Novecento Italiano
ノヴェチェント・イタリアーノ / 1922–1943 / Style / Figurative Painting
A movement that, after the avant-garde had dismantled form, sought a return to the mass and stillness of Italian classicism. Simplified, solid bodies, subdued earth colour and emphatically frontal composition became the vocabulary of interwar public building and mural painting. A leading case of the return to order, and one that has to be read together with its closeness to the regime.
Simplified, solid bodies / Emphatically frontal composition / Subdued earth colour / Mass recalling classical sculpture
Dictionary entry
- Best used for
- Institutional identity that wants gravity without ornament, for museums, foundations and civic bodies, provided the political reading is faced rather than ignored · Figurative illustration and sculpture-led art direction in which weight and calm matter more than movement
- Type
- Roman capitals cut to classical proportion and spaced as though incised, aligned to the axis of the figure.
- Composition
- Frontal and symmetrical, the figure centred and cut at the knee, the ground a plain plane with no incident.
- Material
- Fresco-like matte surfaces in ochre, terracotta and stone grey, lit so that mass is modelled and almost nothing casts a shadow.
- Caution
- Taking the monumental frontality as neutral good taste: the same devices were built to speak for a state, and used without that awareness the work carries an argument its author did not intend.
- Further study
- Margherita Sarfatti's leadership / The context of the return to order / Its extension into public murals