The Regime and the Creation of an ‘Arte di Stato’

Abstract

The Regime and the Creation of an 'Arte di Stato'

Constructing the Novel

“…As far as the regime and its artistic theorization were concerned, modernity was a mixture of innovation and passéism: of new political statements and reactionary and dogmatic thinking paired with the ambition of modernizing the country socially and culturally. 9 Crucially, however, modernity was seen as a new social, cultural and political configuration, which would not only create an anti-bourgeois, anti-individualist Fascist Man, 10 but also produce a vision of a future controlled by anti-liberal politics. Emilio Gentile has often stressed the ways in which the anthropological revolution of Fascism has shaped and substantiated the New Man, a psychic and social subject at the same time (2009).…”

Fascism and Architecture

“…Despite the ongoing battles between the other two movements, Muzio and the Novecentisti remained a constant presence during the Ventennio, with notable buildings which changed the urban and cultural profile of Milan (see, for instance, Maulsby 2014, 133-60, on the planning of the Palazzo del Popolo d 'Italia, 1938'Italia, -1942 42 Like Muzio, these artists grouped around Margherita Sarfatti rejected the return to classicism championed by the Valori plastici movement, and they too stood at a crossroads between tradition and modernity without ever conclusively choosing one over the other but aspiring to find a new aesthetic paradigm which could guarantee a hegemonic position within the construction of State art. 43 Contrary to Sarfatti however, who was ideologically close to Mussolini's political programme, in Muzio's works the principal drive is explicitly stylistic, and not political: namely, the will to express the syntactical renewal of architectural language by drawing together traditional geometrical patterns in contrasting, alternating fashions (Kirk 2005, 69-70; Etlin 1991, 174-76). For both of them, one of the key aesthetic principles guiding their artistic practices was the idea of synthesis as construction and not as 'simultaneity of forces' as for the Futurists (Pontiggia 2003, 14-19;Fossati 1972, 27-33).…”