Boccioni despised most contemporary sculpture as derivative, dull, and coarse—“a spectacle of barbarism and lumpishness.” But he made exceptions, chiefly for the Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso (1858–1928), “who tried,” he argued, “to enlarge the horizon of sculpture by rendering into plastic form the influences of a given environment and the invisible atmospheric links which attach it to the subject.” Unlike more highly regarded sculptors of the time, with passéist influences—Constantin Meunier (Greek), Antoine Bourdelle (Gothic), and Auguste Rodin (Italian Renaissance and especially Michelangelo)—Rosso was “revolutionary, very modern, more profound, and of necessity restricted.” Unfortunately, his attachment to light Impressionist modeling “deprives his art of any mark of universality,” but he is much more than a start toward what Boccioni calls “a sculpture of environment.”
Boccioni was a painter (not “too”), and he struggled to create images of “universal vibration” which took Impressionist light beyond its normal descriptive aims. He learned much about this from the pointillist paintings of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. Signac was especially congenial to the Futurists, because he was an anarchist, a foe of all established orders, hence an ally of Marinetti’s ideas of overthrow and radical change. Some of Boccioni’s paintings, conceived in terms of “divisionism” (as the dot painting that derived from Seurat and Signac was called in Italy), appear to be deliberate illustrations of passages from Marinetti’s Futurist manifestos. “We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals.… ” And there was Boccioni’s Riot at the Galleria (1910), with its jagged confusion of figures struggling under the blinding glare of a café’s glass doors. Boccioni’s masterpiece in this divisionist vein was a canvas of industrial work, The City Rises (1910–11), originally titled Work, inspired by the sight of heavy industrial construction on the outskirts of Milan. The painting is dominated by an enormous red horse, seemingly half dissolved into flakes and smears of light. The blue hitching horn of its harness rises up aggressively to center the composition. The draft horse strains forward against its hauling cables, as do the human workers that it dwarfs, with the kind of exaggerated effort that will become a commonplace in strip cartoons; its point of departure in “fine art” is probably Tintoretto’s Raising of Lazarus in Venice.
Futurist architecture had been imagined, but the only Futurist architect who mattered built nothing. His work survives solely on paper: in the small, beautifully rendered drawings he made for architectural projects that existed in his head but had no commissioning client. Antonio Sant’Elia was born in 1888 and, having bravely volunteered to fight in the war which Marinetti and his friends had exalted as “the world’s only hygiene,” was killed in an Austrian attack at Monfalcone, in northern Italy, in the summer of 1916; he was twenty-eight years old, and his death may be numbered among the culturally unhealable losses of that conflict, along with those of Franz Marc, Umberto Boccioni, August Macke, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilfred Owen, and a host of others whose names can never be known because they died too soon for their talent to have a chance to make a mark.
Even the efforts to commemorate Sant’Elia failed. He was buried in a cemetery which he had designed for his unit, the Arezzo Brigade; it no longer exists, and his grave is lost. The Futurist painter Enrico Prampolini and the chief architect of Fascist high modernism, Giuseppe Terragni, joined to design a monument to him, and to the dead of World War I, in the cemetery at Como. (Terragni’s canonical building, the Casa del Fascio, is also in Como, though after World War II it was shorn of the portrait of Mussolini which adorned its façade.) The monument is based on Sant’Elia’s own designs for larger structures (powerhouses, apartment blocks, and factories), but done at a puny scale, far too small to achieve much impact. For those who have studied Sant’Elia’s original drawings, many of which are only a few inches square, it does not matter; since those structures never existed, these drawings are his monument, and a most effective one.
A lot of ingenuity has been expended, mostly by Italian critics, to dissociate Sant’Elia’s ideas from those of Marinetti, and one can easily understand why: Marinetti’s tolerance for Il Duce, which sometimes approached the level of an intellectual love affair (though a doomed one, in the end), besmirched his postwar reputation and tended to hurt that of his associates. But Sant’Elia was killed before Mussolini’s ideas were even born, and long before Marinetti’s semi-conversion to them took place in the 1930s. Nothing suggests that Sant’Elia harbored the totalitarian ideas of Fascism, or expressed them in his architecture—though the designs were certainly meant for mass use and occupation. If anything, he was a young socialist. (It is still common for some critics, residually enthralled by the promises of radical socialism, to prefer its ideology to that of Fascism—even though the left, when it achieved power, could be and was as brutal to aspirations of freedom as the right.)
What Sant’Elia and Marinetti had in common was an ecstatic sense of the possibilities of the modern city—a mighty switchboard of information, manufacture, and perception, a social turbine hall, humming away, almost without human interference. To look at the multilevel cities Sant’Elia imagined, with their vast stepped skyscrapers, aerial terraces, bridges, and overpasses, is to see the excitement of a supposed future applied to architecture:
We must invent and rebuild the Futurist city like an immense and tumultuous shipyard, agile, mobile and dynamic in every detail; and the Futurist house must be like a gigantic machine.
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The lifts must no longer be hidden away like tapeworms in the niches of stairwells; the stairwells themselves, rendered useless, must be abolished, and the lifts must scale the lengths of the façades like serpents of steel and glass. The house of concrete, glass and steel, stripped of paintings and sculpture, rich only in the innate beauty of its lines and relief, extraordinarily “ugly” in its mechanical simplicity … must soar up on the brink of a tumultuous abyss: the street will no longer lie like a doormat at ground level, but will plunge many stories down into the earth,…linked up for necessary interconnections by metal gangways and swift-moving pavements.
The decorative must be abolished.
It is unlikely that even Sant’Elia himself could have said what went on in those buildings, space by space, function by function. They are like the cinematic dreams of Fritz Lang—Metropolis raised to a high level of aesthetic sophistication. But they pack a romantic wallop, as visionary architectural designs can—and there had been nothing as potent, in Italian architecture, since the (equally unbuilt) fantasies of Piranesi. Perhaps, if they had been built, they might not have lasted well. On the other hand, their erosion and decay might not have displeased the Futurists, who liked the idea of temporary architecture anyway, because it accorded with their love of speed and impermanence. They distrusted “massive, voluminous, durable, antiquated and costly materials.” They hoped to see architecture as a “rigid, light and mobile art,” in Umberto Boccioni’s words—although the buildings in Sant’Elia’s drawings often look as solid as Egyptian mastabas. In 1914, Sant’Elia declared in a manifesto3 that “the decorative value of Futurist architecture depends solely on the use and original arrangement of raw or bare or violently colored materials”—and such materials, as one knows from Le Corbusier and his “Brutalist” offspring, get very grotty very quickly. But since they existed only on the utopian space of paper, this could not be put to the test. Their extrusion into the world of built architecture was not foreseen by Sant’Elia, who had long been dead when it happened, and it would undoubtedly have repelled him. The ideas—at least, his ideas for the single building—were taken over and given a glitzy, theatrical form by two American architects in the 1970s and 1980s—Helmut Jahn with his skyscrapers in Chicago, and John Portman, the architect-developer of huge hotels with see-through glass-pod elevators zipping up and down, making a drama (which quite soon gets tedious, even for the tourists in the lobby) of vertical circulation.