Rome

degenerates, hooligans, childish layabouts, onanists and spineless people who had pompously styled themselves surrealists and also talked about the ‘surrealist revolution.’ ” The Surrealist painters, of course, were the modernists who derived most from de Chirico, who most admired his early work, but, because of their contempt for his later, pseudo-classical work, had become his ferociously rejected and disowned children. Chief among de Chirico’s villains was the Surrealist leader Andre Breton, “the classic type of pretentious ass and impotent arriviste,” closely followed in vileness and treachery by the poet Paul Eluard, “a colorless and commonplace young man with a crooked nose and a face somewhere between that of an onanist and a mystical cretin.” (If de Chirico disliked you, he never forgave or forgot, and you would know it soon enough.) This pair and their associates in Surrealism (Yves Tanguy, Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dali, the Catalan for whom de Chirico cherished an especial contempt and hatred) had all been inspired by the early “metaphysical” paintings he made, up to 1918 or thereabouts, which turned the image of the city (chiefly Ferrara, where he lived from 1915 to 1918, and Turin, whose towers regularly appear in his paintings) into one of the emblematic sites of the modernist imagination. Its elements click into place as de Chirican property as soon as they are named: the piazza, the hard dark shadows, the statue, the train, the mannequin, and of course the arcades.

Many of them are drawn from memories of real places where de Chirico had lived; they are not inventions, and this only adds to their imaginative power. The town of Volos, for instance, was cut through by a railway; hence the recurrent train and its puffs of smoke. But since de Chirico’s father was also a railroad engineer, the train is also a deeply paternal image, and this lends extra meaning to a railway-station painting like The Melancholy of Departure (1914): melancholy because the father-train is leaving, abandoning the young, insecure son to his fears. De Chirico found the epitome of strangeness in classical architecture. It was summed up in the arcade—that receding array of dark arches, that shallow screen. “There is nothing like the enigma of the Arcade, which the Romans invented,” he wrote:

A street, an arch—the sun looks different when it bathes a Roman wall in light. And there is something about it more mysteriously plaintive than in French architecture, and less ferocious, too. The Roman arcade is a fatality. Its voice speaks in riddles filled with a strangely Roman poetry.

De Chirico cited three words “which I would like to be the seal of every work I have produced: namely, Pictor classicus sum”—“I am a classical painter.” The thought was anathema to the Surrealists, who took unrestrained pleasure in attacking de Chirico for his later work, in which he celebrated the classical world and completely shied away from those elements in his style that were called proto-Surrealist. There were no boundaries to Surrealist hostility, and none to the anger with which de Chirico responded to it. Modern art, de Chirico insisted, was now in a state of utter decadence. It had fallen for two reasons. First, it had surrendered to Parisian-style modernism instead of keeping to the real track, which in de Chirico’s belief ran from the Old Masters through the artists who had nourished de Chirico himself, the Northern painters like Arnold Bocklin. “If some day someone institutes a Nobel Prize for provincialism, silliness, xenophobia and masochistic lust for La France Immortelle,” de Chirico wrote, “I am convinced that this prize would be awarded to the Italy of today.”

Second, painting had forgotten its own basic techniques. Other artists might look back to past painters: Picasso to Ingres, Leger to Poussin, and any number of Italian painters to Masaccio, Piero della Francesco, or Lorenzo Lotto. But what de Chirico proposed was not a mere “looking back,” it was a restructuring of art in terms of ancient, now ignored techniques that must somehow be reinvigorated and recovered. And this was not fated to happen, especially not in the terms of gladiator battles and classical facades that came, more and more, to define the subject matter of de Chirico’s later painting.

And there was a further complication. De Chirico refused to believe what was an article of faith among the Surrealists and most other foreign admirers of his work: namely, that he had been a better painter in his youth, and that the so-called pittura metafisica that he produced up to about 1918 was the real, essential de Chirico, whereas the later work was either cynical self-copying sold as “original,” or obvious pastiches of older forms of art de Chirico admired—Raphael, Titian, and so forth. To make things worse, de Chirico had no inhibitions about selling his later pictures as pre-1918 originals, backdated. Italian art dealers used to say the Maestro’s bed was six feet off the bedroom floor, to hold all the “early work” he kept “discovering” below it. There are, for instance, at least eighteen copies of The Disquieting Muses (1917), all painted by de Chirico between 1945 and 1962.

Large marketing efforts have been made to set late de Chirico on an equal footing with the early work, but so far they have been unsuccessful, as indeed they deserve to be. By far the best painter directly associated with Fascism was Mario Sironi, who after the fall of Mussolini would pay dearly for his favored role in the movement. A leading member of the Novecento group, which had assembled around Mussolini’s art-curating mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, Sironi had rebelled against liberalism, declaring the fine arts to be “a perfect instrument of spiritual government,” and wholeheartedly placing his work at the service of the Fascist revolution. It ought to be “intentionally anti-bourgeois.” Early in his career, just after World War I, Sironi painted dark, harsh landscapes of industrial Milan, which (consciously or not) reflected Mussolini’s early socialist ideas. After Fascism took hold in Italy, Sironi kept stressing that he wanted to be seen as “a militant artist, that is to say, an artist who serves a moral ideal and subordinates his own individuality to the collective cause.” He wished to leave aside the easel picture and devote himself to large-scale murals and installations. A truly Fascist art, he insisted, was a matter of style in which “the autonomous qualities of line, form, and color” manipulated reality into “the medium of political efficacy.… Through style, art will succeed in making a new mark on popular consciousness.” Distinctions between high and low culture must go. Sironi hoped that his style, with its archaic monumentalism of rough-hewn forms and its occasional references to ancient Roman bas-reliefs, would play a part in shaping “the collective will through myth and image,” and this equation of formal order with political order became part of the official ideology of Fascism. This idea of “militant idealism,” strongly espoused by Mussolini’s first minister of education, Giovanni Gentile, became official ideology during Fascism’s first decade, the 1920s and early 1930s.

For the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, Sironi designed four powerful galleries around Fascist themes. Perhaps the most moving display was the “sacrario dei caduti,” the “holy room of the fallen,” where, in a dim religious light, the names of the Fascist dead were unrolled while a voice murmured, “Presente, presente, presente,” and the party’s anthem, “Giovinezza,” softly played on hidden, ambient speakers.

For the Fascist faithful, this was a guaranteed emotion-jerker. All visitors were taken to it, especially the VIPs: the records of the MRF contain the names of, among others, Franz von Papen, Josef Goebbels, Hermann Goring from Germany, Ramsay MacDonald, Austen Chamberlain, Anthony Eden, and Oswald Mosley from England, and the king of Siam. Eden noted in his journal, “I did not find the place congenial and I did not want to be uncivil to my hosts, so I was glad when the embarrassing ordeal was over.” Nevertheless, he felt it was “less dragooning and pervasive than Nazi rule in Germany.” Though it may not have been congenial to foreigners like Eden, it was a smashing popular success with the Italians themselves, particularly since the Fascist authorities organized mass visits to it from all over Italy. These enabled citizens who had never been able to leave outlying hometowns like Grosseto or Acquapendente to get to Rome for the first time. Eventually, some four million visitors came by train and bus to the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, and its run was extended by two full years.

A central idea about art and its purposes was enshrined by the MRF, and its main promulgator then and afterward was Mario Sironi. Late in 1933, Sironi joined with three other Italian painters, Massimo Campigli, Achille Funi, and Carlo Carra, to produce a manifesto about the future of art in Italy. “Fascism is a way of life: it is the very life of Italians.” Art must serve the interests of Fascism—but how? Sironi had nothing but contempt for the vacuous propaganda paintings of German National Socialism. He wanted to see a bony, structural art which would nevertheless have the possibility of wide popular appeal. It would do this by reviving Renaissance ambitions: in the