Rome

of desperation; very much under the influence of Goya, they commemorate revolt against intolerable human conditions. Sometimes they quote and imitate Goya directly, as in La Fucilazione in Campagna (Execution by Firing Squad in the Country, 1938), provoked by the killing of the poet Federico Garcia Lorca by Franco’s Falangists, which was based on that archetype of protest pictures, Goya’s Third of May. Guttuso painted the working class at work: fishermen, textile workers, sulfur miners. He did so with a fierce and disillusioned sympathy that many Italians, at the outset of his public career, found intolerable, but later came to expect, more or less as a trademark. When he won the Bergamo Prize in 1942 with his Crucifixion—which contains, along with bitter emblems of suffering and torment, indebted equally to Guernica and to the Isenheim Altarpiece, the figure of a naked woman—there were strident protests from members of the Catholic Church.

His best-known series of paintings inspired by the war, the massacres, was based on a slaughter that took place in a little-frequented suburb of Rome, the Fosse Ardeatine or Ardeatine Caves. These caverns had been used until then as a mine for pozzolana, the volcanic dust used in mixing concrete. On March 23, 1944, a squad of German policemen (Eleventh Company, Third Battalion, mostly German-speaking Italians who had served in Russia) was marching along Via Rasella in central Rome when it drew level with a steel trash cart which the Italian resistance, knowing their route, had packed with iron tubes filled with some eighteen kilos of TNT. The resulting explosion, faultlessly timed, killed twenty-eight police and a number of bystanders outright; others died soon after, bringing the death toll to forty-two.

This action—or atrocity, as the Germans saw it—threw the Nazis into a frenzy of vengeance. Reprisals were called for: ten Italians for every dead Nazi. (The sixteen resistance members who had actually planned and helped carry out the action were never caught.) There were difficulties in rounding up enough hostages, and many of those taken into custody not only had had nothing to do with the explosion but knew nothing about it, being already in jail when it happened. But finally, on March 25, a total of 355 Italians were forced into trucks, driven to the Ardeatine Caves, and shot in groups of five. It took all day and produced indescribable and horrible chaos, particularly since some of the Nazi executioners were themselves so horrified by their task that they had to get drunk on Cognac to finish the job, which did not improve their aim. When the last victim was pronounced dead, a corps of German engineers sealed the caves with dynamite. They would not be opened for a year, until after the Allies entered Rome. But word of the Ardeatine slaughter leaked out very fast, and it was on this that Guttuso based his melodramatically tragic series of massacre paintings, collectively entitled Gott mit Uns— God with Us, the slogan on the buckles of Nazi uniform belts—which could not be publicly exhibited before the liberation of Italy, for fear of German reprisals.

Probably Guttuso’s most ambitious painting was done several decades later—his enormous three-meter-square canvas La vucciria (1974), a panorama of the food market in central Palermo. The name of the place derives from the French boucherie, “butcher’s shop,” and that is essentially how it began: in Italian a macelleria, but a gigantic, encyclopedic one, where everything living or dead, from baby squid to whole hogs, from bunches of laurel to boxes of eggplant, as long as it was edible, was sold for consumption, twenty-four hours a day. Just as the old Les Halles was known as “le ventre de Paris,” “the belly of Paris,” so the Vucciria is and was the belly of Palermo, growling, grumbling, restlessly teeming, and always alive. “E balati ra Vucciria ’un s’asciucanu mai,” runs a common Sicilian saying, “The paving stones of the Vucciria are never dry,” meaning that the place is always in use, always being swilled and hosed down. Or, if you want to make a promise of delivery that neither you nor your hearer will believe, you can say, “When the stones of the Vucciria dry out.” Into this painting Guttuso packed his feelings and observations about Palermo; the city was, as he painted it, what the city ate, an enormous and phantasmal, chaotic slaughterhouse: dead lambs, tuna split open to disclose their ruby flesh, harsh contrasts of purple eggplant, tomatoes so red-ripe as to seem on the verge of explosion, sardines awaiting their transformation into pasta con le sarde, pyramids of shining lemon—a massive compost of life and death.

If Guttuso’s form of social realism—victims, big backsides, spaghetti-haired women, and all—proved popular with orthodox communists and rich Italians in and out of Rome, it failed to excite much imitation—and none of any quality—among Italian painters in the postwar years, and was looking decidedly tired by the 1960s.

The new rage was for abstract painting, and in particular for the work of Alberto Burri (1915–95) and Lucio Fontana (1899–1968). But Burri’s work now seems to have been overtaken by the more subtle paintings of the Spaniard Antoni Tapies, and Fontana’s has come to look monotonous. (There are those who, remembering Fontana’s early enthusiasm for Mussolini and Fascism, to which he was a convinced adherent, would regard this as a just punishment.) How much mileage can an artist extract, and for how long, from ripped, paint-drenched, charred burlap? The work of these “informalist” painters only reminds us, decades later, that when paintings have little or no anchorage in the world as seen, they will end up looking pretty much the same; the “freedom” of so much abstract art actually leads to monotony. Nine times out of ten, the thing that underwrites variety is a certain degree of faithfulness to things as they appear, to a world whose enormous and constantly invigorating and challenging differences cannot be surpassed by the more limited experience of a painter.

Fontana was the kind of artist whose work passed through a phase of seeming radical almost to the point of aggression and alarm, and then slumped into a semi-decorative sameness. From early Cubism onward, artists had achieved certain effects by adding material to the canvas—collaged newsprint, glued-on objects. Fontana’s rhetorical device was to take material away from the canvas, leaving holes in it—either poked or slashed in its paint-burdened surface. These were christened, rather pretentiously, Concetti Spaziali (Spatial Concepts), because they showed emptiness behind the stretched canvas. Fontana’s admirers saw in this an invigorating sign of pent-up energy, though today this seems more a figure of art-speech than a physical reality. Looking back on it, how pointless it seems! The real surface of Italy was full of holes, craters, gashes, all inflicted on it by the bombs of the raiders and the shells of the panzers. It was one huge landscape of damage. Little could have been more gratuitous than to take canvases and punch holes in them, as though this could add some meaning to what the real world had undergone, whose traces were so much more eloquent than anything an “advanced” artist could do to surfaces in his studio. Fontana’s work could not escape the fate of novelty art which outlives its novelty.

In general, Italian painting in the 1960s seemed caught in an insoluble bind: anxious to escape the heavy, elegant burden of inherited culture, plagued by memories of its own glorious past, it could not invent a convincing way of looking brutal. In Rome it entered a phase of complacent, pseudo-radical mannerism which made the frigid exercises of such painters as the Cavaliere d’Arpino, three centuries before, seem positively exuberant. The Italian art world, seemingly disoriented by the war and by the rise of American art to prominence (and then to imperial glory in the fifties), tended to treat as “major figures” artists whose talent and achievements were quite nugatory. One example among many was Mario Schifano (1934–98), an “Italian Pop” artist who briefly enjoyed the reputation of being Italy’s answer to Andy Warhol—as if an answer were needed!—before wrecking his slender talent and eventually killing himself with massive intakes of cocaine. Schifano was the next-door neighbor of the great Italian aesthete and English scholar Mario Praz, author of The Romantic Agony, The House of Life (a long, meditative essay that circled around his enormous collection), and other works. Praz loathed Schifano, who was the noisiest of neighbors and, as a friend of the Rolling Stones and a devotee of rock- and-roll, represented everything Praz found most noxious and threatening in sixties culture. Schifano, on the other hand, worshipped Praz, and bombarded him with invitations to meet. He wanted, in particular, an inscribed copy of The House of Life. Eventually, one was left outside Schifano’s door, and it was indeed inscribed by the scholar. “A Mario Schifano,” the dedication ran. “Cosi vicino, ma cosi lontano”—“To Mario Schifano, so near but so far away.”

The 1960s and ’70s were a hospitable time for conceptual art in Rome, particularly given the Italian talent for obfuscatory theory. The most “radical” of these gestures—one whose sharpness is most unlikely ever to be