Francesca Billiani - Architecture and the Novel under the Italian Fascist Regime

This book forms part of a wider research project entitled , Modernism, Modernization, and the Arts under European Dictatorships , funded by the UKs Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Drawing on a wide-ranging set of modernist journals and artefactsspanning public building, films, theatre plays, artworks and novelsthis research project explored how the Italian Fascist regimes participation in an aesthetic movement (modernism) and in its transformation into a social phenomenon (modernization) created a distinctive system of the arts, which, in the 1930s, also had a profound influence across the whole of Europe. Specifically, this book analyses the relationship between the novel and architecture as one of the key expressions of the system of the arts under the dictatorship.

The project as a whole started from several working hypotheses which have been tested across the Fascist system of the arts and are visible in the website. As it has been established, during the Ventennio, not dissimilarly from what it did happen in other 1930s totalitarian regimes, the Italian Fascist regime created totalitarian aesthetic apparatuses together with new forms of social and cultural patronage for the control of the individual/citizen in the social sphere, seeking mass consensus and the constitution of the New Man as the foundation of a modern collective social identity. In its claims, the regime adopted modernist aesthetics in a variety of forms and across various artistic fields, albeit not unproblematically and unilaterally, as the privileged paradigm for the modernization of the public sphere. In doing this, the idea of modernity encompassed progressive as well as reactionary forces.

Taken as a whole and despite their different ideological orientations, the official debate on State art as well as that on liberal arts shared a similar concern: the imperative of using the arts as a platform for fostering social modernization in the civic sphere to accommodate the new Fascist Man shaped by the regimes anthropological revolution. In the theory and in the practice of the modernist/Fascist dialectics of modernity and modernization, architecture, the novel, the visual arts, realism, the theatre, the newsreels and the futurist avant-gardes functioned for the regime and for Italian writers, artists and intellectuals, as core drivers for building a new society. In this project, we therefore argue that these debates and artistic expressions were of key importance for the existence of the regime, for they played a foundational role in shaping the aesthetics orientations of Italian culture, in creating its transnational profile, and in strengthening the power of the arts during political repression. Realism across these artistic fields in particular was the key aesthetic principle for such a construction and for creating a new national novel embedded within the international field.

To fulfil its aims, the project produced several outputs, including this book, and a website-database which collects, displays and more importantly connects information about circa 180 artefacts . The website also features five interpretative hypotheses about the role the novel, architecture, visual arts and cinema played in the construction of the arte di stato. The hypotheses function as the projects conceptual framework since they describe the main lines of enquiry developed throughout. The general and overarching hypotheses and the individual artefacts analysed in short essays are connected through a set of 12 cardinal principles, two or three associated to each hypothesis . Each artefact has been selected as representative of one of the hypotheses, and is linked to an essay in which it is analysed in light of the appropriate principle. Such principles are shaped in the total work of art , which was designed to represent modern forms of total power and technologies different from those championed by the avant-gardes. In the 1920s and 1930s, the total work of art found its implementation in: (1) the new theorization of the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity; (2) the sacralization of the new mans total politics though the arts; (3) the construction of the new mans urban reality; (4) the new mans /citizens media manipulation; and (5) the legitimization of the artist/intellectual participation in the civic sphere.

The website also contains a database of journals, which have been used as sources for the project and the chapters of this book. The website functions as a collective book which has been written by Francesca Billiani, Silvia Colombo, Gianmarco Mancosu and Laura Pennacchietti.