Rome

he positively loathed John Ruskin’s views on art, nature, and (inevitably) Venice. He asked his English audience in a speech at the Lyceum Club in London in 1910:

When, when will you disembarrass yourselves of the lymphatic ideology of that deplorable Ruskin.… With his morbid dream of … rustic life, with his nostalgia for Homeric cheeses and legendary wool-spinners, with his hatred for the machine, steam power, and electricity, that maniac of antique simplicity … still wants to sleep in his cradle and feed himself at the breast of his decrepit old nurse in order to recover his thoughtless infancy.

This must be one of the stupidest diatribes ever launched against Ruskin, but perhaps its defects are ascribable to the limitations of Marinetti’s English. Though he was certainly no feminist, he said he stood for “the semi-equality of man and woman and a lessening of the disproportion in their social rights,” which put him ahead (or semi-ahead) of most Italians. He had an acrid realism, sometimes, which contained some hard nuggets of truth: he wanted to see

Disdain for amore (sentimentality or lechery) produced by the greater freedom and erotic ease of women and by the universal exaggeration of female luxury … Today’s woman loves luxury more than love. A visit to a great dressmaker’s establishment, escorted by a paunchy, gouty banker friend who pays the bills, is a perfect substitute for the most amorous rendezvous with an adored young man. The woman finds all the mystery of love in the selection of an amazing ensemble … which her friends still do not have. Men do not love women who lack luxury. The lover has lost all his prestige.

Sad, perhaps, but indisputable. Marinetti was an enthusiastic womanizer; if you believe his account of adventures among the beauties of Moscow and Saint Petersburg on a Russian lecture tour, he was an irresistible sex god. The preferred attitude of Futurism toward women in general was to see them as primordial forces rather than rational beings. “Let every woman rediscover her own cruelty and violence that makes them turn on the defeated,” exhorted a Futurist manifesto in 1912. “Women, become once more as sublimely unjust as every force of nature!” There were, of course, no woman artists in the band of brothers who enlisted their talents around Marinetti’s peculiar charisma.

As he aged, Marinetti drew closer to the big movement that was developing in Italy: Fascism. Of course, he would not have seen it that way: rather, his view was that the Fascist leaders, including Mussolini himself, drew closer to him, needing the inspiration that only he personally and Futurism in general could provide. In 1918, the political party Marinetti founded, the Partito Politico Futurista, merged with Mussolini’s Fasci di Combattimento. Mussolini himself did not have strongly partisan views on visual arts other than architecture, but he was certainly not going to echo the psychotic hatred of modernism as a Jewish plot that animated Hitler and his cultural lieutenants. He never showed any interest in importing Nazism’s exhibition “Entartete Kunst” (“Degenerate Art”) to Italy, or encouraging his own people to construct and curate an Italian equivalent. The reason was simple: Mussolini, at first, was not anti-Semitic, and in any case (as he put it in 1923¹), with regard to art, “the State has only one duty: not to undermine art, to provide humane conditions for artists”—in short, to get out of the way. Hitler might loathe Futurism, but how could Mussolini do so? Marinetti succeeded in persuading Mussolini not to import the “Entartete Kunst” show to Italy. He also protested, successfully at first, against the copying of Nazi cultural anti-Semitism by Italian Fascists. As the twenties moved on, Marinetti became more tolerant still: he accepted election to the Italian Academy, tried (but failed) to have Futurism declared the official state art of Italy, took a hand in promoting religious art, and declared that Jesus Christ had been a Futurist—which, given Jesus’ more excited and apocalyptic predictions about the transformation of human life in the world to come, may not have been so far off the mark. And no one could say Marinetti himself did not want to practice what he preached: the man who praised war as the world’s necessary hygiene volunteered (but was not accepted) for active service in World War II, when he was past sixty.

Of the artists associated with the Futurist group and promoted by Marinetti, the most talented were three men: the painters Gino Severini (1883–1966) and Giacomo Balla (1871–1958), and the sculptor-painter Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916).

Along with these, one should probably include a fourth, a musician whose work can no longer be assessed because the special instruments for playing it have long disappeared: Luigi Russolo (1885–1947), who was the spiritual ancestor of such eccentric modernists as the English composer Cornelius Cardew. Russolo’s belief was that nonmusical sounds, as from industry, machines, or traffic, could have as much aesthetic value as traditional sounds made by stringed or wind orchestral instruments; his specialty was constructing what he called intonarumori, “noise machines.” At this first concert, at the Gran Teatro del Verme in Milan in 1914, eighteen of these devices were divided into howlers, cracklers, gurglers, thunderers, hissers, exploders, buzzers, and crumplers. Under a hail of vegetables from the indignant audience, they played three of Russolo’s compositions, including his Convention of Automobiles and Airplanes. Other recitals, evoking an equally gratifying anger, were given in London and Paris. Russolo pronounced himself “satiated” by Beethoven and Wagner; now, he said, “we find far more enjoyment in mentally combining the noises of trams, backfiring motors, carriages, and bawling crowds than in rehearing, for example, the Eroica or the Pastoral.” Unfortunately, none of Russolo’s noise machines have survived, and we have only the sketchiest idea of what sounds they may have produced.

Gino Severini was the creator of one of the major Futurist icons, the congested, jazzy, frenzied panorama of nocturnal pleasure, Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin (1912). Giacomo Balla, who taught painting to both Severini and Umberto Boccioni, was quite widely recognized as an artist by the time he joined the Futurists, and he gave the movement its most popular image, the disarmingly humorous Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912). This must rank high among the few core- modernist paintings that are good for a laugh and which almost everyone can recognize—the charming vision of a dachshund, tail a-wag and little legs going frenetically, trotting along the pavement at the feet of its owner. The paintings Balla laid most store by, however, were those of a speeding car. Some were very big— Abstract Speed (1913) is fully eight feet wide—and they are suffused with the bellowing romanticism of Marinetti’s first manifesto, full of force lines and violent, dynamic curves.

Such work was greatly indebted to photography. The main inspiration was the work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904), the French scientist who has the strongest claim to be the father of modern cinema. Eadweard Muybridge, to study the movement of humans and animals, had set up a battery of cameras side by side in order to capture isolated phases of movement as single images. Marey, on the other hand, used film strips so as to capture on one negative the successive movements of a subject seen from a single point of view by one lens which followed its trajectory. This, not Muybridge’s sequences, was the true ancestry of the movie camera.

Boccioni’s is an instructive case, because his best-known (and best) surviving work, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), is a striding sculpture based upon the very one Marinetti thought inferior to a racing car—the ancient Greek Victory of Samothrace. Its flanges and scooped-out hollows obey Boccioni’s conviction that “Sculpture must make objects live by rendering their extensions in space sensible, systematic, and plastic, for no one can imagine that one object ends where another begins.… The pavement can rise up onto our table … while between your house and the other your lamp spins its web of plaster rays.” But it also illustrates the fact that it is very difficult, and for most talents impossible, to create a work of art that is 100 percent new in the way the Futurists prated about novelty. Everything has precedents, and their presence does not reduce the intensity of a work of art. Boccioni made at least a dozen sculptures in the same vein which suggest this kind of interpenetration of object and surrounding space. Old photos suggest they are among his most beautiful and complex works, but nearly all of them were destroyed by rain when they were carelessly left outside after his posthumous retrospective of 1916–17. They instinctively accept what contemporary physicists such as Einstein had come to perceive as the truth, however esoteric it might seem at first: that matter is, ultimately,