The image of a machine in Italian futurism: manifests, music, painting

Abstract

The 20th century became a new epoch in the development of the European civilization which projected images begotten by the process of technological transformation of reality into an artistic space. The quick growth of technologies and the industrialization of all spheres of life were reflected in the works of artists in urbanized images of reality. One of these images was a machine as an embodiment of speed and technical progress. Being a central motive of the main idea of the Italian futurism (the most dynamic branch of modernism), the image of a car penetrated into all artistic spheres of the Italian art of the 1910s - the 1930s, most notably: literature, (embodied, first of all, in the futurists’ manifests, devoted to a Machine); music (the noise music by B. Pratella and L. Russolo), and art (machine painting). The interest in the avant-garde visual art of the 1920s - the 1930s, including the Italian futurism, has been growing recently. Many scientific articles and monographs by foreign authors focus on technical aspects of this ambiguous flamboyant direction: the images of electricity, urban architecture, machines and mechanisms. But the Russian scientific literature lacks in-depth studies of these aspects of futurism. This article is supposed to become the first step on the way of studying the “machine” aspect of futurism, i.e. its historical background, development, and the influence of the image which formed the basis for the main idea of the creator of the direction more than a century ago. The authors consider the use of the image of a machine in various artistic fields: literature, music, art, and provide a comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon.