Francis Donald, 14
Hoffmann, Hermann, 348 Kostelanetz, Richard, 273
Hoffmann, Josef, 292, 294 Kovtun, Yevgeny, 267
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 188 Krieger, Murray, 275
Homer (Hómros), 113 Krupp, Friedrich, 207
Houdini, Harry (Erich Weisz), 133 Kuleshov, Lev Vladimirovich, 208,
Hugo, Victor, 102, 109 219
Hulten, Pontus, 315
Huyssen, Andreas, 129 Lakhovsky, Georges, 257
Index 385
Lam, David, 8, 9 Loos, Adolf, 30

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de, 26, 49, Lorrain, Jean, 129
74, 139, 334 Lozowick, Louis, 164
Lancia, Vincenzo, 3 Lozzi, Enrica, 172
Lander, Dan, 270 Lucini, Gian Pietro, 28, 131
Landow, George P., 264, 265 Lumière, Auguste Marie, 140, 203
Lang, Fritz, 92, 344 Lumière, Louis Jean, 140, 203
Lanham, Richard A., 265-266, 275, Lunacharsky, Anatoly Vasilyevich,
282 153
Lanza, Michele, 3, 4
Latanza, Antonio, 245, 270 Maassen, Henry, 101
Laurel, Brenda, 281 Mac Delmarle, Félix, 121
Le Bot, Marc, 14 Maccari, Mino, 299, 344
Le Corbusier (Charles Édouard Mach, Ernst, 53-54
Jeanneret), 25, 30, 288, 289, 291, MacKenzie, Scott, 225
292, 310-311, 322 Mackintosh, Charles Rennie, 292
Lebedev, Nikolai, 209 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 140
Ledeen, Michael, 95 Malaparte, Curzio (Kurt Erich
Léger, Fernand, 30, 132, 155, 213 Suckert), 288, 289, 299-300, 309
Lemagny, Jean-Claude, 178 Maldacea, Nicola, 248
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 92, 208 Malipiero, Gian Francesco, 249-
Lennon, Brian, 266 250, 251, 255
Leonardo, see Da Vinci, Leonardo Mallarmé, Stéphane, 130-132, 143,
Levassor, Emile, 8 210
Levi-Civita, Tullio, 46 Mallet-Stevens, 30
Lévy, Pierre, 197 Malsch, Friedemann, 268
Libera, Adalberto, 287, 288, 289, Manca, Alberto, Bruno, 268
290, 294, 299, 309 Mantegazza, Paolo, 15
Lindbergh, Charles, 82 Mantia, Aldo, 251
Lindsay, Vachel, 201 Manzoni, Carlo, 317
Linze, Georges, 102 Marasco, Antonio, 155
Lissitzky, El (Lissitzky, Lazar Marchesi, Enrico, 232
Markovich), 163, 164, 169 Marchi, Virgilio, 24, 34, 143, 287,
Lista, Giovanni, 116, 128, 129, 142, 292, 295, 298, 300-301
144, 151, 154, 155, 159, 160, 170, Marconi, Guglielmo, 232-233, 239,
181, 183, 184, 185, 189, 225, 268, 254, 257
273, 320, 322 Marcus, Millicent, 224
Lloyd Wright, Frank, 322 Margadonna, Ettore, 236
Lodder, Christine, 163 Margherita, Queen Mother
Lombardi, Daniele, 245, 249, 251, (Margherita Maria Teresa
270 Giovanna of Savoy-Genoa), 10
Longhi, Roberto, 64 Mariani, Gaetano, 16
Lonitz, Henri, 170 Marinelli, Donald, 16
386 Index
Marra, Claudio, 178, 181, 184, 185, Montessori, Maria, 236

186, 189 Monticone, Alberto, 232, 233, 237,
Marriott, Fred, 8 241
Marrone, Gianfranco, 187 Montoya, Anthony, 166, 172
Martina, Guido, 225 Morasso, Mario, 16, 103
Martini, Stelio Maria, 278 Morgagni, Manlio, 317
Marx, Karl, 102, 159, 166, 168, Moses (biblical figure), 21
207, 208, 328, 333 Mosse, George Lachman, 95, 348,
Marx, Roger, 135 350-351
Mascagni, Pietro, 237, 250 Mozzhukhin, Ivan, 208
Masnata, Pino, 31, 229, 236, 244, Mucci, Renato, 333
253, 256-258, 260, 268, 274 Müller, Jørgen Peter, 348
Matté-Trucco, Giacomo, 288 Müller Lehning, Arthur, 170
Mauclair, Camille (Séverin Faust), Munari, Bruno, 190, 315-336
129, 131 Munari, Vittorio, 330
Mavara, Gino, 255 Munthe, Axel, 297
Maxwell, James Clerk, 52 Murphy, Dudley, 213
Maybach, Wilhelm, 13 Mussolini, Arnaldo, 237, 239, 240,
Mayol, Félix, 215 241, 260, 346
Mazza, Aldo, 138 Mussolini, Benito, 31, 92, 93, 96,
McKernan, Luke, 12 98, 113, 153, 171, 231, 232, 233-
McLuhan, Marshall, 129, 177, 186 234, 236, 237, 240, 251, 254, 256,
Medusa (mythological figure), 181 260, 327, 346, 349, 352, 356
Méliès, Georges, 133, 214-215, 220 Mussolini, Edda, 232
Menduni, Enrico, 230
Meneghino (popular figure), 18 Nadar, Félix (Gaspard-Félix
Meneguzzo, Marco, 316-317, 324, Tournachon), 128
325, 327, 331 Nalato, Giuseppe Ugo, 185
Meyerhold, Vsevolod Emilevich), Napoletano, Daniele, 254
140 Nash, Paul, 96
Michelucci, Giovanni, 306-307 Nazzaro, Gian Battista, 18
Milan, Serge, 63-76 Newhall, Beaumont, 188
Minnaert, Jean-Baptiste, 140 Nicholas, King of Montenegro
Miracco, Renato, 329 (Nicholas Petrovitch-Njegos), 217
Mitchell, Bonner, 91 Nicolodi, Fiamma, 249, 251, 255
Mitchell, Brian Redman, 3 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 74,
Mitry, Jean, 212 77, 81, 83-84, 88, 89, 95, 118,
Mix, Silvio 251, 252, 254 368
Mockel, Albert, 108 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 125
Moholy Nagy, László, 322 Noguez, Dominique, 221
Mondadori, Arnoldo, 237 Notari, Umberto, 131
Monteleone, Franco, 232, 234, 246, Notte, Riccardo, 269
254
Index 387
Ochaim, Brygida, 126, 129 Perseus (Greek hero), 118

Oddone, Elisabetta, 236 Persico, Edoardo, 321-322
Olmo, Carlo, 290 Pettena, Gianni, 289
Orazi, Vittorio (Alessandro Pettenella, Paola, 253
Prampolini), 333 Piamonti, Giorgio, 255
Oriani, Pippo, 225 Piazza, Carlo, 14
Orlandi, Ugo, 278 Picabia, Francis, 333
Ostrovsky, Aleksandr Picasso, Pablo, 309
Nikolayevich, 228 Pietra, Italo, 4, 7
Ottieri, Alessandra, 243-244, 248 Pietrini, Sandra, 114
Otto, Nikolaus August, 3 Pietropaolo, Domenico, 41-61
Oud, Jacobus Johannes Pieter, 24 Pirelli, Alberto, 325
Overy, Paul, 309 Plank, William, 84
Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 49 Plato, 63
Platone, Augusto, 329
Paladini, Vinicio, 142, 149-162, Plautus, Titus Maccius Plautus, 44
164, 166-168, 170, 190, 217, 322, Pocarini, Sofronio, 256
328-329 Poincaré, Henri, 47, 53-54, 58,
Palazzeschi, Aldo (Aldo Giurlani), Pollini, Gino, 307-308, 310, 322
14 Ponti, Gio, 321
Pane, Roberto, 296-297 Ponti, Vitaliano, 131
Pannaggi, Ivo, 142, 149-155, 159- Pontiggia, Elena, 322
160, 162, 164, 166, 168-170, 217, Pozzi, Emilio, 241
320, 322, 328-329 Prado, Gilbertto, 281
Paoli, Renato, 297 Prampolini, Enrico, 24, 31, 32, 33,
Papi, Roberto, 307 56, 64, 125, 127, 142, 143, 149,
Papini, Giovanni, 71, 104 155, 158, 162-167, 159, 160, 163,
Parisio, Giulio, 190 224, 256, 269, 287, 292, 295, 300,
Parpagliolo, Luigi, 296 304-306, 320, 323-324, 328-329,
Pascoli, Giovanni, 103, 252, 338 333
Pathè (Charles, Émile, Théophile Prampolini, Massimo, 172
and Jacques Pathé), 12 Pratella, Francesco Balilla, 64, 250-
Paul, Christiane, 266 252, 254-255
Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich, 208 Prolo, Maria Adrianna, 220
Pavolini, Alessandro, 255 Prometheus (mythological figure),
Pavolini, Corrado, 224 29, 83, 84, 116, 118, 142-143,
Pedrollo, Arrigo, 253 337, 341-342, 346, 349, 354-357
Peeters, Josef, 162 Prozzillo, Italo, 294
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 183 Pullman, Bernard, 59
Pellegrini, Glauco, 216 Pythagoras of Samos, 182
Peltier, Thérèse, 9
Perloff, Marjorie, 260, 263 Queneau, Raymond, 265
Perrin, Jerôme, 129 Quintavalle, Carlo Arturo, 317, 322
388 Index
Rabinbach, Anson, 139 Sada Yakko (Kawakami

Recchi, Mario, 56 Sadayakko), 131
Recupero, Giovanni, 106 Saint-Point, Valentine de (Anne
Reggiani, Mauro, 322 Jeanne Desglans de Cessiat-
Regina (Regina Prassede Bracchi), Vercell), 125, 126
317 Salaris, Claudia, 12, 31, 349
Regnani, Gerardo, 177-199 Salerno, Maria, 310
Reith, John, 233 Salgari, Emilio, 15
Restany, Pierre, 315 Sanborn, Robert Alden, 166
Ricas, see Castagnetti, Riccardo Sant’Elia, Antonio, 26, 64, 288,
Richter, Hans, 164, 170, 212 289, 290, 295, 300-301, 318
Ridenti, Lucio, 320 Santini, Aldo, 232, 233
Riemann, Bernhard, 54 Santos, Alckmar Luiz dos, 281
Rietveld, Gerrit, 309 Santuccio, Gianni, 255
Rignano, 45-46 Saporta, Marc, 265
Rigolly, Louis, 8 Sarfatti, Margherita, 327
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 108 Sartoris, Alberto, 170, 322
Roach, Joseph R., 140 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 88
Roberts, David R., 230 Sava, Gabriella, 46
Robichez, Jacques, 136 Savoia, Umberto, 10
Robida, Albert, 137 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 292
Rocca, Enrico, 255 Schmalzigaug, Jules, 101
Rodenbach, Georges, 132, 338 Schnapp, Jeffrey Thompson, 10
Romains, Jules, 16 Schoenberg, Arnold, 250
Röntgen, Wilhelm Conrad, 185 Schram, Albert, 2
Roquentin, Antoine, 88 Schröder-Schräder, Truus, 309
Rosenkreuz, Christian, 182 Schrödinger, Irwin, 42
Rosso, Mino, 256 Schultz, Joachim, 91
Rouillé, André, 178 Schwartz, Vanessa R., 135
Roussell, Raymond, 332 Scriabin, Alexander, 142
Rübel, Dietmar, 24 Sedlmayr, Hans, 309
Ruskaja, Jia, 160 Segeberg, Harro, 14
Ruskin, John, 292 Sekler, Eduard Franz, 292
Russell, Bertrand, 46, 118 Settimelli, Emilio, 221, 255
Russolo, Antonio, 252 Severini, Gino, 24, 43, 143, 150,
Russolo, Luigi, 72, 221, 222, 247, 164, 205
249, 250, 252, 260, 272, 273, 295, Sharkey, Stephan Richard, 115-116
326 Shulgin, Alexei, 193
Rutherford, 46, 58 Silvani, Mario, 251
Simmel, Georg, 132
Saba, Cosetta G., 226 Simone, Renato, 321
Sabatino, Michelangelo, 287-314 Sinisgalli, Leonardo, 332
Saccoccio, Antonio, 191, 192, 195 Skladanowsky, Max and Emil, 128
Index 389
Snow, Charles Percy, 42, 43 Tisdall, Caroline, 243

Soffici, Ardengo, 71, 103, 155, 277 Tondi, Pietro, 255
Solari, Luigi, 232, 234, 241 Toni, Anna Caterina, 152, 154, 172
Soldati, Atanasio, 322 Toniolo, Gianni, 2
Solimano, Sandra, 321 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 130
Somenzi, Mino, 253-254, 257, 329 Touraine, Alain, 119
Sommi-Picenardi, Guido, 242 Traina, Augusto, 138
Sontag, Susan, 178 Trilussa (Carlo Alberto Salustri),
Spencer, Lady Diana, Princess of 248
Wales, 190 Tsivian, Yuri, 219
Spengler, Oswald, 168, 172 Tucci, Umberto, 258
St. Augustine, 154 Turati, Augusto, 352
St. John the Baptist, 84 Turner, Victor, 89
Stalin, Joseph (Ioseb Besarionis dze
Jughashvili), 92 Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 42
Starzl, Roman Frederick, 234
Stone, Marla, 95 Van den Aemet, Sofie, 121
Storer, Edward, 162 Van Doesburg, Theo, 288, 309
Strand, Paul, 165-166, 167 Van Ostaijen, Paul, 102
Strauven, Wanda, 201-228 Van Pottelsberghe de la Poterie, P.,
Stravinsky, Igor Fyodorovich, 143, 9
250 Vasari, Ruggero, 29, 160, 166, 168-
Sullivan, John, 334 167, 320, 378
Suys, Léon, 117 Vauxcelles, Louis, 143
Swinburne, Richard, 84 Venizelos, Eleftherios, 217
Verdone, Mario, 225
Tafuri, Manfredo, 288 Vergine, Lea, 288, 292, 304
Tagliabue, Carlo, 253 Verhaeren, Émile, 15, 101-111, 338
Tailhade, Laurent, 103 Verne, Jules, 15
Talamona, Marida, 288, 299, 310 Veroli, Patrizia, 125-147, 160
Talbot, William Henry Fox, 191 Veronesi, Luigi, 190, 322
Talmor, Ezra, viii Versari, Maria Elena, 25, 149-175
Tanchis, Aldo, 317, 320, 322, 342, Vertov, Dziga, 205, 206, 217
330, 332 Viazzi, Glauco, 278
Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni), 189-190, Vielé-Griffin, Francis, 103
320, 329 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro),
Taut, Bruno, 309 112
Teige, Karel, 170 Virilio, Paul, 265
Terragni, Giuseppe, 322 Vitas, Elena, 302
Tessari, Roberto, 212 Vittorio Emanuele II, 17
Thayaht, Ernesto, 256 Vittorio Emanuele III, 10, 254
Thiel, Ewald, 126 Vodoz, Jacqueline, 326
Thomas, Valérie, 129 Voisin, Gabriel, 9, 10
390 Index
Volterra, Vito, 46 Zacconi, Ermete, 215

Vos, Eric, 273, 282 Zaehner, Robert, 79
Zamagni, Vera, 7
Wagner, Richard, 77, 130, 131, 137, Zamboni, Armando, 270
215, 222 Zannier, Italo, 189
Wallace, Anthony, 90 Zarathustra, 83, 84
Waterhouse, John, 249-250, 255 Zenone, Daniela, 8
Weber, Max, 88 Zeus (Zeús Diós; Greek god), 44
Wells, Herbert George, 15 Zeuxis of Heraclea, 217
Wermester, Catherine, 158 Zevi, Bruno, 288
White, Michael, 162 Zola, Émile, 15, 131, 178
Wiener, Norbert, 333 Zornitzer, Amy, 142
Wolf, Virginia, 82 Zurbrugg, Nicholas, 273
Wright, Wilbur, 10 Züst, Roberto, 3
Wulz, Wanda, 190

(Avant Garde Critical Studies) Günter Berghaus (Ed.) - Futurism and The Technological Imagination (2009, Rodopi)

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Futurism and the

International Advisory Board

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff

Editor’s Foreword vii

Maria Elena Versari

This collection of essays results from a workshop held on 29 July

The rapid unfolding of science and technology in the wake of the

Some of the most remarkable examples of the technological

As many scholars in the past had focussed their attention on

I should like to express my sincerest gratitude to Marja

Unfortunately, not every presentation given at our conference

‘The essence of technology is not itself something technological’

The advent of the Age of Mobility in Italy

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti had been brought up in Egypt in

to notice that, in comparison, Italy lagged far behind the most

Table 1: Growth of railway networks in selected European countries

England Germany France Italy

(From Mitchell 1998: 673-677)

Table 2: FIAT production numbers

Table 3: Car production and ownership in selected countries

Manufacturers’ output Cars registered in Number of citizens

(Figures based on Bardou 1977: 25-107)

Whereas railway travel is a

for example, could buy himself a car, but not a railway or an

12 September 1897 Arona-Stresa-Arona (34 km)

In Italy, the situation was not much different. Motor-clubs sprang

Illustr. 3: Brescia car race in 1907. From a contemporary postcard.

Table 5: Annual wages in Italy in selected professions (in Lire)4

1900 1902 1904 1906 1908 1910 1912

(Based on Zamagni 1984: 59-93)

numbers and the introduction of American-style division of labour, in

Table 6: Some memorable speed records, 1894-1909

Date 22 July 25 Febr. 18 Dec. 29 April 31 March 26 Jan.

With the new century approaching, another development in the

of its main attractions a Gallery of Aeronautics. The following year,

We cut out our Futurist airplanes from the buff-colored sailcloth of

This text of the manifesto was published in the August-October

Illustr. 6: Airshow in Verona, 1910.

Illustr. 7: Two posters for the International Airshow in Milan 1910.

As numerous articles in the popular press suggest, Italy was seized

Table 7: Some memorable early aviation shows in Italy

9 – 20 September 1909 First International Airshow held in Brescia

Marinetti experienced his first flight with the Peruvian aviator

1911, Captain Carlo Piazza flew in his Blériot monoplane from

Long before Futurism entered the scene, the subject-matter of modern

Another major proponent of an art and literature that reflected the

described the art and literature of his time as being in a state of

Science produces wonders and industry accomplishes miracles. Yet

Du Camp attacked the Académie Française for belonging to ‘a

although he never mentioned Mario Morasso, whose writings

Marinetti has left us a vivid description of how, as a young man, he

modernity (‘Provincialism goat’s voice is bickering about the tram

In the following years, Marinetti became an ideologue of

Futurist machine cult

We renounce the obsessive splendors of the centuries that are gone

In The New Ethical Religion of Speed, Marinetti described the

authority, which comes close to giving humans divine status:

Human energies, increased a hundredfold by speed, will command

During the first phase of the Futurist movement, Marinetti

We shall thus arrive at a real reduction in the cost of living and of

iron, steel, and aluminum at the service of mankind, which will be

heard the lyrical drive of electricity passing through the armor-plating