Lligams entre tradició i modernitat Noves interpretacions al voltant del món clàssic Irene Gras Valero Núria Aragonès Riu (coords.) Lligams entre tradició i modernitat Noves interpretacions al voltant del món clàssic Irene Gras Valero Núria Aragonès Riu (coords.) Editors Irene Gras Valero Núria Aragonès Riu Autors dels textos Irene Gras Valero, Núria Aragonès Riu, Rosalind McKever, Xavier Daufí i Rodergas. Exposició Martyrium Sanctae Eulaliae. A Contemporary Re-envisioning Comissariat The Crossing Lab Artistes participants Adrián Arnau, Ramón Casanova, Amanda Chiarucci, Jorge Egea, Massimiliano Fabbri, Luca Freschi, Núria guerra, Elena Hamerski, Lara Montenegro, Miguel Palomino, Valeria Pierini, Dani Pujalte, Stefano Ricci, Pau Roig, Laia Vaquer, Ignacio Zornoza de Solinís. Col.laboren Grup de Recerca GRACMON (Universitat de Barcelona) MEAM (Museu Europeu d’Art Modern) Edita Grup de Recerca GRACMON (Universitat de Barcelona) www.ub.edu/gracmon Imatge de coberta Pau Roig, Sense títol. 2013. ISBN: 978 84 697 1824 7 Aquesta publicació és resultat dels projectes de recerca L’Altre segle XIX (HAR2010-16328/HIST-ARTE) i Mapa dels oicis de l’escultura (1775-1936). Professió, mercat i institucions: de Barcelona a Iberoamèrica (HAR 201343715P), inscrits dins el Grup de Recerca GRACMON (Universitat de Barcelona). Índex 6 Pròleg Irene Gras Valero Núria Aragonès Riu 9 El classicisme com a signe de modernitat en la indumentària al tombant del segle XX Núria Aragonès Riu 29 El somni dels segles: ruïna i declivi del món clàssic segons la sensibilitat decadent de la Catalunya de finals del s. XIX Irene Gras Valero 45 ‘More beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace’: Sculpting a Futurist Classicism Rosalind McKever 79 Dos oratoris de Francesc Queralt dedicats a Santa Eulàlia: una contextualització Xavier Daufí i Rodergas ‘More beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace’: Sculpting a Futurist Classicism Rosalind McKever We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath – a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.1 This is the fourth point of Filippo Tomasso Marinetti’s The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909) and the first incident of Italian Futurism expressing its aversion to this icon of classical sculpture. The Futurists’ hatred of the Victory was so infamous that when the Futurist painter Gino Severini got married in Paris in 1913, an Italian friend made him a plaster model of the sculpture as a humorous wedding present. Severini, flummoxed but gracious, hid it. Later in the celebrations, the writer and artist Max Jacob found the statue and proceeded to smash it to pieces with a bottle.2 Futurism’s aversion to the Victory was part of its anticlassicism, perpetuated in many manifestos and statements by Marinetti and the Futurist artists of the pre-war period. They claimed that Italian art’s continuing slavish imitation of its classical (and renaissance) past was 1 * The author would like to thank Ayla Lepine and Silvia Loreti for their invaluable discussions of the above ideas, Jorge Egea and Núria Aragonès for inviting me to give this paper and their patience in its production, and the institutions and individuals who have allowed the use of the images illustrating this article. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, «The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism» (1909), reprinted in Futurist Manifestos, ed. by Umbro Apollonio, London, Thames and Hudson, 1973, pag. 21. 2 Gino Severini, La vita di un pittore, Milan, Abscondita, 2008, pag. 129. 45 preventing it from creating the kind of modern art blossoming in Paris. It is therefore rather ironic that art historians so regularly discuss Umberto Boccioni’s sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), an icon of the Futurist movement, with reference to the visual assonance between this work and the Victory [fig. 1-2]. The two figures, produced around 2100 years apart, are both carved in the round and stride out powerfully, right leg leading. Their swift motion is evident in the billowing curvaceous forms that surround their limbs and trail in their wake, creating spirals of movement. Their torsos rush forwards; their arms are missing, lost or perhaps concealed. Their movement is only curbed by the plinths beneath them, which shackle their feet into stasis.3 This paper argues that the visual similarity between these two sculptures is crucial to nuancing the understanding of Futurism’s relationship with Italy’s classical heritage. It will explore the circumstances of Boccioni’s possible appropriation of the classical Victory before proposing three motivations for it: firstly, Boccioni’s classical training; secondly, his interest in the work of the modern sculptors Medardo Rosso and Auguste Rodin; and thirdly, the possibility that this could have been a conscious appropriation on Boccioni’s part, an attempt to surpass the Victory. The second and third theories necessitate consideration of the changing reception of classical art in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, looking beyond Rodin and Rosso to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche in order to consider how the classical and the modern could be synthesized, or rather, which aspects of the classical could be of use to Futurism, and addressing the inherent nationalism involved in such discussions of Europe’s classical heritage. It is worth emphasizing that Boccioni’s sculpture was produced in 1913, a year before the outbreak of the First World War, and two years before Italy’s involvement, because discussions of modernist classicism have previously focused on the 1914-18 war and its aftermath.4 My argument does not aim 3 The Victory’s feet, which were sculpted separately, have been lost. 4 See Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925, London, Thames and Hudson, 1989 and Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910-1930, London, Tate Gallery, 1990. For a full review of recent art historical literature on modernist classicism, see Silvia Loreti, «Avant-garde Classicism: the Cases of Giorgio De Chirico and Pablo Picasso, 46 at incorporating Futurism, or Unique Forms, into the rappel à l’ordre, nor does it intend to downplay Futurism’s avant-garde status by associating its most famous sculpture with arrière-garde tendencies. As recent literature has argued, modernist or avant-garde classicism from Ingres to Denis to Seurat to Picasso, was practiced in a range of forms and supported by varying ideologies.5 This paper is a specific exploration of the utility of classicism, as represented by the Victory, to Boccioni’s Futurist sculpture. The limited scope of this short paper precludes engagement with the wider Warburgian issue of the Nachleben of the nymph motif, to which this paper doubtless relates, but it will conclude with the comparison of the afterlives of the two sculptures in question and respond to Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas in its use of images. The Futurist artists were by no means oblivious to the fact that comparison between their art and that of antiquity was possible. In the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture (1912) Boccioni had a pre-emptive retort for the accusation that an armless figure was a trope of classical statue: We want the entire visible world to tumble down on top of us, merging and creating a harmony on purely intuitive grounds; a leg, an arm of an object has no importance except as an element in the plastic rhythm of the whole, and can be eliminated, not because we are trying to imitate a Greek or Roman fragment, but in order to conform with the general harmony the artist is trying to create. A sculptural whole, like a painting, should not resemble anything but itself, since figures and objects in art should exist without regard to their logical aspect.6 Ca. 1907-1924», unpublished doctoral thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 2008. In Silver, see pag.96-97 for a discussion of the nationalist ways in which the Victory of Samothrace was invoked during wartime, as a symbol of triumph in adversity, naturalized to France in Reb’s 1915 cartoon «Those who have seen» and as a means to lament Greek neutrality in Ozenfant’s cover for L’Elan, which praises her spirit but bemoans her lack of brains and brawn [bras]. 5 Gottfried Boehm, «An Alternative Modern: On the concept and basis of the exhibition», in Gottfried Boehm, Ulrich Mosch and Katharina Schmidt, eds, Canto d’Amore: Classicism in Modern Art and Music 1914-1935, Basel Kunstmuseum, 1996, pag. 16-17. Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, On Classic Ground, op. cit., pag. 24. 6 Umberto Boccioni, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture” (1912), reprinted in Futurist Manifestos, op. cit., pag. 63. 47 Boccioni acknowledges that a Futurist sculpture may have missing elements, such as an arm or a leg, but stresses that the ideology for this is entirely Futurist; a question of composition, not classicism. Missing limbs are of course only deemed classical in retrospect, as the statues would have originally had their full complement of appendages, but the loss of these elements is testament to their age. Nonetheless, Boccioni’s argument that a seemingly classical formal motif can be used for an entirely Futurist ideology is essential to a nuanced understanding of Futurism’s relationship with the classical. Another example of the Futurists’ awareness of the comparability to classical art is found in the introduction to their exhibition catalogue for the 1912 show that toured Paris, London and Berlin. In this the Futurist artists wrote: The points of contact which the quest of style may have with the so-called classic art do not concern us. Others will seek, and will, no doubt, discover, these analogies which in any case cannot be looked on as a return to methods, conceptions and values transmitted by classical painting.7 Nonetheless, highlighting the comparability of Futurism and classical art can enrich our understanding of Futurism, with no detriment to its forcefully modern ideals. I argue that the Victory was not necessarily Futurism’s nemesis, but it was something the Futurists could use to sculpt their own modernist classicism. The force of Futurism’s reaction against classicism is indicative of its popularity. Since the 18th century the art academies of the Italian peninsula had shown an interest in artistic classicism through the prevalent taste for neoclassicism. The popularity of this revisitation of classical form and subjects was also widespread across Europe. It owed much to Johann Joachim Winckelmann and his studies of classical art in 7 Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini, «The Exhibitors to the Public» (1912), reprinted in Futurist Manifestos, op. cit., pag. 47. 48 the 1750s and 1760s which praised Hellenistic art (and its later imitators such as Raphael) above all other periods, encouraging all artists to emulate it. Even though Winckelmann never used the word «classical», his vision of Greek art as characterized by «a noble simplicity and sedate grandeur in gesture and expression» soon became the paradigm of classicism.8 Neoclassicism, Winckelmann’s praise of the serene ideal of Greek art and of course his endorsement of the imitation of the past, summed up in his statement «[t]here is but one way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps unequalled; I mean by imitating the ancients» were all contrary to Futurism’s aesthetic and ideals. In the Manifesto of Futurist Painters (1910) the artists announced they would «Totally invalidate all kinds of imitation» and that they were «sickened by the foul laziness of artists who, ever since the sixteenth century, have endlessly exploited the glories of the ancient Romans».9 Italy’s ancient Roman heritage was a matter of national pride, called upon in nationalist rhetoric in order to unite the disparate Italian peninsula, which had only become a unified nation in 1861. Giuseppe Mazzini, the political activist who for years fought for Italy’s unification, called for a Third Rome; the protagonists of the Risorgimento, the period of Italy’s wars of independence, were compared to the Romans; and the colonialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was lauded as a reclamation of Italy’s former Roman territories, such as Libya.10 Futurism’s anticlassicism clashed with its nationalism; Futurist rhetoric suggests a complex relationship between the two. As in the above quotes, the Futurists rarely differentiated between Greek and Roman and instead referred to the antico, classico or greco-romano, suggesting that their idea of the classical was not restricted by national borders. This is important to Futurism’s relationship with the Victory, which was discovered on the Greek island of 8 Silvia Loreti, op. cit., pag. 12. J. J. Winckelmann, «Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture» (1755), in David Irwin, ed., Winckelmann: Writings on Art, London, Phaidon, 1972, pag. 72. 9 Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini, «Manifesto of Futurist Painters» (1910), reprinted in Futurist Manifestos, op. cit., pag. 25. 10 Giovanni Lista and Scott Sheridan, «The Activist Model; or, the Avant-Garde as Italian Invention», South Central Review, 13 (1996), pag.13-14. 49 Samothrace and then put on display in France, and therefore on a national level has minimal connection to Italy, but, as I will argue, could still be seen as part of the Futurists’ cultural heritage. Moreover, Boccioni questioned neoclassicism’s place in the Italian artistic tradition. Boccioni claimed that Antonio Canova, the protagonist of Italian neoclassicism, was not part of the history of the Italian sensibility, instead associating him with French art, for example Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David.11 It is notable that when highlighting Boccioni’s appropriation of the Victory, John Golding called it an «unwilling recognition of the splendours of her [Italy’s] cultural heritage», a way of asserting Italian primacy over the French.12 Golding, in 1985, was one of the first to highlight the similarity between Unique Forms and the Victory. Golding was fully aware of the status of the Victory as a symbol of everything Futurism opposed. He said: «The final armless image with its muscular contortions reminiscent of fluttering wet drapery owes more than a little to the originally despised forms of antiquity. The Victory of Samothrace and the speeding automobile have in a sense become one.» In 1968 Marianne W. Martin compared the lost Synthesis of Human Dynamism (1913) [fig. 3], the first of the series of striding figures of which Unique Forms was the conclusion, to the Victory: The multiple calves and feet resemble the legs of Severini’s White Dancer, but the total sculptured effect of the web of motion connecting these force-lines is also quite like the animated and delicately modelled drapery which clings to the legs of the Victory of Samothrace.13 The Synthesis’s more ornate «drapery» around the lower leg has a stronger formal resonance with the drapery of the Victory of Samothrace, but as a sculptural whole, the simplicity of Unique Forms is more akin to the antique sculpture. In his sculpture manifesto Boccioni expressed 11 «Canova non esiste nella storia della sensibilità italiana.» Umberto Boccioni, Pittura e Scultura futuriste, ed. by Zeno Birolli, Milan, Abscondita, 2006 [1914], pag. 72. 12 John Golding, Umberto Boccioni: Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, London, Tate, 1985, pag. 26. 13 Marianne W. Martin, Futurist Art and Theory, 1909-1915, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968, pag. 166. 50 his desire to use straight lines, as seen in Synthesis, to try and escape the Greek as well as Baroque influences.14 It is therefore telling that Unique Forms, which features far fewer straight lines, is the sculpture more often compared to the Victory, although we must bear in mind that Unique Forms is far better known, and thus more available for comparison. Unique Forms has become one of the iconic works of Futurism, its canonical status confirmed by its appearance on the 2002 Italian 20 cent coin [fig. 4], 15 but it has no always been so. Boccioni died in August 1916; despite the best efforts of Marinetti, his fame dwindled and Unique Forms was little known in the 1920s.16 Unique Forms only began to attract worldwide fame in the 1940s when the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the collector Lydia Winston Malbin, bought posthumous bronze casts of the sculpture and exhibited them in America; Winston Malbin’s cast is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York [fig. 5]. Casts are also found in Tate Modern in London, the Museo del Novecento in Milan, the Kunsthalle Zurich and the Kroller-Muller museum in the Netherlands. Small bronze copies of Unique Forms are available, and contemporary artists including Francesco Vezzoli and Peter Coffin have appropriated the work. Ironically, for a work entitled Unique Forms, it is the variety of forms of reproduction in two and three dimensions appropriations by contemporary artists link the afterlife of Unique Forms to that of the Victory. Unique Forms may have equalled or surpassed the dynamism of the Victory to become a modernist sculptural icon, but this status has only been secured by the same reproduction which led Marinetti to single out the sculpture as the antithesis of Futurism. 14 Umberto Boccioni, «Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture» (1912), reprinted in Futurist Manifestos, op. cit., pag. 64. 15 The coins in the series feature (in ascending value) the Castel del Monte, the Mole Antonelliana, the Coliseum, Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man and Raphael’s Portrait of Dante. 16 Marinetti organized retrospectives in 1916-17, 1922 and 1924. See Maria Elena Versari, «Recasting the past: on the posthumous fortune of Futurist sculpture», Sculpture Journal, 23, 3 (2014). It has very recently been suggested that Unique Forms was in the collection of the Marchesa Luisa Casati until 1923. Fabio Benzi, «Luisa Casati e il Futurismo», in La Divina Marchesa: Arte e vita di Luisa Casati dalla Belle Époque agli anni folli, ed. by Gioia Mori, Milan, 24Ore Cultura, 2014, pag. 104. 51 The original plaster version of Unique Forms is extant in the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, but it is rarely exhibited or reproduced. Comparing the plaster original of Unique Forms, rather than a bronze cast, to the Victory exacerbates the similarity due to the relatively similar tones and textures of the aging off-white plaster and the Parian marble which produces a far greater visual, as well as material, affinity. The Victory is considered one of the masterpieces of Hellenistic art. The figure of Nike standing on the prow of a ship is thought to commemorate a naval victory. It is lauded for its sense of motion created by the billowing tunic, and, although it is dated to 190BC, it recalls the fourth to fifth century BC Greek artistic tradition and fashion in its exposure of the body through the wet drapery, and the cord placed under the breasts. The statue was originally positioned in a niche overlooking the Sanctuary of the Gods on the island of Samothrace; today it overlooks the sculpture hall from the top of the Daru staircase in the Louvre, Paris, where it has been since for 130 years. It was discovered in 1863, put on display in the Louvre the following year, and underwent further restorations in 1884, including some extensive remodelling of the left wing from a cast of the right. As an ancient work that was restored and put in pride of place in the capital of art, the Victory would have been hugely offensive to the Futurist sensibility, which bemoaned exactly this much attention being paid to ancient art when modern art received so little. The fact that many areas of the statue were reconstructed was also inimical to the statement in the Manifesto of Futurist Painters: «Away with hired restorers of antiquated incrustations»17. The Victory is the quintessential example of the art establishment’s desire to revive the dead, rather than support the artistic youth. The object’s temporality is complex, although it dates from circa 190BC, the Victory was extant and receiving a lot of attention in the half century prior to the launch of Futurism. 17 Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini, «Manifesto of Futurist Painters» (1910), reprinted in Futurist Manifestos, op. cit., pag. 26. 52 Sketching classical sculptures, copies and casts It is certain that the Futurists, including Boccioni, were familiar with the Victory well before Unique Forms was produced in 1913. The circumstances by which Boccioni knew the sculpture are crucial to asserting that Boccioni was appropriating this victory, rather than, for example, the Roman copy of a Greek Victory unearthed in Naples in 1893, or the Nike of Paionios, excavated at Olympia in 1875-76, and to contextualizing his motivations for doing so. Boccioni could have seen the sculpture at the Louvre as he visited Paris during his formative years, for 8 months in 1906 and for a week in October 1907. He also visited with his fellow Futurists in the autumn of 1911 and spring of 1912, with sculpture in mind on the latter trip. His diaries and letters do not recount a trip to the Louvre, but Maurizio Calvesi and Ester Coen have suggested that Boccioni sketched in the museum on an early visit to Paris.18 Should Boccioni have visited the Louvre, one could hypothesise that as a devotee of Michelangelo, he could well have seen the prominently positioned Victory at the top of the Daru staircase overlooking the sculpture hall where Michelangelo’s Slaves (1513-15) were, and still are, positioned. The fame of the Victory led to many two- and three- dimensional recreations. One such is Galileo Chini’s decorations at the 8th Venice Biennale in 1909 [fig. 6]. Chini’s decorations of the New Civilization, which he imbued with Italian nationalism, stressing the dominance of Italy in western civilization, included an image of the Victory in the third section which celebrated Greek and Roman art. Doubtless Chini chose the Victory as a contemporary and recognisable symbol of classical art. While evidence regarding Boccioni’s presence at the 1909 Biennale is inconclusive, it has recently been suggested that he attended,19 and therefore would have seen 18 This is based on Boccioni’s copy of Honoré Daumier’s Don Quixote and the Dead Mule (1867), which then hung in the Louvre, although, as Calvesi and Coen stress, this sketch may well have been from a reproduction as it could predate 1906. Maurizio Calvesi and Ester Coen, Boccioni, Milan, Electa, 1983, pag. 151. 19 Nico Stringa makes this suggestion on the basis of Boccioni’s regularity of attendance of the prior and subsequent Biennales of this period, and the similarity of another Boccioni painting to a work exhibited in that year, namely the echoing of the pose of Gugliemo Talamini’s La Veggente (Ritratto di una centenaria) in Boccioni’s Materia (1912). Nico Stringa, «Boccioni e Venezia, integrazioni e nuovi indizi», Boccioni Prefuturista: Gli Anni di Padova, ed. by Virginia 53 these decorations, had he not learnt about them later. The year before Chini’s mural, a young artist with whom Boccioni was certainly familiar reproduced the Victory. The soon-to-be Futurist Carlo Carrà used the Victory in a design [fig. 7] for the motif for membership card for the Famiglia Artistica in Milan, which won this competition in 1908. The Famiglia Artistica was a non-academic exhibition space for avantgarde artists in Milan, and in 1909 both Boccioni and Carrà exhibited works there; one could hypothesise that Boccioni once had this membership card in his pocket. Like the Chini mural, Carrà’s depiction of the sculpture views it from an oblique angle, emphasising its sense of movement. While Chini focuses on the fluttering drapery, Carrà’s monochrome emphasises the plastic nature of the work. Carrà was familiar with the Victory through a cast of the work in the Reale Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, the art school he attended. The fact that this Victory was being cast and disseminated around Europe to scale and in three-dimensions is very important for its status and the argument that Boccioni was appropriating this work. Boccioni, however, did not go to the Brera for his training.20 With his friend Severini, Boccioni attended, albeit infrequently and briefly, the Disegno Pittorico course of the Scuola arti ornamentali in Rome from October 1901. The first year of this course included drawing from plaster casts, as well as prints and photographs.21 When Boccioni first moved to Rome he was far more interested in drawing than painting which, Calvesi has suggested, led to this early interest in art of the past and sketching antiquities,22 evident in these drawings from classical statues and friezes [fig. 8-11]. While Virginia Baradel has claimed that these drawings were made at the Scuola arte ornamentali, details of its gipsoteca (cast hall) of Baradel, Milan, Skira, 2007, pag.81-87. 20 When noting the similarity between Unique Forms and the Victory Marianne W. Martin mentions that the Brera owned a cast, but it is useful to note other casts Boccioni could have encountered. See Marianne W. Martin, Futurist Art and Theory, op. cit., pag. 166. 21 Raffaele Erculei, «L’insegnamento secondario in Italia dell’arte applicata all’industria, I. Roma», Arte Italiana Decorativa e Industriale, IV (4 April 1895), pag. 34. See also Roberta Perfetti and Lucia Collarille, eds, Scuola Arti Ornamentali di Roma: La Storia, Rome, Edizioni Joyce, 2003. 22 Maurizio Calvesi, Boccioni prefuturista, Milan, Electa, 1983, pag. 18. 54 this school are no longer extant, so this cannot be confirmed.23 Casts of all but one of these originals would have been available to Boccioni in Rome’s Museo dell’arte classica, where they were displayed near each other for reasons of chronology. The only original of these classical sculptures to be found in Rome was a Roman copy of Lysippus’s Apoxyómenos in the Vatican Museums [fig. 12]. It is unknown whether Boccioni ever visited the Vatican Museums; he was a staunch atheist, but this would not necessarily have precluded him from visiting the collections. His sketch Seated Mercury appears to be from a Roman bronze in the style of Lysippus, originally from Herculaneum, found in August 1758 and on display in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples. Again, there is no evidence of Boccioni travelling to Naples and visiting that institution, but it is still plausible. Boccioni’s watercolour and gouache sketch of a section of the Parthenon Frieze could not have been completed from the original, as in his youth Boccioni never visited Greece, where this section is conserved. The sketch linked to the Louvre’s Discobolus [fig. 13], a first or second-century AD marble copy of a lost bronze original thought to be by the Greek sculptor Naucydes of Argos, which was moved from Rome to Paris in 1808, is not likely to be from the original. The drawing probably predates Boccioni’s first trip to Paris and shows a support strut protruding from the right calf in the drawing, absent in the original. However, the cast of this sculpture did not join the Museo dell’arte classica collection until 1941. The geographic distance between the Greco-Roman originals and the proximity of the drawings in Boccioni’s sketchbooks make it far more likely that they are from casts accessible to him in Rome. It is important to note that, near these other casts, the Museo dell’arte classica contained a cast of the Victory of Samothrace, although no drawing of the Victory appears with these other sketches. However, in 1913, the year he sculpted Unique Forms, Boccioni made a drawing which is very likely to be from the Victory of Samothrace [fig. 14]. This drawing is dedicated to Duilio Cambelotti and was found in the back of that artist’s manifesto on Greek theatre. Calvesi claims that Boccioni copied the Victory from a group in the Capitoline Museums in 23 Virginia Baradel, «Disegni e tempere», Boccioni Prefuturista: Gli Anni di Padova, op. cit., pag. 174. 55 Rome in 1913, but evidence suggests that the Victory cast was not there at that time.24 While the source for this drawing is unknown, it could have been made from the original Victory, a cast, or perhaps a photograph or drawing, its visual similarity to the Victory is readily apparent. This is the first of the three theories I propose about Boccioni’s appropriation of the Victory in Unique Forms: Boccioni had a lifelong interest in sketching ancient sculpture that led him to emulate the Victory when sculpting striding figures. As such, this demonstrates that while the Futurists claimed to have no past, the training of Boccioni, as well as Severini and Carrà, was steeped in an academic classicist tradition, from which he failed to fully escape. Synthesising classical and modern sculpture The second theory suggests that elements of the Victory filtered through to Unique Forms not (only) via sketching casts of the original, but (also) via the work of Auguste Rodin and his Italian contemporary Medardo Rosso, two sculptors of the previous generation working in Paris and using classicism in a modernist, rather than academic, manner. In his ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture’, Boccioni was rather dismissive of Rodin due to his Michelangelesque grandeur and full of praise for Rosso for his more impressionistic approach to sculpture.25 While the Futurists were vitriolic about their neoclassicist contemporaries, they were far more positive about their recent Italian avant-garde predecessors. In the Manifesto of Futurist Painters they demand that the young artists of Italy ask the art establishment: «where they can see Medardo Rosso’s sculpture, or who takes the slightest interest in artists who have not yet had twenty years of struggle and suffering behind them, but are still producing works destined 24 Some casts were moved from the Capitoline Museums to the dedicated museum of plaster casts on 24th March 1970, but the Victory cast appears in a 1920s photograph so was present in the collection prior to this date. There could of course have been a second cast. No other victories in the Capitoline Museums are visually similar to the drawing. Marcello Barbanera, Museo dell’arte classica: Gipsoteca, Cataloghi dei musei e gallerie d’Italia, Rome, Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Libreria dello Stato, 1995, pag. 21. 25 Umberto Boccioni, «Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture» (1912), reprinted in Futurist Manifestos, op. cit., pag. 62. 56 to honour their fatherland».26 Futurism’s supposed tabula rasa referred to their passéist predecessors, the neoclassicists, rather than modernist predecessors in Paris and Milan, particularly the Neo-Impressionists and Italian Divisionists. Rosso, and to a lesser extent Rodin, were accepted as modernist predecessors. Rodin’s The Walking Man (c. 1878-1900) [fig. 15] is the clearest example of the connection between Unique Forms and the Victory, first noted by Martin.27 This sculpture, based on Rodin’s own John the Baptist (1879-80), deliberately excludes the head and arms in homage to classical statuary, in all likelihood with awareness of the Victory. The lack of arms and the dynamic forward motion of the position of the legs are both similar to Boccioni’s sculpture. Rodin’s figure, like Boccioni’s, has both feet on the ground, in a position never taken when walking;28 this sculpture is a precedent Boccioni’s attempt to show diachronic movement through a single position rather than a frozen point in time. Boccioni was familiar with this work, not least due to its presence at the Rome International Exhibition of 1911, and the publicity surrounding the gift of a bronze cast to the French Embassy in Rome in February 1912.29 Boccioni’s approach to sculpting movement also shares much with Rosso, particularly his, now lost, Impression of the Boulevard: Paris by Night (c. 1895-6). In the surviving photographs, we see a figure, fleeting, possibly fleeing, with a flowing cloak of either fabric or displaced air billowing out behind it, like the calves of Boccioni’s Unique Forms. Rosso’s work prefigures the Futurist interest in rendering the environment around a figure, expressed in the painters’ technical manifesto and Boccioni’s sculpture manifesto.30 As such, Rosso provides a modernist provenance for 26 Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini, «Manifesto of Futurist Painters» (1910), reprinted in Futurist Manifestos, op. cit., pag. 26. 27 See Marianne W. Martin, Futurist Art and Theory, op. cit., pag. 166. 28 Albert E. Elsen, Rodin, London, Secker & Warburg, 1974, pag. 27. 29 Ibid., pag. 170. See also Albert E. Elsen, Rodin, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1963, pag.173174, 212. 30 Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini, «Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto» (1910), reprinted in Futurist Manifestos, op. cit., pag. 28. Umberto 57 the aspect of Unique Forms also associated with the classical drapery of the Victory. Rodin and Rosso also offer a precedent for the idea that the modern and the classical can be synthesised. Rodin both studied and collected classical art and on occasion would create assemblages in which he combined his own sculptures with fragments of classical sculpture from his collection.31 Rosso produced copies of antique sculptures, which he sold and included in exhibitions, in order to stress the superiority of his own works and to make his own sculpture compete with the art of the past.32 While normally referred to as copies, they were more re-creations, that is, a creative re-interpretation rather than a mechanical copy, as they combined his technical skill and creative abilities. For example, his copy of the 2nd century bust of the Roman Emperor Vitellius [fig. 16] is both recognisable as related to the original, and as being in Rosso’s style. I suggest that Boccioni took from Rosso not only the technique of sculpting the environment around figures, and the dynamic pose of Paris by Night, but also Rosso’s attempt to surpass classical art not through imitation, but through synthesis with his own modern aesthetic. This leads us to the idea that Boccioni was consciously appropriating the Victory, rather than merely emulating antiquity by association due to his interest in Rodin and Rosso’s dynamic forms. Sculpting a Dionysian dynamic Italian classicism This third theory, that Unique Forms was, in part, a conscious attempt by Boccioni’s to emulate and surpass the Victory is inherently related to this particular sculpture’s role in the history of interpretations of classical statuary. As I mentioned at the outset, Winckelmann and neoclassicism Boccioni, «Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture» (1912), reprinted in Futurist Manifestos, op. cit., pag. 65. 31 See Bénédicte Garnier, Rodin. L’antique est ma jeunesse. Une collection de sculpteur, Tout l’œuvre, Éditions du Musée Rodin, Paris, 2002. 32 Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso, 2nd edn, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1972, pag. 56. See also Sharon Hecker, «Reflections on Repetition in Rosso’s Art», in Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker, Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, New Haven; London, Yale University Press, 2003, pag.23-67. 58 both asserted that Hellenistic art was the epitome of tranquillity. However, this claim had not gone unchallenged. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872) published less than a decade after the discovery of the Victory, Friedrich Nietzsche highlighted the Dionysian, as well as Apollonion, elements in the classical, giving it a more chaotic, dynamic character than previously been conceived.33 Even though Marinetti rejected him in «Against the Professors» due to his fondness for antiquity, Nietzsche was widely read by the Futurists, including Boccioni.34 Nietzsche’s aversion to those who «do not desire to see new greatness emerge [...] say “Behold, greatness already exists!”»35 is shared by the Futurists’ annoyance at the art establishment’s adoration of works like the Victory and lack of interest in modern art. Nietzsche’s Dionysian classicism and the rediscovery of the Victory form part of a zeitgeist around an alternative understanding of what classical sculpture could mean. The sense of movement and dynamism achieved through the drapery on the Victory showed that Winckelmann’s immobile classical art was highly reductive. As Silvia Loreti has argued, a more dynamic, even primitive, form of the classical which draws on Nietzsche is found amongst Futurism’s contemporaries, in the paintings of Pablo Picasso and Giorgio De Chirico, and also the expressive modern dance of Isadora Duncan.36 While a full examination of the relationship between Boccioni’s sculpture and contemporary dance is beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth comparing images of Duncan and Loie Fuller [fig. 17], both known to the Futurist movement,37 to Unique Forms and the 33 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, ed. by Michael Tanner, trans. by Shaun Whiteside, London, Penguin, 1993 [1872]. 34 F.T. Marinetti, «Contro i professori» (1915), reprinted in Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. by Luciano De Maria, Milan, Mondadori, 2005, pag. 306. Severini’s memoirs recount that he and Boccioni were encouraged to read Nietzsche by Mosone Pietrosalvo around 1900. Gino Severini, La vita di un pittore, op. cit., pag. 18. 35 Friedrich Nietzsche, «On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life» (1873), in Untimely Meditations, ed. by Daniel Breazeale, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pag. 72. 36 Silvia Loreti, «Avant-garde Classicism […]», op. cit. On Duncan’s reading of Nietzsche see Kimerer L. LaMothe, Nietzsche’s Dancers: Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and the revaluation of Christian values, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pag.107-150. 37 See Patrizia Veroli, «Futurism and Dance», Italian Futurism 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe, ed. by Vivien Greene, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2014, pag.227- 59 Victory. Duncan’s translucent draperies and Fuller’s veils are evocative of both the form and the sense of dynamism shared by both works. The Futurist Valentine de Saint-Point donned a similar Greek-inspired costume for her Poème d’amour in 1913, the year Boccioni produced Unique Forms.38 These dancers should not be associated with Winckelmann’s assertion about imitation of the ancient being the only route to greatness for moderns because, like Rodin and Rosso, theirs is not a servile imitation, but an assertive appropriation, classical costume used to emphasise modern movements. Nietzsche too rejected the imitation of antiquity, instead maintaining, in his On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (1873), that the past should only be remembered if it can serve the present. I argue that this is closer to the Futurist approach to the past than has previously been acknowledged. In Futurist rhetoric it is rarely the past itself that is vilified, but history and the preservation of the past in the present as seen in, for example, the neoclassicism of the Italian art academy. This is clear in close reading of the ‘Manifesto of Futurist Painters’: We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-a-brac, against the enthusiasm for everything which is filthy and wormridden and corroded by time, and we judge unjust and criminal, the habitual disdain for everything that is young, new, pulsating with life.39 It is the worship of and enthusiasm for the past which is criticised, the 230. Also, Ted Merwin, «Loïe Fuller’s Influence on F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Dance», Dance Chronicle, 21 (1998), pag.73-92. 38 Günter Berghaus, «Dance and the Futurist Woman: The Work of Valentine de Saint-Point (1875-1953)», Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research, 11 (1993), pag.2742. Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008, pag. 225. 39 «Noi vogliamo combattere accanitamente la religione fanatica, incosciente e snobistica del passato, alimentati dall’esistenza nefasta dei musei. Ci ribelliamo alla supina ammirazione delle vecchie tele, delle vecchie statue, degli oggetti vecchi e all’entusiasmo per tutto ciò che è tarlato, sudicio, corroso dal tempo, e giudichiamo ingiusto, delittuoso, l’abbituale disdegno per tutto ciò che è giovane, nuovo e palpitante di vita.» [emphasis mine] Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini, «Manifesto dei pittori futuristi» (1910), reprinted in Manifesti del futurismo, ed. by Viviana Birolli, Milan, Abscondita, 2008, pag. 27. I refer to the Italian original here as the widely used 1973 Apollonio translation of this manifesto omits “the enthusiasm for”, perpetuating this misconception about the nature of Futurist antipassatismo. 60 restorers, rather than the artists of the past. I see this as relevant to Rosso, Rodin and Duncan’s modernist appropriations of the Victory as using the past to create something innovative, rather than passéist. In a sense, this third idea as to why Boccioni appropriated the Victory is very much related to the previous two. His training meant that he knew what the classical was meant to be and how he could use it and his interest in Rodin and Rosso led him to the possibility of using the classical to create the modern. Nietzsche’s pluralising of classicism returns us to the aforementioned nationalist issues. Boccioni’s possible appropriation of the Victory places his dynamic figure into a tradition other to the neoclassicism he associated with France (that of David and Poussin, and for him, Canova), not an academic imitative classicism, but a modernist dynamic classicism. The vision of classicism Boccioni appropriated was one of dynamism; a Dionysian classicism which was arguably as new to the art world as, for example, Manet’s Olympia (1863), coincidentally painted the same year the Victory was unearthed. Moreover, if, as Golding suggests, this is also an issue of FrancoItalian relations, of re-establishing the artistic dominance of Italy, then to appropriate a classical work found in such a prominent Parisian position, despite its Greek production, can be read as a reclamation of artistic dominance. As the Italian writer Fernando Agnoletti bemoans in his article «Contro le “Belle Arti”» in La Voce in 1910, «In modern history every living people has succeeded better than us in returning to our antique.» Unique Forms could be seen as a new victory for the start of the new civilization the Futurists sought to instigate, one connected to Italy’s cultural heritage. I speculate that Boccioni could have considered this dynamic form of the classical more Italian than that of Canova. Boccioni’s appropriation is not as overt as that of Rosso or Rodin, but it demonstrates a comparable familiarity with classical statuary gained through his artistic education, and most importantly a comparable level of subversion, of appropriating not to conserve the past, but to exploit and surpass it. In short, to create an Italian Futurist sculpture more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. 61 Fig. 1 Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (Forme uniche di continuità nello spazio), 1913, plaster, h. 111.4 cm, Collection: Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil. 62 Fig. 2 Greek, Winged Victory of Samothrace, c. 190 BC, h. 243.8 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo by author. 63 Fig. 3 Umberto Boccioni, Synthesis of Human Dynamism (Sintesi del dinamismo umano), 1913, destroyed. 64 Fig. 4 Italian 20 cent coin, 2002. Photo by the author. 65 Fig. 5 Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (Forme uniche di continuità nello spazio), 1913 (cast 1949), bronze, 121.3 x 88.9 x 40 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Lydia Winston Malbin, 1989. 66 Fig. 6 Galileo Chini, Nike, third section (detail), 1909, Italian Pavilion, Venice. Originally reproduced in Claudio Spagnol, Galileo Chini: La Cupola del Padiglione Italia alla Biennale di Venezia: Il Restauro del Ciclo Pittorico, 1st edn (Venice: Marsilio, 2006). 67 Fig. 7 Carlo Carrà, Victory of Samothrace, c. 1908. 68 Fig. 8 Umberto Boccioni, Athlete (Atleta), undated, pencil on paper, 28.1 x 20.8 cm, private collection. 69 Fig. 9 Umberto Boccioni, Seated Mercury (Mercurio seduto), undated, pencil on paper, 28.3 x 20.8 cm, private collection. 70 Fig. 10 Umberto Boccioni, Discus Thrower (Discobolo), undated, pencil on paper, 27.3 x 20.8 cm, private collection. 71 Fig. 11 Umberto Boccioni, Parthenon Frieze (Fregio di Partenone), undated, watercolour and gouache on paper, dimensions, private collection. 72 Fig. 12 Apoxyómenos, plaster cast of original, Museo dell’arte classica, Rome. Photo by author. 73 Fig. 13 Roman, Discus Thrower (Discobolus), 1st – 2nd century AD, marble, h. 165 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. 74 Fig. 14 Umberto Boccioni, Nike, Air Victory, 1913, green pastel on cardboard, 46.5 x 31.8 cm, Massimo and Sonia Cirulli Archive, New York. 75 Fig. 15 Auguste Rodin, The Walking Man (L’homme qui marche), model 18781900, cast probably 1903, bronze, 85.1 x 59.8 x 26.5 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Gift of Mrs. John W. Simpson, inv. 1942.5.11. 76 Fig. 16 Medardo Rosso, Emperor Vitellius, c. 1895, bronze, 34 x 25 x 20 cm, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 77 Fig. 17 Samuel Joshua Beckett, Loie Fuller Dancing, ca. 1900, gelatin silver print, 10.1 x 12.5 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gilman Collection, Purchase, Mrs. Walter Annenberg and The Annenberg Foundation Gift, 2005. 78