GX1993.462

Unità di misura: cm; Altezza: 159; Larghezza: 129.5

olio su tela

When Dottori painted Mario Carli's Air Portrait in 1931, also titled "An Italian of Mussolini", the Futurist writer and activist had by then become an official figure of the regime and was later appointed consul first in Porto Alegre in Brazil and then in Salonika. However, his existential and artistic path had been a bumpy one, revealing the many contradictions inherent in the historical evolution of Fascism. After making his debut in Florence, before the war, as an author of experimental, almost pre-surrealist novels, Carli was one of the leading exponents of Arditism, a phenomenon typical of the original fascist movementism, which proposed the figure of a "new man" intolerant of all rules and conventions, violent and anarchic, radical and provocative, daring and unscrupulous, a man, in short, with ‘the heart of a dynamo, pneumatic lungs, the liver of a leopard’. Animated by these ideals, Carli enlisted as a volunteer in 1917 and was wounded and decorated. He went with D'Annunzio to Fiume and there launched "La Testa di Ferro", the press organ of the Fiuman legionnaires. He was put on trial and arrested several times. To open the way for revolution, he was open to socialist and communist experiences and models, which aroused the suspicions of Marinetti and Mussolini. Following the crisis of Arditism and after the march on Rome, he founded the magazine "L'Impero" with the aim of bringing together the most innovative forces of Futurism and outlining a new culture suited to the prospects of Fascism, until Mussolini, by then consolidated in power and purged the initial subversive spirit of the movement, harnessed it in officialdom to render it inoffensive.

GX1993.396

Unità di misura: cm; Diametro: 56

vetro dipinto e piombato

Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa Moderna - Torino, Parco del Valentino - 10/05/1902 – 10/11/1902<br>Famiglia Artistica - Milano

'[...] the hideous image, which the serpents coiled iridescently, is held suspended by the hand of Perseus and stands out red-hot against the sky in all its petrified terror. Already exhibited at the Famiglia Artistica in Milan, it received confirmation of its success in Turin'. With these words, Alfredo Melani commented in September 1902 on the participation of the leaded glass tondo - made by Guido Zuccaro, on a cartoon by Giovanni Buffa, for the G. Beltrami Vetrate Artistiche in Milan - at the First International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art in Turin.
In discontinuity with the past experiences of historicist matrix, this exhibition, whose official programme foresaw, in the name of a total adhesion to modernity, the strict exclusion of works marked by "simple imitations of styles of the past", represented the first exhibition of international scope organised in Italy after unification.
The leaded glass roundel, made in 1901, is signed with the glassworks' trademark, composed of the initials of the four partners: Beltrami, Buffa, Zuccaro and Innocenzo Cantinotti. The Medusa stained-glass window, however, was executed by Zuccaro alone on a cartoon by Buffa. Adhering to a strand of research that was very much in vogue at the time, in which the model of the demonic and mutant woman - in its disturbing physiognomic correspondence with the animal world - had by then taken over from the traditional angelic and idealised female portrait, this painted and leaded glass tondo presented clear expressive and iconographic analogies with the literary and mythological transpositions of international Symbolist culture, from Franz von Stuck to Gustave Moreau. Glass globe depicting the severed head of Medusa.