Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy (review)

In 1982 Norberto Bobbio still spoke for the majority of historians when he declared in an interview with L'Espresso,"Where there was culture, there wasn't Fascism, where there was Fascism there wasn't culture. There never was a Fascist culture." Since then a velvet revolution has taken place in the academic understanding of generic fascism (still arrogantly and ignorantly dismissed in some quarters as no more than a modish genuflexion to the "linguistic turn") which in the context of Mussolini's Italy has meant growing recognition that Italian fascism, despite the many contradictions and extreme heterogeneity of its ideology, is to be approached as a sustained attempt to create a new type of "total culture." Moreover, it is now widely accepted that, at least until the late 1930s, fascism's revolutionary experiment mobilized a significant section of the nation's artistic and intellectual elite, some of whom devoted enormous creative energy to imparting ideological expression and plastic substance to the "reborn Italy" in the deepest sense of the term "propaganda," namely to propagate the new faith.

The fourteen essays of Donatello among the Blackshirts supply an abundance of fresh grist to this interpretive mill thanks not only to its sustained focus on the generally neglected visual dimension of cultural production under fascism, but also to the overall cohesion of its heuristic approach and a consequent synergy between the various articles rarely encountered in multi-author volumes on fascist aesthetics. The high standard of conceptualization that permeates the whole set of essays is established at the outset in Section I, "Italy's Past as Mussolini's Present." Here Claudia Lazzaro stresses the utopianism underlying the regime's bid to "forge a visible Fascist nation." Claudio Fogu then explores how it set out to "make history present," supplanting the "historical" with the "historic" to make Italians feel they were experiencing the living presence of an epic, inspiring past woven into the fabric of contemporary events in the key of regeneration and renewal. Together they create a refined heuristic framework within which to read the constant interplay between history and modernity, politics and art, creativity and ideology, which emerges so powerfully from the subsequent contributions. Each becomes a detailed case study in how the considerable scholarly attention, artistic ingenuity, and material resources devoted by the State to "reclaiming" (and hence "reimagining") elements carefully selected from the material culture of Italy's past were symptomatic of the desire neither to preserve the nation's artistic heritage nor to erect a beguiling façade to conceal fascism's counter-socialist designs, but to act on and transform the present. The prevailing spirit was thus neither conservative nor reactionary, but (in its own terms) revolutionary, manipulating the power of cultural artifacts and icons to bring about a genuine conviction among "the people" that they were participating in the reawakening of the unique genius of the race within a new post-liberal phase of civilization, one that breathed life into and drew inspiration from the country's extraordinarily rich cultural legacy.

Thus in Section I, Fogu and Lazarro use the the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution of 1932–3 and the Augustan Exhibition of Romanità of 1937 respectively to illustrate the regime's propensity for manipulating the capacity of carefully staged exhibitions to re-enchant the artifacts on display, harnessing their refurbished auratic quality to the mission of conveying the message of national rebirth. In Section II, "Antiquity," Ann Wilkins explores the attempts to give fascist Italy an Augustan resonance, Jobst Welge unpacks the significance of the triumphal arch to fascist architecture, while Gerald Silk reveals that even the imagery used to present Mussolini as the nation's supreme aviator evoked the divine status of Roman emperors. Together they suggest that in practice the cult of "Romanità" meant that political reality under fascism was constantly being keyed into a highly...