Recovery of tradition and fascination for the avant-garde: Architect Angiolo Mazzoni and the sculptor Domenico Ponzi

Abstract

In the period between the two World Wars, designers and artists belonging to different trends often find themselves collaborating in Italy’s strong creative tension. An emblematic case is the new public buildings that the fascist regime built to equip the country with new infrastructures and combat unemployment after 1929. Such public works allow creating innovative solutions going beyond the schemes that are still preferred by the bourgeois clients, and that affect most of the private buildings. In this context, the work of the architect Angiolo Mazzoni (1894–1979) for the Ministry of Communications is absolutely unique; the designer starts from historicism and increasingly feels the fascination of the Italian avant-garde par excellence: the futurism. Within this evolution, the architect hires many artists of traditional or avant-garde trends to decorate and furnish postal buildings and railway stations throughout Italy, designed with new formal outcomes at an impressive rhythm, and adapted to the context function. Among these artists, the partnership with Domenico Ponzi (1891–1973) is remarkably interesting: at first, a sculptor able to dialogue with the architecture, to be tolerated then, and finally imposed by the Regime for the troubled construction of Termini.