The Activist Model; or, the Avant-Garde as Italian Invention

Abstract

Modern Italian art was born in 1909. In that year, F. T. Marinetti published the founding manifesto of the Futurist movement and Giorgio De Chirico painted Enigma di un pomeriggio d'autunno (Enigma of a Fall Afternoon), the first example of metaphysical art. The new course of Italian art was thus inaugurated by Marinetti, in the theoretical and literary field, and De Chirico, in the pictorial field, although each had broader interdisciplinary and ideological tendencies. At the same time, they created-or, at least, synthesized in exemplary fashion-two fundamental directions of modern culture: the avant-garde and its opposite; on the one hand, the abolition of the past, which exalts the progress of History, and on the other a melancholic awareness of modernity, which is lived as a crisis and a loss of traditional values. This peculiar coincidence, which through a complementary relationship both joins and separates the two founders of modern Italian art, invites reflection on the existential itineraries of both. Both Marinetti and De Chirico found themselves involved in a specifically Italian problematic. Their individual ways of conceiving of modernity and modern culture were born first of all as reactions to the mythic image of Italy that had been forged by the Risorgimento. The traumatic experience of living their own Italianness can be found at the heart of their choices. Italian by language and culture but born abroad, neither had any concrete knowledge of the Italian reality at the beginning of the century. Marinetti's parents, like the parents of De Chirico, instilled in their children the pride of being Italian: they belonged to the culture of a country rich with an immense artistic glory and a unique history in the world-a history that, from the Roman empire to the spiritual empire of the Catholic Church, made Italy the most active center of Mediterranean and European civilization throughout the centuries. Furthermore, it was a country that had become reborn as a result of the Risorgimento, the achievement of political unity and the establishment of nationhood.