TY - JOUR
AU - Merjian, Ara, H
AB - For ten years now, the prospect of undertaking a portrait of Mussolini has formed the undying dream of artists the world over, renowned and obscure, old and young. Seeing up close this man endowed with extraordinary power, capturing in his visage the signs of the highest and most universal individuality in existence: this is the necessary point of departure and daunting aspiration for he who trusts to marble or bronze those human features touched by the spark of divinity. - Francesco Sapori, ‘Ritratti del Duce’, Emporium, November 19321 Lavishly illustrated in the journal Emporium, Francesco Sapori’s survey of portraits of Benito Mussolini helped mark a decade of the Duce’s rule – an anniversary celebrated more comprehensively with this same year’s Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution (Fig. 1). One of the most active critics of the day, Sapori had recently published Art and the Duce, followed two years later by a more ample tome on aesthetics under Fascism. The subject was not without controversy. Since the regime’s establishment in 1922, Fascist propaganda – and its attendant imagery – had oscillated among a range of subjects and styles, without settling on any unifying aesthetic imperative.2 Would the regime’s culture stake itself upon the example of antiquity or a technophilic future? Upon an idiom duly classical or boldly contemporary? It would take a new World War and its various preludes – autarchy and empire chief among them – to shore up that identity crisis. In the meantime, a survey of prominent intellectuals on the subject of ‘Fascism and Culture’ in 1926 prompted some fittingly conflicted replies. ‘Surely you jest?’ responded the journalist and novelist Curzio Malaparte: ‘A Fascist art? Just what might that mean, a Fascist art?’3 Others expounded – often at cross-purposes – upon the relative merits of ancient or modern styles and themes. One subject, however, already offered a means of figuring Fascism’s abidingly equivocal essence. ‘For the moment’, Malaparte writes, ‘the only original and powerful artistic expression of fascism is Mussolini himself’.4 Fig. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Domenico Rambelli, Benito Mussolini, 1932, in Francesco Sapori, ‘Nel primo decennale dell'Era Fascita: Ritratti del Duce’, Emporium, vol. 76, no. 455, 1932, p. 258. Fig. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Domenico Rambelli, Benito Mussolini, 1932, in Francesco Sapori, ‘Nel primo decennale dell'Era Fascita: Ritratti del Duce’, Emporium, vol. 76, no. 455, 1932, p. 258. Sapori remarks that portraits of the Duce already numbered in the thousands, and would soon exceed anything dedicated to Augustus or Napoleon, such that ‘we won’t be able to count them’.5 The critic’s language brims with the hyperbole familiar from writing on Mussolini’s leadership and appearance, including the ‘virile profile’ routinely invoked as his defining attribute. While artists, Sapori notes, had depicted the Duce seated, standing, and astride his horse, the majority of individuals have been drawn uniquely to his head – a ‘head which they had assumed to be menacing, but which they instead discovered full of an affective, plastic mobility’.6 For the most part, however, the images reviewed by Sapori hew to traditional models. With its coarse, granular surface evoking pseudo-archaic gravitas (Fig. 1), Domenico Rambelli’s three-quarters bust opens the essay, followed by a number of conventional likenesses. Even the work of prominent Futurists, whether an early adherent like Primo Conti or the ‘aeropainter’ Gerardo Dottori, appear in the guise of thoroughly academic examples. Giacomo Balla, one of Futurism’s leading lights, likewise appears by way of a turgid representation of Mussolini bestriding a large fasces with unsubtle phallic zeal. If, as Sapori insists, the Duce manages always to ‘synthesize’ (an eminently Futurist shibboleth) his impressions of the world around him, the examples of his likeness presented here remain anchored to the past. In truth, Fascist art and architecture up to and throughout the early 1930s revealed a striking diversity of styles, set on purposeful display at the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, which welcomed millions of visitors beginning in October 1932. Organizers commissioned an impressive slate of artists and architects to transform the spaces of Rome’s Palazzo delle Esposizioni into a narrative of Fascism’s founding and ensuing ‘revolution’ – a revolution still, the regime hastened to remind visitors, ongoing. Dressing the building’s façade in a sheath of soaring metal fasces, Adalberto Libera, Mario Sironi, Enrico Prampolini, and Giuseppe Terragni joined other prominent modernists and rationalists – as well as more conservative artists – in recounting the regime’s origins and development. From mock-archaic equestrian statues of the Duce to sculptural photomosaics depicting churning urban masses, the range of work on display underscored the regime’s ideological conciliations between antiquity and modernity, activism and administration, revolution and reaction. As Jeffrey Schnapp writes of this spectacle and its staging of official cultural policy, ‘neither monolithic nor homogenous, Fascism’s aesthetic overproduction relied on the ability of images to sustain contradiction and to make of paradox a productive principle’.7 Consider – particularly compared to its illustration of Sapori’s text – Rambelli’s bust of Mussolini as it appears on the catalogue cover for the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in the same year (Fig. 2). Rather than isolated as a discreet (ersatz-archaic) object, it presides in a dynamic photomontage over a phalanx of diagonally ranged, hyphenated ‘Du-ces’ – typographic equivalents of a chanting, adulatory crowd. Depictions of Mussolini in fact stand out in their formal and stylistic range over two decades of his rule, from Prampolini’s Plastic Synthesis of the Duce (1925) – which distills the thrust of his jaw to a bowed, metallic form indebted to Cubism – to the chromatic faceting of Alfredo Ambrosi’s Physical-Psychic Portrait of the Duce (1935) ten years later. The cult of Mussolini witnessed everything from ‘aeropainted’ portraits to depictions of his solemn form clad in a toga, or crowned with Dantean laurel. Alongside the (indeed countless) homages in an academic vein appear the nearly abstract likenesses completed by artists like Alvaro Corghi, Nino Za, Mino Rosso, and Mario Sironi. These disparate renderings offer a compendium of Fascism’s aesthetic heterogeneity well into the 1930s – a pluralism still contingent, to be sure, upon the restrictive measures of party affiliation and patronage.8 Mussolini himself had famously declared the regime’s openness to art that was ‘both traditionalist and modern’ in 1926. Ten years later, Antonio Maraini – Secretary General of the Fascist Art Syndicate and Secretary General of the Venice Biennale – reiterated the government’s endorsement of diverse aesthetic tendencies under the aegis of a shared national cause.9 Fig. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Cover, guide to Dino Alfieri and Luigi Freddi (eds), Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista [Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution], (Rome: Partito Nazionale Fascista, 1933). Massimo and Sonia Cirulli Foundation, Bologna. Fig. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Cover, guide to Dino Alfieri and Luigi Freddi (eds), Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista [Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution], (Rome: Partito Nazionale Fascista, 1933). Massimo and Sonia Cirulli Foundation, Bologna. It is no coincidence that Sapori himself figures Mussolini as navigating effortlessly between past glories and prospective challenges: ‘his greatness consists in the superlatively modern universality of his mind, which extends from historical exegesis to the most arduous problems of the future’.10 These facets play out in respective representations of the leader’s body, such that ‘the refined design of the academician sits peaceably side by side with the Futurist’s fragmented and fitful lines’.11 The text abounds in this kind of juxtaposition, between ‘academics and avant-gardists’, ‘tradition and modernity’, the ‘ancient and the modern’.12 Such conciliations formed the order of the day. Consider that the Accademia d’Italia had recently inducted into its ranks no less a firebrand modernist than the Futurist leader, F.T. Marinetti. This rapprochement was matched in high and popular culture alike: architectural, visual, and rhetorical examples in which the traditional and the modern either existed side by side, or else fused into a new – uniquely Fascist – unity. Of all the disparate representations of Mussolini himself, however, very few had reconciled in a single form the ‘productive paradox’ upon which Fascism staked itself.13 This would soon change. Not long after commemorations of the Fascist Revolution, a relatively unknown artist set about capturing the Duce’s ‘universal individuality’ in a likeness at once new and old, notably singular and literally unlimited. Patent Will Spurred by the retrospective attention to the Duce’s portraits in 1932, the sculptor Renato Bertelli (1900–1974) emerged from relative obscurity to design one of the most striking images from Fascism’s twenty-year rule. The Continuous Profile of Mussolini (1933) (Fig. 3) renders its subject in the round, such that the Duce’s visage appears redoubled from nearly any angle.14 Seemingly throbbing yet utterly still, the sculpture conjures up at once the gyration of some mechanical contrivance and – equally apparent to an Italian public – millennial depictions of the Roman god Janus. The work’s eponymous continuity obtains first and foremost in an illusion of unceasing movement: a rotation virtual rather than actual, evoking an ever vigilant leader seeing simultaneously in all directions. Belonging to the first Italian Prime Minister bereft of facial hair (and increasingly of hair tout court), the profile boasts an unmistakably prominent jaw and large round head – the subjects of countless elegies in their own right.15 Fig. 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Renato Bertelli, Profilo Continuo del Duce, 1933, painted ceramic, 42 x 25 cm [‘Head of Mussolini’ but is better known as ‘Head of Mussolini (Continuous Profile)’, ‘Continuous profile of Mussolini’, or ‘Continuous Profile – Head of Mussolini’] Massimo and Sonia Cirulli Foundation, Bologna. Estate of Renato Bertelli, courtesy of Marco Moretti. Fig. 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Renato Bertelli, Profilo Continuo del Duce, 1933, painted ceramic, 42 x 25 cm [‘Head of Mussolini’ but is better known as ‘Head of Mussolini (Continuous Profile)’, ‘Continuous profile of Mussolini’, or ‘Continuous Profile – Head of Mussolini’] Massimo and Sonia Cirulli Foundation, Bologna. Estate of Renato Bertelli, courtesy of Marco Moretti. It was, in fact, the very countlessness of Bertelli’s portrait – or more specifically, of its reproductions – that distinguished its import and impact. Not long after the work’s debut, Bertelli applied for a patent. After it was granted in July 1933, he set about distributing the design in a range of formats and sizes. Illustrated business cards served to advertise the work’s availability in media including metal, ceramic, and porcelain, and in dimensions ranging from a small bust to a ‘monumental’ version (Fig. 4). The options only multiplied thereafter. The Profile found eventual diffusion in terracotta, aluminum, enameled brass, wood, marble, metal, bronzed terracotta, glass, glazed stone wear, majolica, and iron. Some iterations (such as that depicted on Bertelli’s calling card) bore a bespoke plinth reading ‘DUX’. Versions also emerged in Bakelite and other ‘autarchic materials’, such as the so-called Alpha Berta alloy from Florentine foundries – materials, that is, endemic to the Italian peninsula and hence not contingent upon importation (and not subject to international sanctions).16 The sculpture’s reproducibility and portability facilitated its distribution to countless Case del Fascio (local branches of the Fascist National Party [PNF]) as well as Party offices and gruppi rionali across the peninsula. In a sense, Bertelli brought to fruition Sapori’s claim that ‘multiplying [Mussolini’s] Roman profile will make that magical gaze reverberate’.17 How, though, might such multiplication safeguard the ostensible singularity of its subject? Fig. 4 Open in new tabDownload slide Business card of local authorized distributor in Turin of Bertelli’s Continuous Profile in various formats (‘Reproductions in metal, artistic maiolica, porcelain, etc., from small-sized bust to monumental format’.) Estate of Renato Bertelli, courtesy of Marco Moretti. Fig. 4 Open in new tabDownload slide Business card of local authorized distributor in Turin of Bertelli’s Continuous Profile in various formats (‘Reproductions in metal, artistic maiolica, porcelain, etc., from small-sized bust to monumental format’.) Estate of Renato Bertelli, courtesy of Marco Moretti. The mass replication of the Continuous Profile owed a notable debt to the sculpture Dux, by fellow Tuscan artist Thayaht (Ernesto Michahelles) (Fig. 5). Conceived in 1928 and first forged in 1929, Thayaht’s Dux enjoyed renewed prominence on the occasion of Fascism’s decennial celebrations. The illustrated magazine of the Popolo d’Italia (founded by Mussolini himself in 1914) featured a full page image of the sculpture during the 1932 Decennial celebrations, for instance, and this same year it appeared on postcards and on a special medal forged by the Fascist Artists’ Syndicate.18 In its sculptural format alone, Dux had been produced in ninety-nine examples, all of them offered to local Case del Fascio. Bertelli, by contrast, removed any possible limits to his work’s serialization.19 Perhaps more consequential to his design than the multiplicity of Thayat’s Dux, however, was the latter’s studied fusion of antiquity and contemporaneity. Extant in steel, bronze, iron, and stone versions, Thayaht’s sculpture presents a head indistinguishable from its helmet – particularly in the armored, blind arches of eyes, and the raised ridge where the chin curls up into a detached ear. Flesh and carapace become one, suggesting both a proud Roman profile and the suit of armor of some medieval knight or Renaissance condottiere.20 These allusions are counterposed by a severe, geometric angularity redolent of both Cubism and Art Deco, in full international ascendance by the early 1930s and frequently merged with Futurist tendencies on the peninsula. Like Bertelli’s in turn, Thayat’s sculpture hastened his induction into the Futurist movement, which – as I discuss below – persisted even in the face of Marinetti’s newfound ‘academic’ gravitas. Fig. 5 Open in new tabDownload slide Thayaht (Ernesto Michahelles), Dux, 1929, grey sandstone, approx. 33 x 24 x 18 cm; as reproduced in Emporium, vol. 76, no. 455, 1932, p. 269. Fig. 5 Open in new tabDownload slide Thayaht (Ernesto Michahelles), Dux, 1929, grey sandstone, approx. 33 x 24 x 18 cm; as reproduced in Emporium, vol. 76, no. 455, 1932, p. 269. Published the same year as Thayat’s Dux, Marinetti’s poem-in-prose ‘Portrait of Mussolini’ describes the leader’s body as massive and adamantine, yet bearing ‘ultradynamic eyes’ that ‘dart with the speed of automobiles’.21 The Duce, Marinetti reports, regularly sits behind his desk tending to documents; yet he remains poised to leap over this furniture, or indeed over any bureaucratic impediment to sheer physicality. It is still, Marinetti insists, a ‘Futurist eloquence’ and ‘Futurist temperament’ that distinguish Mussolini’s leadership. Accounts of the Duce’s vigour were legion. Rumour had it that he never slept, or else slept very little.22 Even the most trivial of administrative matters were said to pass under his hyper-efficient gaze with unprecedented speed. The Italian press echoed foreign counterparts in describing Mussolini as a ‘human dynamo’; he, in turn, exploited this attention in cultivating a ‘political fantasy of total control’.23 In evoking that hyper-physicality and controlling omniscience, Bertelli was not the only artist to ply a metaphorical tack. Take, for instance, the neoclassical bronze sculpture of Mussolini as a blacksmith, forging a sword on the allegorical anvil of ‘unitas’; or else Thayaht’s later painting of the Duce as a ship’s helmsman (1939), manning the tiller of an unfettered Italy, leaving broken chains in his wake. It is, I think, the formal economy of metaphor which separates Bertelli’s image from these other examples – an economy at once defied and underscored by the object’s reproducibility. In place of anecdote or narrative we find two silhouettes, joined in a sweeping, pulsing continuum. Despite the stationary, cylindrical base on which the Continuous Profile rests, its striations convey both a mythical indefatigability and a Futurist reverence for kineticism. Educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence from 1914 to 1922, Bertelli could hardly have stood farther apart from Futurist circles. He studied, in fact, under Domenico Trentacose, an accomplished sculptor of fin-de-siècle tendencies, specializing in languid female nudes and Old Testament figures redolent of Rodin’s work. Participating in a few juried selections during the 1920s, Bertelli exhibited a bronzed plaster Bambina con coniglio (Child with Rabbit) at the 1928 Venice Biennale – about as anathema to Futurist sensibilities as possible in both subject and form. An encounter with another Academy graduate, the ‘dissident’ Futurist painter Antonio Marasco, led to Bertelli’s adherence in 1933 to the Group of Independent Futurists, founded to challenge Marinetti’s monopoly on Italian avant-gardism. Marasco even launched a short-lived journal (Supremazia Futurista) and a requisite manifesto, drawing a number of artists into the anti-Marinetti fold before losing momentum by the decade’s end. Bertelli’s association with the movement proved short-lived. His description of the Continuous Profile in his patent application, however, suggests the fundamentally Futurist key in which he conceived it: ‘Head of the Duce in whatever material, in which the lineaments are reproduced synthetically along the periphery of the molding’.24 Both practically and conceptually, the ‘synthesis’ of his reproduction – and the reproductions of that synthesis – proceeded in a Futurist vein. To be sure, Futurist painting and sculpture disavowed the very notion of a traceable periphery or fixed lineaments.25 The intersection of bodies and the space they inhabit formed the willfully shifting foundation of Futurist aesthetics as articulated by Boccioni. Still, Bertelli seized precisely upon the profile’s delimited contours as potentially stable and volatile in equal measure – at once centripetal and centrifugal, impervious and expansive. The aesthetic economy of the profile was hammered home in the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, just before Bertelli designed the Continues Profile. Traced in metal relief down the wall of the exhibition’s Room O, Mussolini’s detached profile flanked the silhouette of an idealized Roman citizen (Fig. 6). The apposition between these two nearly abstract forms (designed by Giuseppe Terragni) appear redoubled by a group of stylized ‘gagliardetto’ pennants – emblems of the early Fascist squads – arranged behind them to form the further, third profile of a classic Roman nose. As Dino Alfieri noted in the exhibition’s catalogue, Terragni’s juxtaposition set into (literal) relief the ‘spiritual unity of Duce-Italy-Fascism’.26 Even more explicitly than the Room O relief, a contemporary poster evoked the Duce’s profile as both the vessel of the Fascist masses and isomorphic with their incorporation, such that they shared ‘A single heart, a single will, a single resolve’ (Fig. 7). The poster clearly anticipates Xanti Schawinsky’s prominent photomontage – later used as a propaganda poster – from the following year, which renders Mussolini as the literal incarnation of the Italian body politic, formed by its legion of isomorphic subjects. The 1934 poster figures that notion in a seemingly spontaneous shorthand. If the Duce’s profile distinguishes his inspiring singularity, it also lurks already implicit in the Fascist masses. Fig. 6 Open in new tabDownload slide Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista [Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution], Room O, designed by Giuseppe Terragni, Palazzo delle esposizioni, Rome, 1932 [detail]. Fig. 6 Open in new tabDownload slide Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista [Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution], Room O, designed by Giuseppe Terragni, Palazzo delle esposizioni, Rome, 1932 [detail]. Fig. 7 Open in new tabDownload slide Unknown artist, Propaganda poster, circa 1932 [‘A single heart, a single will, a single decision’] Massimo and Sonia Cirulli Foundation, Bologna. Fig. 7 Open in new tabDownload slide Unknown artist, Propaganda poster, circa 1932 [‘A single heart, a single will, a single decision’] Massimo and Sonia Cirulli Foundation, Bologna. The profile view also distinguished one of Mussolini’s earliest official portraits – or rather distinguished its widespread photographic reproduction. Rendered first in plaster and bronze, a large marble bust by the Novecento sculptor Adolfo Wildt came to form one of the regime’s most broadly disseminated likenesses. Having sculpted Mussolini’s likeness already in 1923, Wildt went on to create bronze and marble versions of his portraits in a large bust and mask-like format. The former appeared in slightly less than three quarters view on a later edition of the prominent 1926 biography DUX by Margherita Sarfatti – a highly influential Venetian art critic and Mussolini’s lover. In his recollections of the Duce’s ubiquity in the Italy of his youth, Italo Calvino notes that the mounting fixation upon the leader’s profile – particularly following an equestrian monument erected at Bologna’s Littoriale Stadium – marked a turning point in its propagandistic reproduction: from the frontal image to a side view, one that was put to much use from then on because it brought out the skull’s perfect sphericity (without which the prodigious task of turning the dictator into a designer-object would not have been possible), as well as the robust quality of his jaw (also underscored in three-quarter poses), the continuity of the back and front of his neck, and the overall romanità of the whole.27 It is surely with Bertelli’s Continuous Profile in mind that Calvino recalls Mussolini’s representation in the guise of a ‘designer-object’ of ‘perfect sphericity’. For all that ostensible perfection, however, the regime expressed only the faintest interest in Bertelli’s work – an indifference echoed in official publications and the press alike. Mussolini personally approved the portrait’s distribution. Yet this barely affected its sparse critical fortunes. Critical interest has fallen, instead, to a subsequent generation. A recent exhibition dedicated exclusively to the Continuous Profile ascribes the sculpture to a ‘Futurist Parenthesis’ in Bertelli’s oeuvre – a reasonable claim in light of the artist’s rather fitful career. Yet it would seem that another set of parentheses – those famously adduced by the philosopher Benedetto Croce as delimiting the Fascist regime to an anomalous interlude in modern Italian history28 – has likewise been brought to bear upon Bertelli’s portrait. For, the exhibition rather improbably positioned the Continuous Profile as existing ‘today free of its historical legacy’.29 That the exhibition took place in the city of Predappio – Mussolini’s birthplace – and in nothing less than the Duce’s childhood home (remodeled into a museum) highlights the troubling irony of such a claim. More disconcerting still, such an argument forms a piece with other efforts to cast Bertelli as politically ‘non-committed’: that is, as an artist ‘fundamentally detached from the regime’, whose work appears now ‘wholly redeemed from the political legacy of its time’.30 This reasoning echoes, in turn, growing calls to view Italian art of the 1930s in a context ‘Beyond Fascism’ – as if the works in question could be retrospectively excised from the ideological and historical matrices out of which they emerged.31 The present essay seeks instead to contextualize the reception of Bertelli’s sculpture and its relationship to the regime’s imperatives, whether iconographic or ideological, formal or philological. The task conceals some abiding pitfalls. The work’s reproducibility resulted in a striking assortment of owners, from Mussolini’s son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, to Robert Mapplethorpe (on whom more below). For all this commercial success and latter-day visibility, however, the sculpture garnered almost no critical responses during the last decade of Mussolini’s rule.32 Period accounts of the Continuous Profile are essentially non-existent. We may nevertheless set about imagining the parameters of the work’s reception in their own right, just as we may, in turn, find in the work’s visual and rhetorical aspects some of Fascism’s evolving conceptions of authority and sacrality. However unwittingly, Bertelli’s work evinces what Mussolini’s cultural minister Giuseppe Bottai had called, as early as 1926, Fascism’s ‘permanent revolution’.33 The resonance with the Marxist notion by the same name – adduced first by Marx and Engels, and subsequently developed by Leon Trotsky over three decades – is no accident.34 Bottai sought to expropriate aspects of Soviet state intervention (long-term planning, collectivization, one-party hegemony) to nationalist and ‘corporativist’ ends.35 Fascism’s consolidation as a regime after 1925 saw it jettison the radical, anti-bourgeois impetus of its origins. The 1930s witnessed a further rigidification of the governing elite and its penchant for hierarchy. Yet appeals to the firebrand (and abidingly violent) inclinations of the regime’s populist ‘base’ required a rhetoric of enduring insurgency. Marinetti’s Futurism had long since pledged a commitment to the ‘continuous perfection and endless progress’ of Italian culture.36 For his part, Mussolini echoed Bottai’s formulation in his ‘Synthesis of the Regime’ speech, one year after Bertelli debuted his Profile. Here he warned citizens against ‘the ‘bourgeois spirit,’ a spirit, in other words of satisfaction and adaptation … For this danger this is only one recourse: the principle of continuous revolution [rivoluzione continua]’.37 The resonance of Mussolini’s use of the term ‘continual’ (rather than the usual ‘permanent’) with Bertelli’s work is surely coincidental. Yet more than any cultural representation to date, the Continuous Profile rendered literal the notion of an unceasing revolutionary energy, particularly as it centered upon and issued from the Duce’s very body. Futurist Continuities After reaching their peak during and immediately following World War One, Futurism’s cultural fortunes had begun to wane in Italy by the late 1920s. In his regular column for Emporium in 1927, the critic Raffaello Giolli noted that the new generation of Futurist artists risked succumbing – despite themselves – to their own set of conventions. Recourse to perfunctory interpretations of ‘dynamism’ and ‘simultaneity’ now came at the expense of actual plastic innovation.38 The launching in 1929 of ‘Aeropittura’ (Aeropainting) thus breathed new, temporary life into the movement. As both subject matter and the source of new aerial perspectives, the trope of flight insisted upon the modernity of the Futurist-Fascist nexus. Indeed, propaganda celebrating Fascism’s youth, vigour, and virility stemmed directly from Futurist precedent, filtering into both the thuggish violence of the squadrists and the more euphemistic rhetoric of revolution. Even as much Fascist culture increasingly recoiled from urban, ‘cosmopolitan’ motifs in favour of rural purity, aeropainting offered an almost platonic version of technological zeal. Bertelli’s Continuous Profile today finds itself periodically classified as an example of ‘aeroscultura’ and ‘aeroceramica’ – sub-genres which flourished briefly in the early 1930s alongside comparable two-dimensional efforts. In their 1938 manifesto of ‘Ceramics and Aeroceramics’,39 Marinetti and Tullio d’Albisola paid homage to Umberto Boccioni’s foundational experiments and their influence upon ostensibly ‘aerosculptural’ works such as Thayaht’s Dux. Marinetti made sure to note that Thayaht’s portrait had been appraised by the Duce himself. ‘Here,’ he quoted the Prime Minister as commenting, ‘is how Mussolini looks to Mussolini.’40 Even as it seems to draw upon Thayat’s precedent, Tullio’s own Vaso formichiere (Anteater vase) (1931–32) notably anticipates the spherical, cephalic form of the Continuous Profile. The authors omit Bertelli from discussion, however, surely due to Marinetti’s lingering contempt for the ‘Independent’ Futurists. Bertelli’s inaugural Futurist efforts played out not in three dimensions but rather two. Completed soon after he joined Marasco’s Independent group, his works on paper reveal ‘simultaneous’ views of (and from) airborne planes (Fig. 8). One drawing of the Ala Littoria (the Fascist national airline) plainly draws upon Tato’s prominent 1930 aeropainting, depicting Rome’s Coliseum in the wake of a soaring biplane (Fig. 9). In Bertelli’s image, the craft’s fuselage and wing appear to extend from the curve of the Coliseum’s walls, while the structure’s tiered seats double for the spiraled path of the airplane. We will return again to the consequence of the spiraled form for Futurism at large and Bertelli’s work in particular. For now, it suffices to note that aeropainted representations of the Eternal City in a Futurist Key proliferated at the decade’s turn – not only in the work of Tato, but also in the photographs of Filippo Masoero (Fig. 10). The latter’s aerial views of the Roman Forum and of Saint Peter’s confer upon these monuments a purposefully blurred turbulence. They appear not as passive, ‘passéiste’ relics, but rather as hitching posts of high-tech progress – a notion implicit in the Continuous Profile’s agitated update of Janus. Fig. 8 Open in new tabDownload slide Renato Bertelli, Ala Littoria, early 1930s, pencil on cardboard. Estate of Renato Bertelli, courtesy of Marco Moretti. Fig. 8 Open in new tabDownload slide Renato Bertelli, Ala Littoria, early 1930s, pencil on cardboard. Estate of Renato Bertelli, courtesy of Marco Moretti. Fig. 9 Open in new tabDownload slide Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni), Flying over the Colisseum in a Spiral [Sorvolando in spirale il Colosseo (Spiralata)], 1930, oil on canvas, 80 x 80cm, Ventura Collection, Rome. Courtesy of Sansoni heirs. Fig. 9 Open in new tabDownload slide Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni), Flying over the Colisseum in a Spiral [Sorvolando in spirale il Colosseo (Spiralata)], 1930, oil on canvas, 80 x 80cm, Ventura Collection, Rome. Courtesy of Sansoni heirs. Fig. 10 Open in new tabDownload slide Filippo Masoero, Descending over St. Peters [Scendendo su San Pietro], 1930–3. Touring Club Italiano Archive, Milan. Fig. 10 Open in new tabDownload slide Filippo Masoero, Descending over St. Peters [Scendendo su San Pietro], 1930–3. Touring Club Italiano Archive, Milan. Masoero’s photographs themselves draw upon the ‘photodynamics’ of Anton Giuglio Bragaglia, whose experiments at once complemented and diverged from Futurism’s painterly corpus, and which clearly earned Bertelli’s interest in turn. Working alongside his brother Arturo, Anton Giuglio imparted photographs of everyday actions – smoking, slapping, typing – with mystical and metaphysical dimensions, by way of seemingly ongoing movement registered in the form of smeared and striated traces of light. The brothers’ ‘photodynamics’ (fotodinamiche) draw upon E.J. Marey’s chronophotophraphic compositions even as they disavow mere empiricism, exchanging quantifiable motion for a less tangible and more expressive vitalism. As the pair’s theoretical authority, Anton Giulio authored a 1912 ‘Manifesto of Photodynamism’, which Marinetti summarily incorporated into the swelling empire of Futurist media. Balla and Boccioni each sat for Bragaglia’s camera, and works such as The Cellist and The Typist reveal a fundamental sympathy with Balla’s early Futurist paintings of protracted movement such as Dog on a Leash (1912) or The Hand of the Violinist (1912). Notwithstanding his obvious debts to Marey, Bragaglia criticized chronophotography for failing to ‘synthesize’ movement rather than break down its units positivistically. It is precisely the syntheses evinced in Bragaglia’s so-called ‘poly-physionomic’ portraits which bear upon Bertelli’s Continuous Profile. Images such as Oscillating Youth (1912) and Observing (Scruttando) (c. 1915) (Fig. 11) reveal faces at once multiple and singular as they move across the frame. The striations marking out the figure’s mouth – darker bands smeared across the continuum of the white visage – merit comparison with the grooves of Bertelli’s design. Yet Bragaglia’s simultaneous renderings of frontal and profile views of the same individual – as in his noted portrait of Boccioni – seem most apposite to the Continuous Profile, specifically to the way it at once distends and redoubles Mussolini’s silhouette. Fig. 11 Open in new tabDownload slide Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Scrutando, c. 1915, Photomechanical print on paper, 10.5 x 15 cm. Massimo and Sonia Cirulli Foundation, Bologna. Fig. 11 Open in new tabDownload slide Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Scrutando, c. 1915, Photomechanical print on paper, 10.5 x 15 cm. Massimo and Sonia Cirulli Foundation, Bologna. Despite Bragaglia’s claims to exchange ‘analysis’ for sensation, and in spite of his own subscription to Henri Bergson’s metaphysical theorizations of memory, his images fell foul of Boccioni’s aesthetic imperatives. As Futurism’s chief theorist, Boccioni came to condemn Bragaglia’s Fotodinamiche as prosaic inventories of movement – more proper to the cinematograph, he claimed, than to an intuitive aesthetics. For Boccioni, the non-indexicality of painting and sculpture differentiated their representations of the world from the camera’s positivism. Despite Boccioni’s untimely death during World War One, his attention to oblique, diagonal, and spiraled forms exerted an abiding sway on ‘Second’ Futurism and Aeropainting. Even as late as the early 1930s, the trope of ‘continuity’ with which Bertelli baptized his sculpture would have evoked Boccioni’s legacy (and the latter’s erstwhile friendship with Marasco would have underscored the endurance of his example even for ‘dissident’ Futurists). Considered a kind of Futurist manifesto in its own right, Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) registers duration on the surface of sculpted form, injecting a consummately spatial medium with aggressively temporal dimensions. In place of successive notations, Boccioni synthesizes movement and gesture into a single entity, pulsing with ‘continuity’ even as it is fixed upon a plinth. More apposite still to Bertelli’s sculpture is Boccioni’s Development of a Bottle in Space (1913), which collapses the envelope of the subject’s form into its surroundings, from the table on which the bottle rests to the negative space around it. The ostensibly immobile object becomes a vortex: a site not of being but of becoming, informed as much by the Nietzschean will to power as by Bergson’s notions of flux and élan vitale. Though Bertelli smoothed his sculpture’s proverbial continuity into uninterrupted, circular rings, something of Boccioni’s precedent lingers in the Continuous Profile both nominally and notionally. It lingers, too, in Mario Ridolfi’s Helicoidal Vase (1933) from the same year (Fig. 12). Ridolfi designed the object for the ‘Aviator’s House’ pavilion at Milan’s V Triennale in 1933 – one of several rationalist interiors conceived for different types of workers. No passive bauble, the embossed copper vase evokes the spiralled path of the future occupant’s airplane – a conceit monumentalized in the following year’s ‘Great Italian Airforce Exhibition’, featuring a 13-meter high spiral in Giuseppe Pagano’s Icarus room (a designation oddly inauspicious – and prophetic – in its mythical allusion). Ridolfi had already revealed an appreciation for Boccioni’s work with his 1928 design for a restaurant tower, which adapts Futurist dynamism to rationalist strictures, while preserving a sense of movement and contingency. The rhyme between Ridolfi’s vase and tower and Bertelli’s Profile in 1933 underscores the salience of aero-aesthetics at the time. Bertelli’s extant drawings and paintings from the early 1930s appear singularly focused upon coiled and curved forms, semi-abstracted from patterns of flight. In addition to the Coliseum-airplane image discussed above, a large portion of Bertelli’s works from this period are titled Spiralata, or ‘spiral-turn’, in reference to aerial maneuvers. Fig. 12 Open in new tabDownload slide Mario Ridolfi, Helicoidal Vase for the ‘Casa del Aviatore’, 1933, embossed copper, 120 cm. Massimo and Sonia Cirulli Foundation, Bologna. Fig. 12 Open in new tabDownload slide Mario Ridolfi, Helicoidal Vase for the ‘Casa del Aviatore’, 1933, embossed copper, 120 cm. Massimo and Sonia Cirulli Foundation, Bologna. Alongside this concern with spherical forms derived from modern technology we must consider – particularly as it informs the Continuous Profile – a decidedly non-avant-garde source, one that Bertelli nevertheless assimilated to the Futurist preoccupation with ‘multiplied man’. Erected in 1626 to commemorate the victory of Ferdinand I of Tuscany over Ottoman forces, Pietro Tacca’s Monument of the Four Moors forms the most prominent public artwork in the Tuscan port of Livorno (Fig. 13). Beneath a triumphant Ferdinand, chained to the four corners of the monument’s base, sit four bronze prisoners of African and Mediterranean extraction – the work’s titular ‘Moors.’ Bertelli later noted to his son the consequence of this work in conceiving his Mussolini portrait. From one side of the piazza, he averred, the profiles of the four bald, bronze statues appear visible at the same time – a multiplicity and simultaneity which the Continuous Profile condenses into a single form. Fig. 13 Open in new tabDownload slide Pietro Tacca, Monument of the Four Moors, 1926, marble and bronze, various dimensions, Piazza Micheli, Livorno. Fondazione Federico Zeri, Bologna. Fig. 13 Open in new tabDownload slide Pietro Tacca, Monument of the Four Moors, 1926, marble and bronze, various dimensions, Piazza Micheli, Livorno. Fondazione Federico Zeri, Bologna. While Bertelli drew upon still other pre-avant-garde examples, these have gone unacknowledged. In particular, the Continuous Profile closely resembles the representations of Napoleon Bonaparte and French kings as carved into nineteenth-century walking sticks. Deemed cannes séditieuses, the canes’ ‘sedition’ derived from the half-concealed effigies of successively deposed and reinstated rulers etched into their knobs (Fig. 14). Turned in ivory or wood, the silhouette cut into the cane’s handle would become apparent only upon closer inspection, or else upon the ceremonious (or surreptitious) casting of its shadow upon a wall. To take just one example of these objects’ reception, consider one document from 1844 describing an anti-royalist conspirator; he is said to have schemed ‘to overturn Louis XVIII, to stop Alexander [of Russia], and to free Napoleon, dressed in blue and carrying a canne séditieuse and forty-five francs’.41 Mussolini was himself routinely compared to Bonaparte in Italy and abroad. Shortly after the March on Rome, for example, the New York Times described him as a ‘Napoleon turned pugilist’. Other common comparisons were to Caesar, Garibaldi, Augustus, and Alexander the Great, among others.42 Bertelli may even have sculpted his own walking stick version of the Continuous Profile. Dated between 1933 and 1940, one such example recently surfaced on the market, inscribed with the artist’s initials.43 The cane’s knob bears a rather blocky version of the Continuous Profile, carved in ebony with silver trim. The work might have been intended to capitalize upon the variety of designs permitted by Bertelli’s patent (in the same way that the artist at one point authorized a table lamp version of his sculpture). Whatever this walking stick’s provenance, however, it seems highly unlikely that Bertelli would have remained ignorant of the cannes séditieuses and their ideological significance. Fig. 14 Open in new tabDownload slide Canne séditieuse figuring Napoleon’s likeness, early 19th century, ivory and wood. Courtesy Goxe and Belaisch Associés. Fig. 14 Open in new tabDownload slide Canne séditieuse figuring Napoleon’s likeness, early 19th century, ivory and wood. Courtesy Goxe and Belaisch Associés. The resonances and origins of any art work exceed – or fall short of – its author’s intentions. The Continuous Profile courts associations both deliberate and involuntary. Materially and formally, the sculpture resonates, for example, with various types of ceramic electrical insulators, prevalent in Italy and elsewhere by the 1930s (Fig. 15). Uniformly rounded and often bearing circular ridges or rings capped by a bulbous crown, these objects would have lent Bertelli’s object not simply visual touchstones, but a further association with the Futurist trope of voltage and its (metaphorical) conduction. One art historian recently likened Bertelli’s Profile to a ‘bullet’.44 More apposite still, I would argue, are various military explosives in the wake of World War One. Marinetti’s 1929 ‘Portrait of Mussolini’ notably evokes the Duce’s head as ‘a squared-off projectile, a package full of good gunpowder’.45 Recall, too, that the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution dedicated extensive attention to Italy’s role in the Great War, particularly as a crucible of irredentist and nationalist sentiments. Various objects, documents, and paraphernalia from the Great War sat on display at the 1932 exhibition in Rome. Wrought from materials like brass and steel, the fuses of artillery shells strikingly resemble the Continuous Profile in their conical, striated crowns. The pyrotechnical dimensions of these howitzer and mortar fuses – far more familiar to an interwar audience than to today’s viewer – would have heightened the sculpture’s Futurist allusions.46 Fig. 15 Open in new tabDownload slide Ceramic insulators, 1930s. Photo by Rob L. Dey. Fig. 15 Open in new tabDownload slide Ceramic insulators, 1930s. Photo by Rob L. Dey. Of course, a bellicose technophilia had already galvanized the Italian avant-garde during the First World War. Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero’s influential manifesto ‘The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe’ (1915) not only featured kinetic sculptures by the two signatories, but associated these efforts with incitements ‘to physical courage, struggle and WAR’.47 During the 1920s, Rome’s Futurist ‘Mechanical Art’ group further developed aspects of Balla and Depero’s experiments, marrying them to International Constructivist principals. Artists like Naum Gabo had ventured less aggressive examples of sculptural animation; his Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave) (1919–20) (Fig. 16), for example, uses a concealed electric motor to spin a plain steel rod from its base. The resulting form oscillates and undulates in a blur of (seemingly plural) whiplash lines. If Bertelli’s Continuous Profile exchanges actual rotation for an illusion thereof, its implied kineticism inevitably recalls these avant-garde precedents, both Futurist and foreign. Yet as much as any technical, formal, or functional influences and resonances, we must consider the no less vital consequence of Fascism’s anti-positivist ethos, for these inform the illusory continuum of Bertelli’s work to the same degree, whether in its evocation of temporality and gender, or its troping of the mythical origins of sculpture itself. Fig. 16 Open in new tabDownload slide Naum Gabo, Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave), 1919–1920; replica 1985. The Work of Naum Gabo © Nina & Graham Williams, ©Tate, London 2019. Fig. 16 Open in new tabDownload slide Naum Gabo, Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave), 1919–1920; replica 1985. The Work of Naum Gabo © Nina & Graham Williams, ©Tate, London 2019. Primitivism/Palingenesis As the art historian Meyer Schapiro writes in his essay ‘Frontal and Profile as Symbolic Forms’ (1973) Western medieval artists deployed the profile to quite different iconographic ends. Used to render Judas and demonic figures, profile views were just as frequently deployed for the representation of pious donors, painted into their own commissioned images of the Virgin or Christ.48 A secular religion unto itself, Fascism left little quarter to Christian iconography. The mythical conceits of which the regime routinely availed itself derived almost exclusively from antiquity (or else from an emphatically secular modernity). Compared to the arcane and occultist predilections of Nazi figures like Alfred Rosenberg or Heinrich Himmler, Italian Fascism’s exploitation of romanità proceeded chiefly along martial and archaeological lines, from the proliferation of lictors’ fasces to the use of neo-Roman mosaics.49 That said, a sense of pre-Christian sacrality also inflected Fascist rituals and symbols. Augustus, after all, was not only Rome’s first emperor but pontifex maximus, chief priest. Enshrined now as a giant sphinx sculpted in the Ethiopian desert, now as a portable, votive icon inside the home, Mussolini – or rather, his iconographic figurations – followed precisely in this imperial mold. Giordano Bruno Guerri writes of the Duce’s increasing deification: Mussolini was the conscious object of a collective and intimate exaltation, which remarkably corresponded to the irrational ecstasy of pre-Catholic religions and to the more obscure afterlife of a visionary, medieval Catholicism. Well before being elevated to the object of a cult, he had become a fetish, a kind of talisman of personal and collective salvation.50 The circulation of the Continuous Profile in domestic and bureaucratic settings not only contributed to a sense of ‘public intimacy’ with the Duce, but its format – a compact object at once identifiable and strange, seemingly primordial and newfangled in equal measure – evinced a fetishization in Futurist terms. As much as a whirring machine, Bertelli’s Profile recalls the polished, black lithic cippi (memorial or boundary stones) of the Etruscans, prevalent in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, and occasionally reused by the Romans as weights (Fig. 17).51 Whether as cult objects or aniconic divinities, these sacred, spherical stones were seized upon by Italian scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as examples of pre-Roman religion – a distinction which further inflects the ‘primitive’ simplicity of Bertelli’s portrait as a kind of stylized talisman. Its paradoxical morphology revived some of Futurism’s founding notions: whether the movement’s adherents declaring themselves ‘primitives of a new sensibility’, or Boccioni’s insistence upon art’s ‘primordial psychology’. In other words, even Futurism’s most mechanical imagery lay claim to a fundamentally atavistic impetus. Fig. 17 Open in new tabDownload slide Etruscan cippo, Orvieto, Italy, I-III century BCE, Abbazia di Sant’Antimo/Museo Archeologico di Montalcino, Italy. Courtesy of the Museo Civico e Diocesano, Raccolta Archaeologica di Montalcino. Fig. 17 Open in new tabDownload slide Etruscan cippo, Orvieto, Italy, I-III century BCE, Abbazia di Sant’Antimo/Museo Archeologico di Montalcino, Italy. Courtesy of the Museo Civico e Diocesano, Raccolta Archaeologica di Montalcino. That impetus routinely took three dimensional form, both actual and virtual. Futurism’s founding texts reveal the primacy accorded to sculpture – not as an unrivaled aesthetic medium per se, so much as an ür-metaphor for the movement’s larger ambitions. Well in advance of Boccioni’s theoretical treatises, Marinetti’s novel Mafarka the Futurist (1909) figured sculpted and sculpting bodies as the arbiters of a willful new universe. Published the same year as the ‘Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, Mafarka follows a marauding Futurist strongman as he subjugates colonies and bodies alike in a fictional North African province. Boasting a prehensile, elastic penis several meters long, the eponymous protagonist eventually sets about constructing a winged – and eminently sculptural – son. Wrought from eclectic materials ‘without the help of the vulva’, Mafarka’s airborne offspring not only anticipates the Futurist obsession with flight, but stages the hyper-masculinist embodiments which came to drive the movement’s aesthetic theory.52 Significantly, Marinetti’s only extant self-portrait (from 1914) is a sculptural one: a hanging wooden figure suspended in the act of running. We have already seen with what ease Marinetti transposed Futurism’s ‘physical transcendentalism’ to his descriptions of Mussolini. Tellingly, it is not a painterly or literary dynamism which emerges in that elegy but a three-dimensional one. Marinetti evokes the Duce’s body as ‘forged and carved to the model of the mighty rocks of our peninsula’, resulting in ‘the cubic will of the State’.53 His form is presented not simply as the result of the sculptural act, but also its agent. For, Mussolini is said to wield an ‘intelligent hand which shaves off the useless clay of hostile opinions’.54 Such a portrayal not only echoes Marinetti’s Mafarka, but anticipates Sapori’s description of the Duce as both ‘artist and patron’.55 Mussolini, writes Karen Pinkus, viewed his own form as ‘a detached object that could be manipulated’56 – a sentiment wholly amenable to sculptural representation and replication. Rather than merely the passive object of representation, the Duce was figured as the ultimate creator, the demiurge of a nation forged in his image by his own hand. In this sense, Bertelli’s Continuous Profile conjures up the origins of ceramics itself, particularly the potter’s wheel and its prominence in origin myths. More specifically, the blurred silhouette of the Profile resembles a slab of clay being turned on the wheel – a practice which anchors origin stories from Pharaonic Egypt, to the Qur’an, to the Book of Jeremiah.57 Interestingly, at his Lastra a Signa studio (just east of Florence), Bertelli produced at least one example of the Profile in a particular kind of clay. Named ‘melletta d’Arno’ after the Florentine river from whose flooded banks it was periodically gathered, the clay had helped drive a renewed craze for modern copies of ancient sculptures at the turn of the century.58 Once again, Bertelli’s work unwittingly brushes up against millennial myth, for, one of the earliest Egyptian deities, the Divine Potter named Khnum, derived his association with fertility from the Nile’s fecund silt, from which he fashioned both other gods and men. Khnum appears in Dynastic reliefs seated in profile at his life-giving potter’s wheel. His very name stems from the root words ‘to join’, ‘to unite’.59 Representations of Mussolini did not stray far from this type of epic narrative, particularly in evoking him as Italy’s providential father. Barbara Spackman has convincingly argued that the regime’s disparate cultural facets found consistent resolution in the trope of virility, a ‘node of articulation’ binding together disparate, even conflicting, elements. Several artists, including Bertelli, lent that node literal form.60 Perhaps inspired by the Continuous Profile, the 1934 draft for a sculpture by the artist Mino Rosso hyperbolizes the sexual dimensions of Bertelli’s work (Fig. 18). The image by this fellow traveler of the Futurists depicts a shiny helmet topped by what can only be described as the stylized glans of an erect penis. The sculpture’s two-tiered base echoes the overlapping of ‘head’ and helmet, countering the work’s rigidity with a degree of implied movement. As much as stylized portrait, Rosso’s work – like Bertelli’s before it – suggests the difference between a virile dictatorship and a ‘flaccid parliamentary system’.61 Italians were not the only ones keyed into that difference. Virginia Woolf famously described Fascism as suggesting ‘an age to come of pure, self-assertive virility…unmitigated masculinity’.62 An illustration by the American artist Charles Dana Gibson strikingly anticipates the aesthetic form and sexual rhetoric that such potency would take in Bertelli’s hands (Fig. 19). Collected in 1903 under the title The Weaker Sex: The Story of a Susceptible Bachelor, Gibson’s pen, ink, and graphite drawings brought visions of independent, modern women to popular, middle class periodicals like Collier’s Weekly.63 For our purposes, however, it is the male figure in one plate – presumably courting two women at once – which resonates unmistakably with Bertelli’s Continuous Profile (and uncannily suggests Mussolini’s facial structure). For, if Gibson’s figure evokes a bachelor susceptible to multiple charms, it also figures a kind of Nietzschean superman able to manage simultaneous distractions. It is precisely this sense of simultaneity that Bertelli’s sculpture concretizes, in line with prevailing lore about the Duce’s sexual prowess. Fig. 18 Open in new tabDownload slide Mino Rosso, Il Duce, 1934, graphite on paper; uncertain dimensions. Courtesy of Rosso heirs. Fig. 18 Open in new tabDownload slide Mino Rosso, Il Duce, 1934, graphite on paper; uncertain dimensions. Courtesy of Rosso heirs. Fig. 19 Open in new tabDownload slide Charles Dana Gibson (1867–1944), The Weaker Sex II, 1903, one of eighty illustrations for The Weaker Sex: The Story of a Susceptible Bachelor (New York: Scribner’s, 1903), Ink on paper, Cabinet of American Illustration (Library of Congress). Accession no. DLC/PP-1935:0140. Fig. 19 Open in new tabDownload slide Charles Dana Gibson (1867–1944), The Weaker Sex II, 1903, one of eighty illustrations for The Weaker Sex: The Story of a Susceptible Bachelor (New York: Scribner’s, 1903), Ink on paper, Cabinet of American Illustration (Library of Congress). Accession no. DLC/PP-1935:0140. The multiplication and ‘infinitization’ of his likeness suggested a natural outgrowth of his preternatural fecundity.64 Displays of Bertelli’s work in its various sizes reveal the extent to which his Profile – and its exponential formats – performed and metaphorized that fecundity (Fig. 20).65 Set next to smaller versions, the large head looms like a paterfamilias. Yet it also evokes a mother hen with her clutch of chicks. The fungibility of masculine and feminine traits bears some exalted, theological origins in both myth and Fascist modernity. Acquired in 1888 by the archaeological museum of Florence, one of the above-mentioned spheroid Etruscan cippi was notably identified as evoking ‘either a Baetylic symbol of Giove or else the mother Thufltha’ – a changeability conferred only upon superhuman entities in myths both ancient and modern.66 As Luisa Passerini and other scholars have demonstrated, Mussolini himself came to comprise a spectrum of gender identities in the popular imaginary, from stern father to ‘oceanic’ mother. That feat remained exceptional to his quasi-divine person, however. While the Duce could be perceived to conflate the ostensible polarities of gender, ordinary citizens were held to strictly prescribed and policed roles. In its seemingly parthenogenic reproduction, Bertelli’s object echoed something of its subject’s presumed sexual exceptionalism: not merely in the immaculateness of conception but also an almost magical multiplicity. Fig. 20 Open in new tabDownload slide Renato Bertelli, Continuous Profile of Mussolini, various dimensions. Estate of Renato Bertelli, courtesy of Marco Moretti. Massimo and Sonia Cirulli Foundation, Bologna. Fig. 20 Open in new tabDownload slide Renato Bertelli, Continuous Profile of Mussolini, various dimensions. Estate of Renato Bertelli, courtesy of Marco Moretti. Massimo and Sonia Cirulli Foundation, Bologna. Mussolini’s singularity notably extended from the domain of gender and sexuality to the phenomenon of time. Recall again the ancient representations of Janus, the Roman God of gates, beginnings, transitions, and of duality itself (Fig. 21). Endowed with insight into both past and future, the deified Janus lent Mussolini’s authority some auspicious allusions. To be sure, the notion of a ‘Janus-faced’ rule risked suggesting a certain insincerity or equivocation, epithets which dogged the Duce’s ongoing political crises. One historian has described the regime as prey to a ‘vicious circle of paradoxical contradictions’ – a phrasing which suggests the potential hazard of the spinning metaphor as a vehicle of the Duce’s depiction.67 Torn between activist ‘Fascists of the first hour’ and the duties of respectable administration (particularly on the world stage), Mussolini did not always manage to resolve the regime’s contradictions so tidily. In Italian as in English, the term ‘bifronte’ evokes the sense of (potentially duplicitous) variability suggested by the possession of two faces. Yet Bertelli’s design elides the duality intrinsic to Janus’s representation. In fact, the Continuous Profile at once nullifies and exploits the very principal of duality; for its circular grooves efface any trace of dichotomy, or of the dialectical tension which might result therefrom. To the unresolved questions of Fascism’s historical achievement – rupture or return? revolution or return to order? – the sculptor posed a form at once unresolved and decisive. Fig. 21 Open in new tabDownload slide Roman Bust of the god Janus, marble, 50 x 34 cm. Vatican Museums, Rome. Image in the public domain. Fig. 21 Open in new tabDownload slide Roman Bust of the god Janus, marble, 50 x 34 cm. Vatican Museums, Rome. Image in the public domain. To be sure, Fascist philosophy and cultural policy occasionally paid lip service to dialectics as an instrument of intellectual refinement. Even these instances betray a fundamentally coercive agenda, however. Quoted in the journal Critica fascista in 1931, the theater critic and essayist Giovanni Calendoli notes that ‘dissent is manifested, clarified, and eliminated dialectically, leading to a granite-block synthesis that represents the new civilization’.68 As a totem of this new civilization – and underscoring once again the primacy of sculpture in Fascist rhetoric – the granitic synthesis of Bertelli’s Profile appears purged of any dialectical tension. We find instead a fait accompli, unchanging and unceasing in equal measure. Rather than simply continuous, the piece renders Mussolini’s visage as a continuum. Whether Bertelli knew it or not, ancient authors such as Macrobius had ascribed to Janus’s very name the notion of cyclical – rather than vacillatory – movement: ‘the world always turns in a circle, and from the point of beginning returns to itself’ (‘mundus semper eat dum in orben volvitur, et ex se initium faciens in se fefertur’).69 The neutralization of diachronic time in Fascist culture far exceeds the image of Janus, however. The notion of a temporal continuum proved vital to Fascism’s ideological underpinnings, and to its reinforcement through various cultural representations. In Giorgio de Chirico’s Metaphysical cityscapes of the early 1910s – paintings which combine a Nietzschean penchant for secular soothsaying with tropes of Mediterranean ‘pre-history’ – Fascist culture found one model for its own ‘eternal return’.70 De Chirico’s anti-positivist anti-dialectical aesthetics bore the further boon of a primitivism entirely indigenous to Greco-Roman antiquity, nourished upon pre-Hellenic and even Etruscan allusions. In other words, de Chirico’s architectural aesthetics did not need to make recourse to far-flung cultures; its visual atavisms thus recommended themselves as ideal sources of readymade, ‘autarchic’ imagery propitious to modern romanità. Like the Fascist ‘new towns’ built in their image during the 1930s, the Metaphysical cityscapes neutralized the tensions between historicism and ahistoricism. And like Bertelli’s sculpture two decades later, de Chirico’s architectonics appear endowed with the gravitas of antiquity even in the smooth, generic modernity of their surfaces seemingly untouched by time. As germane to the (often ineffable) essence of Fascist aesthetics – if less demonstrably consequential – were the writings of the regime’s chief philosopher, Giovanni Gentile. Over and against the Bolshevik ‘revolution of matter’, Gentile famously cast Fascism as a ‘revolution of spirit’. The duly metaphysical potential of this concept found elaboration in various writings, including those – like ‘The Doctrine of Fascism’ (1930) – ostensibly penned by the Duce’s own hand. Like his former colleague Benedetto Croce (with whom he broke over the matter of Fascism’s legitimacy), Gentile approached aesthetics as the repository of ‘spiritual eternity’. The word ‘spirit,’ in fact, appears thirty-nine times in the approximately thirty-three pages of ‘The Doctrine of Fascism’. ‘The material world does not exist but only insofar as, by thinking it, we dematerialize it and resolve it entirely into the life of the spirit’: thus Gentile’s English translator glossed The Philosophy of Art, disseminated well beyond Italy’s borders as evidence of the regime’s intellectual bona fides.71 If Gentile’s notion of ‘eternal becoming’ risked a certain evanescence in its spiritual dimensions, Mussolini’s insistence upon ‘action’ anchored Fascism’s philosophical posturing in embodied form. Man was to remain ‘manfully aware’ [‘virilmente consapevole’] of the challenges facing him.72 As physical model and metaphysical metaphor, Mussolini’s hyper-vigilance ensured the defense of Fascism’s supposedly open-ended insurgency. Of course, by the early 1930s, little about the regime remained revolutionary. Even the Fascist Revolution found itself the subject of museological retrospection in 1932. In political terms, the government had hardened into an ever more rigidly bureaucratic apparatus, while potentially progressive phenomena like Bottai’s corporativism took a back seat to imperialist ambition. The expediency of images of romanità to such ambition was without rival. Consider the use of Roman numerals for the Fascist calendar: a resetting of the nation’s proverbial clock by way of its past. Fascist culture constantly moved backward as a means of moving forward. Such was the logic of palingenetic nationalism.73 The regime’s modification of the Gregorian calendar signified not merely a practical or symbolic change, but an ontological revision inspired by the French Republican calendar of post-Revolutionary France. As Barbara Spackman writes in an essay on Fascist temporality, the regime ‘rejected the philosophical heritage of the French Revolution…even as it mimed one of its inaugural gestures’.74 Inscribed onto the base of Bertelli’s sculpture are his signature and the Roman numerals ‘XI’, standing for year eleven of the Fascist Revolution. Alongside these quantitative, calendrical integers stands the sculpture’s defiance of horological measurement: an abjuration of diachronic or dialectical time in favour of a seamless and ageless duration. ‘O Patria immortale…’ (‘Oh, immortal Fatherland’) commenced the Fascist Party’s official hymn, composed in 1922 and updated in 1924. If Mussolini’s rule embodied a providential rebirth, it was also deemed undying. In his recollection of Mussolini’s ubiquitous likeness, Italo Calvino notes that the Duce’s image evoked for a wide swathe of Italians ‘modernity, efficiency, and a reassuring continuity’.75 Continuity never ensured perpetuity, however. In the event, the Fascist patria proved as mortal as Mussolini. A summary execution and defilement by partisan crowds on 29 April 1945 left his body battered beyond recognition. Photographs of the Duce’s hanging and prone corpse reveal a face at once crushed and bloated, flattened and swollen in equal measure. His creased, globular head and indistinct features suggest a travesty of Bertelli’s heroic Profile: the temporal fate of actual flesh pressed into a ghastly new metaphor of Fascism’s demise. From Fatality to Caricature For one latter-day owner of an edition of the Continuous Profile, the sculpture formed both an influence and a subject in its own right. Robert Mapplethorpe had come to possess one of the Bertelli sculptures – a black version, presumably of painted ceramic – and photographed it for an editioned print in 1988, just before he succumbed to AIDS. Set upon a square black base, the sculpture appears before a white wall, interrupted only by a wedge of black in the photograph’s upper left corner (Fig. 22). Like a swatch of abstraction, the black triangle offsets the sculpture with a duly Futurist diagonal, lending the composition an even more modernist air. With one side illuminated and the other in shadow, the sculpture’s lighting as photographed by Mapplethorpe appears to cleave the head into two, respective profiles. The illumination of the left side exposes the work’s material and ambient particularities, setting into relief its graduated ridges; the uniform flatness of the right side instead delineates Mussolini’s profile in a crisp, uncanny silhouette. Fig. 22 Open in new tabDownload slide Robert Mapplethorpe, Photograph of Bertelli’s Continuous Profile of Mussolini, 1988, 82 x 72 cm. (32.3 x 28.3 in.) Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Fig. 22 Open in new tabDownload slide Robert Mapplethorpe, Photograph of Bertelli’s Continuous Profile of Mussolini, 1988, 82 x 72 cm. (32.3 x 28.3 in.) Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Like Bragaglia’s ‘photodynamic’ images, Bertelli’s sculpture had influenced Mapplethorpe’s work several years earlier. A 1985 self-portrait depicts his torso in three-quarters view, his pensive eyes staring out toward his right (Fig. 23). The left edge of Mapplethorpe’s face peels off into an ethereal smear in profile. The darker areas demarcating mouth, nose, and eyes bleed into the striations of his silhouette, recalling both Bertelli’s Profile and the distorted physiognomies of Bragaglia’s images. Though created on the eve of his HIV diagnosis the following year, the self-portrait seems already steeped in a sense of mortality – a subject explored more explicitly in subsequent works (such as his prominent 1988 Self-portrait with a skull).76 The 1985 self-portrait came, in fact, to illustrate a memorial card created after the photographer’s death. The head’s blurred turn suggests not a straining toward the future, but an allusion to corporeal impermanence. It is precisely such impermanence that Bertelli’s Continuous Profile disavows, even as it lays aesthetic claim to contingency. Fig. 23 Open in new tabDownload slide Robert Mapplethorpe, Self-portrait, 1985, gelatin silver print, 390 x 394 mm. Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Fig. 23 Open in new tabDownload slide Robert Mapplethorpe, Self-portrait, 1985, gelatin silver print, 390 x 394 mm. Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Twenty years after Fascism’s founding rally in Milan’s Piazza San Sepolcro, Marinetti – himself in attendance that fateful March morning of 1919 – composed a Futurist eulogy to ‘The Duce up close the Duce radiating power from a solid elastic body ready to be detonated weightless and spontaneous a continuous thinking willing deciding seizing squashing…’77 Marinetti’s recollection here in 1939 may well have been molded by Bertelli’s Profile. For no other likeness had so pithily synthesized Mussolini’s body (the stuff now of myth as much as history) in an image at once solid and elastic, pensive and active, spontaneous and continuous.78 Of course, the cult of the Duce had already proliferated as of the mid-1920s, when – to quote the historian Christopher Duggan – it ‘became institutionally embedded in the Fascist state and remained the main political focus and emotional bedrock of the regime’.79 At one point during the 1930s, Mussolini’s raw, symbolic potency appeared quite literally embedded in Italian bedrock. Atop the so-called Furlo Pass in the Marche region, members of the state forestry corps carved his gargantuan profile into an exposed peak of Mount Pietralata, situated along the ancient consular route of Via Flaminia. Whether in person or on postcards, the ‘masculine, Napoleonic profile’ appeared immortalized in and as the very earth (Fig. 24). Fig. 24 Open in new tabDownload slide Profile of Mussolini, Gola de Furlo, Passo del Furlo, period postcard. Image in the public domain. Fig. 24 Open in new tabDownload slide Profile of Mussolini, Gola de Furlo, Passo del Furlo, period postcard. Image in the public domain. There regularly obtained a reciprocity between verbal or visual evocations of the Duce and the natural world. If a rock face or mountain could take the form of his image, his visage evoked the wonders of nature in turn. Consider Marinetti’s encomium of Mussolini’s body as ‘forged and carved to the model of the mighty rocks of our peninsula’80 – a notion which also took hold in reverse. Scholars have since elaborated upon the syllogisms through which the Duce appeared commensurate with Italy’s larger polity, even in his singularity. ‘Mussolini’, writes Giordano Bruno Guerri, ‘was Fascism. Fascism was the fatherland. The fatherland was Mussolini…In Mussolini the people could not help but worship themselves’.81 As I hope to have demonstrated, that syllogistic circularity takes literal shape in Bertelli’s Continuous Profile. The word ‘profile’ generally refers to the silhouette of a face seen from the side, or the outline of an object, in addition to the lines used to trace them. The tracing of lines lingers in the word’s etymology: as the delineating thread (filum) which is set forth (pro-).82 So too – and here Bertelli’s work rears its head – does the word preserve the notion of spinning; for, the verb profilare means literally to spin forth an outline in (metaphorical) filament or fabric.83 For its part, the word ‘spin’ signifies the act of turning or rotating, but has also come to denote the dissemination of biased political information (as in the expression ‘spin doctor’). The notion of political ‘spin’ has entered the Italian lexicon only recently, and Romance languages bear no exact equivalent of the term.84 The closest cognate is ‘propaganda’. On that score, the Fascist ventennio bears a hefty history. Bertelli’s sculpture offers up not merely a condensation and reconciliation of the regime’s abiding paradoxes, but embodies – however unwittingly – the semantic rapport between spinning form and public persuasion. Representations in profile have served as mass-reproducible images of authority for millennia; think of the proud numismatic depictions of Alexander the Great or of emperors from Augustus to Licinus. Yet the accentuation of distinctive features afforded by a profile in silhouette has also long appealed to caricaturists. ‘[T]here were,’ Meyer Schapiro writes, ‘perhaps in some uses of the profile in early caricature a nuance of detachment that mitigated the affront of political mockery’.85 In other words, the profile’s separateness from the full face or head, its partialness, affords a degree of hedging or equivocation.86 The potential critique of political power lurking in the Continuous Profile has been set into relief in twenty-first-century iterations both verbal and visual. The Italian-American poet Matt Petronzio, in some recent verse, invokes Bertelli as Mussolini’s virtual and exponential progenitor: ‘Renato gives birth to Benito a second time, a thousand times over’.87 More poignant, however, are Petronzio’s poetic evocations of his grandparents, born in Italy under the Fascist regime and subjected to Blackshirt violence. Visiting an American museum where Bertelli’s sculpture is displayed, the poet’s ninety-one year-old grandfather sneers at the object’s pretension to omniscience. ‘If he can see every corner of his empire,/why can’t he look me in the eye?’88 Following the USA’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq in 2003, the artist Julian LaVerdiere updated Bertelli’s work as the model for the Continuous Profile Sculpture of George W. Bush (2004) – a work subsequently nicknamed ‘The Decider’. The moniker derives, of course, from the President’s much-repeated declaration to the press corps when queried about his leadership: ‘I’m the decider – I decide what’s best’. However unintentionally, the work thus echoes the trope of Mussolini’s profile as embodying a single line of singular ‘decision’, imposing form upon otherwise atomized masses. Still more recently, the artist williamCromar adapted the same model for his Head of Drumpf (2017) (Fig. 25), alluding to the subject’s original (German) family name, anglicized in some previous century. Comparisons between Trump and Mussolini have cropped up with increasing frequency in both journalistic and scholarly contexts, though the leaders’ respective cults of personality derive from very different origins and assume different incarnations. Perhaps with a nod to King Midas’s ill-fated touch (and to Trump’s gold-plated properties), Cromar’s 3D printed sculpture deploys orange-tinted gold leaf to subtly caricatural effect. Fig. 25 Open in new tabDownload slide williamCromar, Continuous Profile (Head of Drumpf), 2016, orange-gold leaf on hydrocal plaster cast from a laser-sintered plastic 3D print, 13 x 11 x 11 inches. Collection of the artist. Photo: With permission of the artist. Fig. 25 Open in new tabDownload slide williamCromar, Continuous Profile (Head of Drumpf), 2016, orange-gold leaf on hydrocal plaster cast from a laser-sintered plastic 3D print, 13 x 11 x 11 inches. Collection of the artist. Photo: With permission of the artist. No longer do we find the radiation of power concretized in a self-contained, semi-divine likeness, as Mussolini’s effigy was widely presented. Gone are the attendant historical and art historical allusions – gone, that is, not from williamCromar’s sculpture but from the context of its reception, as well as from the contemporary practice of propaganda. A would-be dictator need no longer exploit cultural representations in a traditional sense; indeed, to do so might invite charges of elitism, laying bare the charade of false populism. If Head of Drumpf trades the notorious comb-over for a more subtle bulb of burnished hair, the sculpture’s gaping mouth lends it an aural – and hectoring – lifelikeness. For all its loud-mouthed cant, modern demagoguery turns in williamCromar’s piece upon a more crude, though no less dangerous, axis. Instead of alluding to the complex and insidious origins of Fascist philosophy, the artist portrays mere spin incarnate, strident and tottering precisely in its solipsism. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. Footnotes 1 Francesco Sapori, ‘Nel primo decennale dell'Era Fascita: Ritratti del Duce’, Emporium,vol. 76, no. 455, pp. 259. [‘Fare il ritratto a Mussolini è da dieci anni il sogno costante degli artisti di tutto il mondo; celebri e oscuri, vecchi e giovanissimi. Vedere da vicino quest’uomo dotato di straordinario potere, cogliere sul suo volto i segni dell’individualità più alta ed universale che esista, è un miraggio e una premessa per chi intende affidare al marmo o al bronzo le sembianze umane toccate dalla scintilla divina’.] 2 Diane Ghirardo writes poignantly: ‘As problematic as the issue is to us now, the question of what constituted a Fascist culture was, if anything, more pressing during the two decades of fascist rule…the question posed not as some decorative to Fascism, but as lying at the heart of its political enterprise’. Diane Ghirardo, ‘Architects, Exhibitions, and the Politics of Culture in Fascist Italy’, Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 45, no. 2, Feb., 1992, p. 67. 3 Curzio Malaparte, response to debate on Fascism and Culture, Critica Fascista, 15 November 1926, pp. 421–2, reprinted and translated in Jeffrey Schnapp (ed.), A Primer of Italian Fascism, p. 225. Piero Melograni writes that the ‘organizational energies of the regime were permanently mobilized around the existence of this cult; millions of Italians defied the Duce…Indeed it is no paradox to say that in Italy it was Mussolinianism, not Fascism, that won allegiance’. Pietro Melograni, ‘The Cult of the Duce’, Journal of Contemporary History vol. 11, no. 4, Special Issue: Theories of Fascism, October 1976, p. 223. For a helpful synthesis of these polemics as they played out in Fascist culture at large, and the work of Mario Sironi in particular, see Emily Braun, ‘Mario Sironi and a Fascist Art’, in Braun (ed.), Italian Art of the Twentieth Century (Munich: Prestel, 1989) pp. 173–180. 4 Malaparte, response to debate on Fascism and Culture, p. 226. 5 Sapori, ‘Nel primo decennale dell'Era Fascita: Ritratti del Duce’, p. 260. 6 Sapori, ‘Nel primo decennale dell'Era Fascita: Ritratti del Duce’, p. 259. 7 Jeffrey Schnapp, ‘Epic Demonstrations: Fascist Modernity and the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution’, in Richard Golsan (ed.), Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture (Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 1992) p. 3. For a recent synthesis of this strain of scholarship, see Ara H. Merjian ‘Learning from Fascism’, Art in America, April 2019, pp. 66–73. 8 Following Franco Sborgi, Giuliana Peri reiterates an iconographic schema of Mussolini portraits according to three ‘phases’ of iconography, as well as a set of ‘three categories’ of images during the late 1920s. This paradigm seems to me somewhat overwrought, and undermined by all sorts of exceptions. While we might trace some broad, associative strokes, portraiture of the Duce appears – like Fascist aesthetics at large – to defy any strictly chronological or stylistic sequence, as Peri notes herself. More feasible might be groupings according to theme, format, or material, though such distinctions would be chiefly classificatory. See Giuliana Pieri, ‘Portraits of the Duce’, in Stephen Gundle, Christopher Duggan, and Giuliana Peri (eds), The Cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italians (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013) pp. 163–4. On the coercive essence of Fascist patronage networks, see Ruth Ben Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001) pp. 9–10, 20–29, and passim. 9 Maraini notably circulated these notions abroad, precisely during Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia – an act which resulted in international sanctions. See Antonio Maraini, ‘Italian Art under Fascism’, The Studio, Fine Arts, Home Decoration and Design, vol. 112, n. 525, December 1936, pp. 1–58. 10 Sapori, ‘Nel primo decennale dell'Era Fascita: Ritratti del Duce’, p. 260. 11 Sapori, ‘Nel primo decennale dell'Era Fascita: Ritratti del Duce’, p. 260. 12 Sapori, ‘Nel primo decennale dell'Era Fascita: Ritratti del Duce’, p. 277. 13 Jeffrey Schnapp writes of the debates over fascist culture which emerged by the late 1920s in highly public forums: ‘Even within the confines of a single contribution, one finds recurring tensions between themes of revolutionary activism and institutional conservatism, between the celebration of heroic individualism and corporate conformity, between elitist and populist values, between cultural internationalism and nationalism, between ahistoricism and historicism’. Schnapp, ‘Epic Demonstrations’, p. 3. In the regime’s first decade, very few images, texts, or objects had managed, however, to resolve and sublimate these tensions into emphatic form. 14 Bertelli’s sculpture is known in English under a variety of titles, including Head of Mussolini (Continuous Profile), Continuous Profile – Head of Mussolini, and Continuous Profile of Mussolini. I have opted to use the latter. 15 On the ‘modernity’ of Mussolini’s lack of facial hair, see Italo Calvino, ‘The Dictator’s Hats’, Stanford Italian Review, vol. 8, no.s. 1–2, 1990, p. 196. 16 Following Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the attendant trade embargos imposed by the League of Nations, autarchy would become an important rallying point for Italian production and pride alike. Yet the stock market crash of 1929 had already recommended to Mussolini the need for self-sufficiency – an autonomy in no way inimical to the nation’s swelling imperialist ambitions across the Mediterranean. On the use of Alpha Berta metal for the production of certain editions of Bertelli’s portrait, see Marco Moretti, Renato Bertelli: La Parentesi futurista (Pontedera: Bandecchi & Vivaldi, 2012), p. 38. 17 Sapori, ‘Nel primo decennale dell'Era Fascita: Ritratti del Duce’. 18 See the objects collected in the Fondazione Cirulli, Bologna, particularly the postcard Effige sintetica del Duce, and the 5cm medal forged for the ‘First Professional Gathering of Artists’, 1932. 19 Moretti, La Parentesi futurista, p. 30. 20 Sapori, ‘Nel primo decennale dell'Era Fascita: Ritratti del Duce’, p. 265. 21 F.T. Marinetti, ‘Portrait of Mussolini’ (1929), in R.W Flint (ed.), Marinetti: Selected Writings trans. Flint and Coppotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972) p. 160. 22 See Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997) pp. 67, 68. 23 Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, p. 67. 24 Renato Bertelli, ‘Domanda n. 822, Riv. Ind. 11612, 23 July 1933, Bertelli Archive; cited in Moretti, Parentesi, p. 33, n. 14. 25 It was Futurism’s very rejection of formal or plastic boundaries that earned the reproach of the British Vorticist painters, for example, who vowed – over and against these Italian examples – to erect more decisively delineated forms. See Wyndham Lewis et al., letter, The New Weekly, 30 May 1914. 26 Dino Alfieri, (ed.), Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (Bergamo: Istituto Arti Grafiche, 1933) p. 50. See also Laura Malvano, Fascismo e politica dell'immagine (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1988) p. 64. [‘Ecco quindi staccarsi netto dalla parete il profilo metallico di Benito Mussolini riassumendo il profilo dell’Italia storicamente fissata nella figura romana e il profilo dei neri gagliardetti, sintesi delle nuove generazioni in marcia. L’accostamento visivo dei tre elementi rende evidente il concetto dell’unità spirituale Duce–Italia–Fascismo’]. 27 Calvino, ‘The Dictator’s Hats’, p. 203. Graziosi’s Littoriale equestrian monument is among those works illustrated in Sapori’s article on portraits of the Duce. 28 See Benedetto Croce, Scritti e discorsi politici (1943–1947), vol. 1, ed. Angela Carella (Napoli: Bibliopolis, 1993), p. 61. 29 See the exhibition press release at http://www.emiliaromagnaturismo.com/it/eventi/forli-cesena/turismo-forlivese/renato-bertelli-la-parentesi-futurista (accessed 4 February 2019) [‘svincolato oggi dal retaggio della propria epoca’.] 30 Giuliana Peri, ‘The Destiny of the Art and Artifacts’, pp. 233–243; Moretti, Renato Bertelli, p. 148. Peri rightly notes the tendentious presentation in recent years of Bertelli’s sculpture as created in ignorance of official Fascist aesthetic canons. 31 Antonello Negri (ed.), The Thirties: The Arts in Italy beyond Fascism, exhib. cat., Palazzo Strozzi (Florence: Giunti, 2012). See also Ara H. Merjian, review of The Thirties: The Arts in Italy Beyond Fascism, frieze, April 2013. 32 On the dearth of critical responses at the time, see Moretti, Renato Bertelli: La Parentesi futurista, pp. 30, 34. 33 Giuseppe Bottai, ‘La rivoluzione permanente: quarto anniversario’, Critica fascista vol. 4, no. 1, November 1926, and Gerarchia, vol. 18, no. 9, 1939, p. 593. See also Alexander Nützenadel, ‘Faschismus als Revolution? Politische Sprache und revolutionärer Stil im Italien Mussolinis’, in Christof Dipper, Lutz Klinkhammer, and Alexander Nützenadel, (eds), Europäische Sozialgeschichte: Festschrift für Wolfgang Schieder (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2000). 34 Though Bottai certainly recognized this Marxist and Trotskyist precedence, he insisted that Fascism’s permanent revolution entailed ‘long-term change under state direction’. See Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2005) pp. 288–9. 35 Vito Zagarrio, ‘Bottai: Un fascista critico?’, Studi Storici, vol.17, no. 4 (October–December 1976), pp. 269. 36 F.T. Marinetti, ‘War, the Sole Cleanser of the World’ (1911), translated and reprinted in Günter Berghaus (ed.), Marinetti: Critical Writings, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2006) p. 53. 37 Benito Mussolini, ‘Sintesi del regime’, 18 March 1934, in Scritti e discorsi. Dal Gennaio 1934 al 4 Novembre. 1935 (XII–XIV E.F.) (Milan: Hoepli, 1935), p. 39 [‘Ma un pericolo tuttavia può minacciare il Regime: questo pericolo può essere rappresentato da quello che comunemente viene chiamato ‘spirito borghese’, spirito cioè di soddisfazione e di adattamento … Contro questo pericolo non v'è che un rimedio: il principio della Rivoluzione continua’]. 38 Raffaello Giolli, ‘Cronache milanesi’, Emporium, vol. 66, no. 396, 1927, p. 376. 39 F.T. Marinetti and Tullio d’Albisola, ‘Ceramica e Aeroceramica: Manifesto Futurista’, Gazzetta del Popolo (7 September 1938). 40 The manifesto’s elegy to the artist Fillia, in fact, reads almost as a sidelong jab at Bertelli in absentia: ‘FILLIA: one of the genius Futurist creators created in 1932 aeroceramics…combining plastic architecture with forms obtained through rotation obtaining a superlatively original and new prodigious ceramics’. Marinetti and d’Albisola, ‘Ceramica e Aeroceramica’. 41 La Belgique Judiciaire (Gazette des tribunaux belges et étrangers), vol. 2, no. 1, 3 December 1843, p. 45. 42 Reflecting on his interviews with Mussolini in the spring of 1932, the German–Swiss biographer Emil Ludwig drew upon modifiers long since prevalent in the lexicon on the Duce. Mussolini’s oratorial style, he noted, was ‘metallic’, reminiscent of a ‘finely tempered steel’. Ludwig also notably described the leader as ‘devilishly Napoleonic’. Ludwig, Colloqui con Mussolini (Milan: Mondadori, 1932), cited in Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, p. 55. 43 See the auction lot at https://www.1stdibs.com/furniture/decorative-objects/sculptures/busts/futurist-benito-mussolini-shadow-walking-stick-cane/id-f_6379053/ (accessed 4 February 2019). 44 Ken Silver (ed.), Chaos and Classicism (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2011) p. 30. 45 F.T. Marinetti, ‘Portrait of Mussolini’, p. 159. 46 Military technology increasingly drew the attention of Europe’s Fascist and philo-Fascist cultural elite. Having authored a paean to the glories of trench warfare, the German writer Ernst Jünger prefaced a new, 1933 edition of the volume Luftfahrt ist not! (Aviation is Necessary!), illustrated with photographs of aircraft, anthropomorphic motors, and other devices. Jünger’s proto-fascist apotheosis of both war and machinery, writes Todd Presner, formed ‘a radical distillation of Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’, transported to the German front on the darkest days of the First World War – and placed there forever’. See Todd Presner, ‘On the End of Sex and the Last Man: On the Weimar Utopia of Ernst Jünger’s ‘Worker’’, qui parle, vol. 13, no. 1, Fall–Winter 2001, p. 104. 47 Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, ‘The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe’, in Lawrence S. Rainey, Christine Poggi, Laura Wittman (eds), Futurism: An Anthology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009) p. 212. 48 Meyer Schapiro, ‘Frontal and Profile as Symbolic Forms’, in Words and Pictures: On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013 [1973]) p. 45. 49 A notable exception is the work of the painter, philosopher, and esotericist, Julius Evola, recently reprised as a lightning rod for the American and European ‘alt–right’. See, inter alia, Jeffrey Schnapp, ‘Bad Dada (Evola)’, in Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky (eds), The Dada Seminars, (Washington, DC: CASVA, 2005) pp. 31–56, on Evola’s early aesthetics; and Elisabetta Cassina Wolff, ‘Evola's interpretation of fascism and moral responsibility’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 50, no.s 4–5, pp. 478–494. 50 Giordano Bruno Guerri, Il culto del Duce (1922–1945), (Salò: Museo di Salò, 2016) p. 5. 51 See in particular Giovanni Colonna, ‘Una categoria particolare di cippi etruschi: i ciottoloni di pietra scura’, in Steingraeber Stephan and Bruni Stefano (eds), Cippi, Stele, Statue-Stele e Semata Testimonianze in Etruria, nel mondo italico e in Magna Grecia dalla Prima Età del Ferro fino all’Ellenismo (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2015) pp. 180–4. My thanks to Vincent Jolivet and Pietro Tamburini for bringing this to my attention. 52 See Ara H. Merjian, ‘Manifestations of the Novel: Genealogy and the Sculptural Imperative in F.T. Marinetti’s Mafarka le futuriste’, Modernism/Modernity, vol. 23, no. 2, Winter 2016, pp. 365–401. 53 Marinetti, ‘Portrait of Mussolini’ (1929), p. 158. 54 Marinetti, ‘Portrait of Mussolini’ (1929), p. 158. 55 The interchangeability between objecthood and agency crop up in official, rhetorical accounts from the period; for while Bottai deems Mussolini the only true Fascist artist, Malaparte – as we have already seen – declared him Fascism’s only true expression. 56 Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising Under Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995) p. 16. 57 See S. K. Doherty, The Origins and Use of the Potter’s Wheel in Ancient Egypt (Oxford: Archaopress, 2015). 58 A. Baldinotti et al. (eds), La Manifattura di Signa (Florence: S.P.E.S., 1986). 59 See Yves Bonnefoy, Greek and Egyptian Mythologies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and R.A. Simkins, ‘The Embodied World: Creation Metaphors in the Ancient Near East’, Biblical Theology Bulletin, vol. 44, 2014, pp. 40–53. 60 Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 61 Christopher Duggan, A Concise History of Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) p. 222. 62 Virginia Woolf Miscellanies: Proceedings of the First Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf (New York: Pace University Press, 1991) p. 24. 63 Charles Dana Gibson, The Weaker Sex: The Story of a Susceptible Bachelor (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1903). My sincere thanks to Giuseppe Virelli for bringing Gibson’s work to my attention. 64 Pinkus, Bodily Regimes, p. 17. 65 Sapori, for one, evokes ‘the goodness of [the Duce’s] heart, a father to all’ [‘la bontà del suo cuore, per tutti paterno’]. Sapori, ‘Nel primo decennale dell'Era Fascita: Ritratti del Duce’, p. 277. 66 L.A. Milani, Il R. Museo Archeologico di Firenze (Florence, 1912) cited in Colonna, ‘Una categoria particolare di cippi etruschi’, p. 179. 67 On such irresolution as a potential driving force in Fascism, Ruth Ben Ghiat writes: ‘Six months before taking power, Mussolini asked readers of his new review Gerarchia, ‘Does fascism aim at restoring the State, or subverting it? Is it order or disorder? … Is it possible to be conservatives and subversives at the same time? How does fascism intend to escape this vicious circle of paradoxical contradictions?’ Ben Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, p. 17. 68 Giovanni Calendoli, quoted in Manlio Pompei, ‘Dialettica fascista’, Critica fascista, 1 February 1931); cited in Ben Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, p. 22. 69 See Roy Eriksen, The Building in the Text: Alberti to Shakespeare and Milton (Pittsburg, PA: Penn State University Press, 2000) p. 39. 70 On de Chirico’s close study of Nietzschean (and Heraclitean) models of time, see Ara H. Merjian, Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2014). 71 Giovanni Gullace, Translator’s introduction to Giovanni Gentile, The Philosophy of Art (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1972) p. xxv. Gullace notes further: ‘The spirit is an act which has neither past nor future, for it contains everything within itself, in an eternal present and eternal becoming…Idealism reconciles all distinctions, but does not, like mysticism, cancel them’ (pp. xxvii, xxxvii). 72 Benito Mussolini, La dottrina del Fascismo, ed. Marco Praiano and Stefano Fiorito (2014 [1933]) §3. 73 Roger Griffin has adduced a theory of fascism as a form of ‘palingenetic nationalism’ in a number of studies. See in particular, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Matthew Feldman (ed.), A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Griffin’s arguments have been countered by Andrew Vincent, who sees Griffin’s account as masking ‘the internal deep tensions within the various fascist arguments’. Andrew Vincent, Modern Political Ideologies, 3rd edn (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2010), p. 137. 74 Barbara Spackman, ‘Fascist Puerility’, qui parle, vol. 13, no. 1,, Fall–Winter 2001, pp. 13–14. 75 Calvino, ‘The Dictator’s Hats’, p. 200. 76 I owe this observation to Frances Terpak and Michelle Brunnick’s essay, ‘A Photographer’s Cabinet of Wonders’, in Terpak and Brunnick (eds), Robert Mapplethorpe: The Archive (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015) pp. 174–6. 77 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Il poema dei sansepolcristi (Milan: Tipografia del Popolo d'Italia 1939) p. 15. 78 To this end, Bertelli’s sculpture also distills and metaphorizes Mussolini’s ingenious (and insidious) strategy of cultural pluralism and coercive inclusiveness – a strategy which the literary scholar Alice Kaplan has described in terms of a ‘polarity machine’. Particularly to the extent that it suggests a mechanized magnet (or other mineral) vacillating between poles, the notion of a polarity machine seems especially apposite to Bertelli’s Profile. See Alice Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 79 Christopher Duggan, ‘The Propagation of the Cult of the Duce, 1925–26’, in Gundle, Duggan, and Peri (eds), The cult of the Duce, p. 38. 80 Marinetti, ‘Portrait of Mussolini’, p. 158. 81 Guerri, Il culto del Duce, p. 5. 82 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘profile’: ‘Italian profilare is <pro– ( < classical Latin pro– pro–prefix) +filare to spin (thread) (a1308; < post–classical Latin fīlāre to spin: see filament)’. 83 Interestingly, the English word ‘spin’ itself denotes – first and foremost – the threading of fibers. Ibid, ‘spin’: ‘1. a. intransitive: To draw out and twist the fibres of some suitable material, such as wool or flax, so as to form a continuous thread; to be engaged in or to follow this occupation’. 84 See, for example, Giancarlo Bosetti, Spin: trucchi e tele–imbrogli della politica (Venice: Marsilio, 2007). 85 Meyer Schapiro, ‘Frontal and Profile as Symbolic Forms’, p. 45. 86 In this sense, Schapiro’s choice of the word ‘affront’ suggests a dual allusion both to full, unmitigated representation and to frontality. 87 Matt Petronzio, ‘Vero Eretico’ The Observer, 3 August 2011. 88 Matt Petronzio, ‘Vero Eretico,’ n.p. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Fascist Revolution, Futurist Spin: Renato Bertelli’s Continuous Profile of Mussolini and the Face of Fascist Time
JF - Oxford Art Journal
DO - 10.1093/oxartj/kcz019
DA - 2019-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/fascist-revolution-futurist-spin-renato-bertelli-s-continuous-profile-6k0qQK7KpS
SP - 307
VL - 42
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -