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Book Review
Europe: Early Modern and Modern
| Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum, editors. Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 005. Pp. vi, 293. cloth $57.50, paper $24.95.
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| The Italian fascist dictatorship assumed power with a highly orchestrated, Roman-style triumphal march. Twenty-three years later, Benito Mussolini's obsession with reviving Italy's Roman past was literally turned on its head, as enraged Italians hung his murdered and mutilated body upside down in a central Milan piazza. Their attack on the dictator's lifeless body represented a highly charged reference to the pitture infamanti, representations of criminals and political enemies dating from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. |
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This collection of essays confronts the critical and complex issue of Italian fascism's appropriation of Italy's iconic pasts, from the Roman Empire to the Renaissance and Middle Ages. An edited and repackaged past was central to all fascist parties and regimes for the legitimacy it offered, the propaganda value of moments of past national glory, and the palette of images and symbols that national history could offer. By tracing the variety, character, and creativity of Fascism's mobilization of the Italian national past, the contributors fill an important scholarly lacuna. Editors Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum offer fourteen essays and an epilogue that probe the theory and practice of the Fascist uses of history in the visual culture of the era. This eclectic collection draws from a variety of scholarly disciplines, including art history, the history of architecture, comparative literature, and classics. The editors divide the Fascist confrontation with and representation of the past into four parts: "Italy's Past as Mussolini's Present," "Antiquity," "Middle Ages and Renaissance," and "History as Fascist Spectacle and Exhibition." |
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The first two essays, which provide the book's theoretical frame, focus on Fascism's relationship to Italian history. In "Forging a Visible Fascist Nation," Lazzaro examines some of the strategies used during the Fascist regime to "make visible the different parts of the peninsula and the various concepts of native identity" (p. 15). Rightly stressing the regime's obsession with national culture—that is, culture free of foreign influences—she traces Fascist notions of Romanità (Roman-ness) and Italianità (Italian-ness) and their manifestation in art, architecture, and exhibition culture. Unfortunately the Fascist relationship to history is presented as static and unchanging between 1922 and 1943, denying the marked shifts in fascist culture and ideology brought on, over the years, by internal and external pressures on the regime. In "To Make History Present," Claudio Fogu analyzes two major Fascist-organized exhibitions, the Garibaldian Exhibition and the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, in order to demonstrate Fascism's "actualist notion of history" (p. 44). Citing the display strategies and the relationship between art and object in these exhibitions, Fogu proposes that fascism gave birth to a new "historic tempo" "meant to reorient [the] Fascist historic imaginary away 'from the history of the present' and 'toward history belonging to the future'" (p. 49). Although Fascism adamantly rejected nineteenth-century positivism and offered a self-representation at once traditional and modern, this conceptualization fails to offer an overarching explanation of the Fascist relationship to history. |
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