Fascist Revolution, Futurist Spin: Renato Bertelli’s Continuous Profile of Mussolini and the Face of Fascist Time

Abstract

For ten years now, the prospect of undertaking a portrait of Mussolini has formed the undying dream of artists the world over, renowned and obscure, old and young. Seeing up close this man endowed with extraordinary power, capturing in his visage the signs of the highest and most universal individuality in existence: this is the necessary point of departure and daunting aspiration for he who trusts to marble or bronze those human features touched by the spark of divinity. - Francesco Sapori, ‘Ritratti del Duce’, Emporium, November 19321 Lavishly illustrated in the journal Emporium, Francesco Sapori’s survey of portraits of Benito Mussolini helped mark a decade of the Duce’s rule – an anniversary celebrated more comprehensively with this same year’s Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution (Fig. 1). One of the most active critics of the day, Sapori had recently published Art and the Duce, followed two years later by a more ample tome on aesthetics under Fascism. The subject was not without controversy. Since the regime’s establishment in 1922, Fascist propaganda – and its attendant imagery – had oscillated among a range of subjects and styles, without settling on any unifying aesthetic imperative.2 Would the regime’s culture stake itself upon the example of antiquity or a technophilic future? Upon an idiom duly classical or boldly contemporary? It would take a new World War and its various preludes – autarchy and empire chief among them – to shore up that identity crisis. In the meantime, a survey of prominent intellectuals on the subject of ‘Fascism and Culture’ in 1926 prompted some fittingly conflicted replies. ‘Surely you jest?’ responded the journalist and novelist Curzio Malaparte: ‘A Fascist art? Just what might that mean, a Fascist art?’3 Others expounded – often at cross-purposes – upon the relative merits of ancient or modern styles and themes. One subject, however, already offered a means of figuring Fascism’s abidingly equivocal essence. ‘For the moment’, Malaparte writes, ‘the only original and powerful artistic expression of fascism is Mussolini himself’.4