Offprinted from MOD E RN L A N GUA GE RE V I E W VOL U ME 108 , PART 4 OCTOBER 2013 © Modern Humanities Research Association  MARGHERITA SARFATTI AND IL POPOLO D’ITALIA: NATIONAL CLASSICISM BETWEEN TRADITION AND MODERNITY When, in , Margherita Sarfatti started contributing to the cultural section of the Milanese newspaper Il popolo d’Italia, founded by Benito Mussolini in , she was already an experienced journalist and an established art critic, patron, and collector. She had collaborated with newspapers and cultural and political periodicals, such as L’Unione Femminile, L’Avanti, and La Voce. She was holding a salon, which was a meeting-point for all the major artists and intellectuals of the time, she had been active in the Italian Socialist Party, and she had taken part in the feminist movement. She had been close to avant-garde artistic circles, particularly to artists such as Umberto Boccioni, Medardo Rosso, and Arturo Martini, and the artists of the Nuove Tendenze group (Leonardo Dudreville, Achille Funi, Erba, Giulio Arata, Antonio Sant’Elia, and Mario Chiattone). As is well known, since about  Sarfatti had been conducting an affair with Mussolini, whom she had met in Milanese socialist circles and followed throughout his early political career, from the socialist years to the rise of Fascism. e affair with Mussolini led her in the s to exercise considerable personal power, which she used to promote and support both her cultural interests and her political agenda. Sarfatti became an acclaimed author, thanks in particular to her biography of Mussolini, Dux (). She also published art books, novels, and essays. e rise of Sarfatti’s public profile ran parallel to the rise of Fascism, and she acted effectively as a cultural operator for the Fascist regime. is article focuses on Sarfatti’s contributions on art in the Fascist newspaper Il popolo d’Italia and its monthly supplement La rivista illustrata del popolo d’Italia. In her articles for Il popolo Sarfatti dealt with different aspects of art, literature, and culture. Her writings on painting and sculpture, the decorative arts, and architecture, in particular, were configured as ideological interventions on the social function of art, the relationship between high art and industrial production, and contemporary redefinitions of urban and private spaces. ese themes were inscribed within a general framework concerning the relationship between tradition and modernity, the definition of national identity, and the relationship between intellectuals and society. Her contributions on the decorative arts, in particular, expressed her own response to a process of renegotiation of the boundaries between high and  Philip Cannistraro and Brian Sullivan, Il Duce’s Other Woman (New York: Morrow, ), p. . For a discussion of Sarfatti’s writings, particularly on literature, see Anna Nozzoli, ‘Margherita Sarfatti organizzatrice di cultura: “Il popolo d’Italia” ’, in La corporazione delle donne, ed. by Marina Addis Saba (Florence: Vallecchi, ), pp. –.  Modern Language Review,  (), – © Modern Humanities Research Association   Margherita Sarfatti and ‘Il popolo d’Italia’ low art, and elite and mass culture, which was taking place aer the war as a result both of the avant-garde critique of bourgeois culture and of the growth of mass cultural industries, as well as debates on industrial design. Sarfatti used art as a specifically defined sphere of power, which was both personal and political. e fact that Il popolo d’Italia was the most important Fascist newspaper serves to contextualize Sarfatti’s operation within the shaping and promotion of Fascist ideology, as she conferred on the cultural topics with which she engaged a strongly political connotation. While biographical and historical accounts of Sarfatti’s life and work, as well as studies on Italian culture in the inter-war years, have oen emphasized the political drive of her writings, this aspect has oen been sidelined by studies on her art criticism. Specifically, I will focus on Sarfatti’s re-elaboration of the idea of the classical with regard to both painting and the decorative arts. I will argue that Sarfatti’s reflections on classicism not only absorbed and re-elaborated the stances of the rappel à l’ordre—the return to order in art advocated throughout Europe aer the First World War—but charged the classical with a specific political resonance. It is well known that post-Impressionist debates on classicism started before the post-war call for order. Indeed, they can be dated back to the nineteenth century, particularly to such artists as Renoir, Cézanne, and Gauguin. Yet, as Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy note, the First World War provided the debate with momentum, since the return to the classical came to respond to a craving for stability provided by tradition aer the unprecedented upheaval brought about by the war. On a figurative level, Cowling and Mundy observe, the return to the classical implied a revisitation of established subjects, such as the nude, still life, and landscape.  See Marla Stone, e Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), p. .  See Cannistraro and Sullivan; Laura Malvano, Fascismo e politica dell’immagine (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, ); Sergio Marzorati, Margherita Sarfatti: saggio biografico (Florence: Nodo Libri, ); Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –; Simona Urso, Margherita Sarfatti: dal mito del Dux al mito americano (Venice: Marsilio, ); Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun, Jewish Women and their Salons: e Power of Conversation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), pp. –; Catherine E. Paul and Barbara M. Zaczek, ‘Margherita Sarfatti and Cultural Nationalism’, Modernism/Modernity, . (), –; Karin Wieland, Margherita Sarfatti: l’amante del Duce, trans. by Elena Mortarini (Turin: UTET, ). See also Walter Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, ), pp. –.  See in particular Elena Pontiggia, ‘La classicità e la sintesi: Margherita Sarfatti critico d’arte’, in Da Boccioni a Sironi: il mondo di Margherita Sarfatti, ed. by Elena Pontiggia (Milan: Skira, ), pp. –, and ead., ‘Alle origini del Novecento Italiano (–)’, in Il Novecento Italiano, ed. by Elena Pontiggia (Milan: Abscondita, ), pp. –.  Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, ‘Introduction’, in On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism – (London: Tate Gallery, ), pp. – (p. ). See also Elena Pontiggia, Modernità e classicità: il ritorno all’ordine in Europa dal primo dopoguerra agli anni trenta (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, ), pp. –.           e references to the classical tradition included the Italian Renaissance and, in France, such artists as Poussin, Ingres, Corot, and Cézanne. In Italy the debate on classicism, started in the early twentieth century, intensified during and immediately aer the war, thanks to such artists as Ardengo Soffici, Carlo Carrà, and Giorgio de Chirico, who were in close contact with Parisian avant-garde circles. e debate acquired an intensely nationalistic focus, which aimed at reclaiming the specifically Italian character of the classical and referred to artists such as Raphael, Bellini, Piero della Francesca, Masaccio, and Mantegna. In these debates the idea of the classical increasingly lost its associations with Greek and Roman antiquity and became more generically linked with a national artistic tradition identified with notions of simplicity, ‘plastic’ qualities, and a timeless beauty derived from a sublimated imitation of reality. As Cowling and Mundy point out, the allusions to the art of past masters were meant to function as suggestions that spectators were invited to reflect on in order fully to grasp the meaning of the work. ey also had the advantage of avoiding the need to deploy the narrative subject-matter that had characterized nineteenth century academic or realist art. Such allusions became an integral part of the subject-matter of the work of art itself, and developed the potential for ideological interpretation and appropriation. Sarfatti identified some of the ideological content inherent in contemporary debates on classicism and politicized it. Her reinterpretation and promotion of the classical idiom in the visual arts corresponded to an intended retrieval and reappropriation of a cultural tradition of beauty, sobriety, discipline, and order, in terms of both art and civilization. Her reading of classicism has been termed by the art historian Elena Pontiggia ‘moderna classicità’: that is, a mediating position which aimed at reconciling classicism and modernity. Such a position was not meant to be backward-looking, but represented an attempt to retain the legacy of the avant-garde, while moving beyond its formal decomposition. Post-avant-garde classicism lent itself to Fascist appropriations, not so much because of its conservative subject-matter or style, but precisely because it was rooted in the avant-garde: the references to tradition, while interpretable in nationalist terms, were presented as steeped in an anti-bourgeois rhetorical framework, as well as being elaborated in an anti-academic, anti-conservative context. As Emily Braun has aptly observed, in Italy the political elitism, cultural chauvinism, and formal values associated with the new classicism originated at the beginning of the twentieth century.  Cowling and Mundy, pp. –. See Elena Pontiggia, ‘L’idea del classico: il dibattito sulla classicità in Italia –’, in L’idea del classico –: temi classici nell’arte italiana degli anni Venti, ed. by Elena Pontiggia and Mario Quesada (Milan: Fabbri, ), pp. –.  Cowling and Mundy, p. .  Pontiggia, ‘L’idea del classico’, pp. –. See also Elena Pontiggia, ‘L’enigmatico classicismo’, in Il ritorno all’ordine, ed. by Elena Pontiggia (Milan: Abscondita, ), pp. –.   Margherita Sarfatti and ‘Il popolo d’Italia’ e avant-garde had elaborated artistic forms congenial to Fascism well before the implementation of Fascism’s cultural policies in the mid-s. George Mosse argues that the attraction of Fascism for intellectuals took place in the context of nationalism: ‘a state that drew together into one spiritual unity the creative souls of its citizens—not the drab state of the raison d’état, but a state whose very nature was identical with the cultural expression for which these men yearned’. As Mosse notes, Fascists believed that the spiritual unity of the nation would resolve most difficulties; most Fascist intellectuals defined this spiritual unity as ‘a resurgence of creativity viewed in aesthetic terms: the dawn of a new world of beauty and of aesthetic form’. What distinguished Fascist intellectuals was ‘the shi from aesthetic politics to the idea of the state as the motivator of aesthetic rejuvenation’. Despite Sarfatti’s well-known fascination with Roman civilization, in her writings the connection between classicism and Fascism was not just made at the level of the use of Roman or more generally classicist symbolism. Rather, it involved a conceptual transformation whereby the characteristics attributed to classicism were transferred to Fascism, or better, Fascism inherited and embodied those classical qualities embedded in Italian culture for millennia. e classically inspired imagery surrounding Fascism therefore acquired a significance that transcended the aspiration to emulate the Roman Empire, and acquired a dimension in which beauty, politics, history, and lineage interlinked. In this sense, the rhetoric of the classical appropriated by Sarfatti operated along the same lines as the use of the Fascist language of the sacred, as observed by Jeffrey Schnapp: like the use of that language, the deployment of classical references did not serve as the retrieval of an atavistic or retrograde cultural model, but was used to focus on the continuity between present and past, an attitude in which the imitation and evocation of the past provided an experience of communion and historical succession, combined with a modernist perception focused on the future. e compression of past and present collapsed the historical distance between the two, with the aim of making history lose its diachronic dimension and acquire a legendary quality. In this context, the reappropriation of the classical idiom in a mythical sense was used because of its potential to convey modern meanings. Tradition was mobilized not for the purposes of conservative restoration, but, as Braun notes, to serve the end of the new mass politics: ‘from the point of  Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism, p. . George Mosse, e Fascist Revolution: Towards a General eory of Fascism (New York: Fertig, ), pp. –.  Ibid., p. . See also Emily Braun, ‘L’arte dell’Italia fascista: il totalitarismo fra teoria e pratica’, in Modernità totalitaria: il fascismo italiano, ed. by Emilio Gentile (Rome and Bari: Laterza, ), pp. –.  Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Anno X: la mostra della Rivoluzione fascista del  (Pisa and Rome: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, ), pp. –.            view of intellectuals and politicians [. . .] the classical past was a ready-made national culture, passed on orally from generation to generation and promulgated visually in ubiquitous public art, both pagan and Christian’. Ultimately, the appropriation of the classical did not just represent the reformulation and validation of a cultural model, but also the justification of aesthetics as a mode of understanding and defining the totality of a civilization. Any discussion of classicism in art was therefore simultaneously translated into a discourse on civilization, of which the classical component was not only an aesthetic model, but also a mode of understanding history and reflecting on the relationship between the past and modernity. is placed art at the centre of the identity-formation process and assigned to the cultural mediator a key role in its formulation. Sarfatti on Art: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Nation When Sarfatti started writing for Il popolo d’Italia her articles were usually published on page  or , or, in the case of reviews of exhibitions taking place in Milan, in the section entitled ‘Cronache di Milano’. In  she took over the column entitled ‘Cronache d’arte’, previously held by Arturo Rossato. In  she began a dedicated column, entitled ‘Cronache del venerdì’, located on the third page, in which she discussed matters of literature and art, with special attention to the latter. e topics she treated in her column ranged from book and exhibition reviews to single authors and artists, and art-related policies and cultural matters in general. Occasionally she signed her articles with the pseudonym ‘El Sereno’. As of  she also ran Gerarchia, a political journal attached to Il popolo d’Italia. During her collaboration with Il popolo d’Italia, Sarfatti determinedly devoted herself to the cause of art. With her column she created a personal space through which she could carry out her specific cultural programme. Sarfatti used Il popolo as a platform to launch an artistic vision which could function as a unifying tool for the creation of the new nation emerging from the war. She was convinced that only by forging a national style was it possible to create the cultural and ideological basis for the construction of a new collective identity. She considered the promotion and the direction of national art as a political mission. As she claimed in her response to a survey by the magazine Vita Femminile in , she saw her role as art critic for Il popolo, as  Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism, pp. –. See David Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), pp. –.  Cannistraro and Sullivan, p. .  Ibid., pp. –.   Margherita Sarfatti and ‘Il popolo d’Italia’ well as her job for Gerarchia, as ‘posti di milizia e di combattimento artistico’, and she conveyed the feeling that she was fighting to construct a new nation. Her programme emerged in a review she wrote for Il popolo on the occasion of a Futurist exhibition held in Milan in . In this she argued that from ancient times up to the Middle Ages, painting and sculpture had been subordinate to architecture and an integral part of it. In the Renaissance those arts had became detached from their architectural context, thereby losing their architectural, plastic qualities. e decadence resulting from such a process was countered by academicism, which led to the ultimate reaction of Impressionism and post-Impressionism. It was only with Cézanne that art began to retrieve those architectural principles which were at the core of classical art. ose artists who had been following Cézanne’s lead wrongly refused to be regarded as a school, preferring instead to regard themselves as enjoying unlimited individual liberty. Yet belonging to a school did not imply a loss of individuality, she argued, but instead provided a co-ordination of effort. ey were pursuing the same artistic goals, which were balance, proportion, composition, and they were placing Italy at the forefront of artistic renovation in Europe: Quelle leggi di equilibrio e di proporzione; quel segreto della composizione stilistica per cui la genialità individuale fiorisce e s’innesta sopra un ritmo musicale e geometrico di profonda e spontanea fatalità; questo segreto del grande stile, che in diverse forme e per modi diversi, pur conobbero tutte le grandi epoche; si tratta ora, nella fervida e piena vigilia d’armi attuale, che prelude a una radicale revisione dei valori artistici, si tratta di ritrovarlo. Non più attraverso le imposizioni esteriori di una architettura inesistente e tuttavia in fasce; bensì per legge propria, intima ed essenziale di sviluppo organico. Spetta forse all’arte italiana di oggi e di domani di risolvere tale compito: di assolvere questa missione. Sarfatti endorsed such artists as Sironi, Funi, and Dudreville, who had an avant-garde background but who pursued the artistic values of the classical masters. e appeal for a return to an ‘architectural’ conception of art implied the rejection of individualism in favour of a collective effort to create a common project. Architecture was used both literally and metaphorically, to convey a sense of structure, hierarchy, and subordination of the parts to a collective endeavour. It also stood for an ‘organic’ concept of art, rooted in the cultural tradition of the nation and emerging spontaneously from it. In subsequent articles Sarfatti introduced the rhetorical cornerstones that would mark her reflections on the idea of the classical. e first was the idea of costruzione, of building, both as developed by post-Impressionism and as its appropriation in nationalistic terms during the war and immediate post-war  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Risposta all’inchiesta di Vita Femminile’ (), in Il Novecento Italiano, ed. by Pontiggia, p. .  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘L’esposizione futurista a Milano’, Il popolo d’Italia,  April , p. .           years (particularly by such artists as Carlo Carrà, who had reread the notion of costruzione as inherent in the Italian artistic tradition and therefore reclaimed it against foreign appropriations). Sarfatti conceived the notion of building as an intrinsically classical quality, and costruire as the aim of post-Cubist avant-garde. e notion of costruire acquired in Sarfatti’s reading—as well as in those of several artists at the time—a significance that went beyond a return to plastic values: it was linked to the Italian artistic tradition and heritage and was therefore charged in terms of national identity; it had a moral and socially relevant value, as it alluded to the need to ‘construct’ or ‘reconstruct’, both socially and culturally, in the post-war years; it metamorphed the notion of building into an architectural metaphor which would proceed to dominate artistic and cultural debates throughout the inter-war years. e second key concept emerging from Sarfatti’s conceptualization of the classical was the opposition classicità versus classicismo, an opposition which was oen reiterated in her commentaries on contemporary art. While she read classicismo either as sterile imitation of past styles or as a rigid application of rules, she saw classicità as possessing the ability to transmit spiritual values, particularly harmony and order. One fundamental quality of the new classicità was its ability to interface with modernity. In a review of an exhibition by Achille Funi she observed that while the subject-matter of Funi’s paintings struck the viewer as very modern (in particular, the settings, the landscapes, and the architecture conveyed an unequivocal sense of modernity), the painter’s attention to form, his ‘purity of lines’, his ability to imbue his figures with a sense of timeless humanity, revealed an understanding of the essence of the classical. Finally, Sarfatti developed her interpretation of the classical as the expression of a discipline which resulted in unity, co-ordination, and hierarchy, and re-elaborated the concept in social, political, and historical terms. She declared: L’arte è unità, coordinazione, e gerarchia, sacrificio dell’inferiore al superiore, rinuncia di quanto è meno importante a quanto lo è maggiormente. Questa è la grande disciplina dell’arte mediterranea, della essenza della sua tradizione classica, dalle sfingi d’Egitto, ai quadri di Paul Cézanne alle cere di Medardo Rosso. e disparate references pointed to an inclusive Mediterranean tradition, whose artefacts were associated according to parameters which were not   Carlo Carrà, ‘L’italianismo artistico’, Valori Plastici, .– (), –. Margherita Sarfatti, ‘La mostra Funi’, Il popolo d’Italia,  October , p. .  See Simona Storchi, ‘Valori Plastici’ –: le inquietudini del nuovo classico (= e Italianist, , suppl. ()).  Sarfatti, ‘La mostra Funi’.  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Le esposizioni Tomescu e Martini a Milano’, Il popolo d’Italia,  January , p. .  Margherita Sarfatti and ‘Il popolo d’Italia’ posited in strict formal terms, but according to their ability to convey a cluster of qualities, which acquired a significance that went beyond exclusively formal values. e Mediterranean, as Benedetto Gravagnuolo argues, dispensed the myth of the transhistorical representation of the past as present, as it insinuated the assumption of an eternal cycle in which the art of each epoch was measured against the sole theme of the desire for harmony. In  Sarfatti founded the Novecento artistic movement, under the patronage of the Pesaro art gallery in Milan. It was composed of seven artists: Anselmo Bucci, Leonardo Dudreville, Achille Funi, Emilio Malerba, Piero Marussig, Ubaldo Oppi, and Mario Sironi. ese artists’ styles were not homogeneous and they did not produce a programmatic statement as a group. In  Sironi, Funi, and Dudreville had signed, together with Luigi Russolo, the manifesto Contro tutti i ritorni in pittura, which acknowledged the importance of Futurism in freeing Italian art from conventionalism and invoked the creation of a new style based on ‘plastic synthesis’, as opposed to the analytical decomposition which had characterized both Futurist and Cubist art. e manifesto took issue with the primitivism professed by such artists as Carlo Carrà, and rejected the notion of ‘return’ to tradition, invoking instead the creation of a truly modern art, which had absorbed and proceeded from the experience of the avant-garde. Notably, these artists denied the idea of a reference tradition, on the grounds that there had never been any Italian tradition, as Italy was defined as a nation of ‘innovatori e costruttori’, in which all great painters had been innovators and had rejected tradition. e manifesto therefore advocated the primacy of Italian art and claimed for Italy a leading role in the post-avant-garde artistic renovation. e desire to establish a leading role for Italy in the post-war artistic scene was at the basis of the strong nationalism of the Novecento movement. Although with different stylistic outcomes, the Novecento artists pursued a classicism which distanced itself from that practised by contemporary artists, such as, for instance, Giorgio de Chirico’s disquieting visions. From a stylistic point of view, the Novecento artists shared the desire to create a ‘synthetic’ classicism, that is, a classicism filtered through post-Impressionism and the avant-garde (particularly artists such as Cézanne, Gauguin, Denis, and the late Boccioni) that drew inspiration from the classics without necessarily copying them. eir style evoked an idea of classical timelessness and their  Benedetto Gravagnuolo, ‘From Schinkel to Le Corbusier: e Myth of the Mediterranean in Modern Architecture’, in Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean, ed. by Jean-François Lejeune and Michelangelo Sabatino (London and New York: Routledge, ), pp. – (p. ).  See Sileno Salvagnini, Il sistema delle arti in Italia – (Bologna: Minerva, ), pp. –.  Sironi, Funi, Russolo, and Dudreville, Contro tutti i ritorni in pittura, repr. in Il Novecento Italiano, ed. by Pontiggia, pp. –.           aesthetics were based on the value of geometry, numbers, proportions, and a return to the human figure. e first exhibition of the group was inaugurated at the Pesaro gallery on  March  in the presence of Mussolini, who on that occasion gave a speech declaring the Fascist government’s support for art, but rejecting intrusion in artistic matters. e speech contributed to the blurring of the boundaries between aesthetics and politics, as Mussolini declared that he belonged to the same generation as the artists whose work was exhibited, and saw himself as an artist, who worked with a ‘matter’ and pursued specific ideals. anks to Sarfatti’s promotion, Novecento expanded considerably, and changed its name to Novecento Italiano to reflect its inclusive character and its aspiration to represent officially the new Italian art. e ‘Prima mostra del Novecento Italiano’ was inaugurated in Milan in . It was held at the Palazzo della Permanente, was opened by Mussolini—who once again reiterated the strict interrelationship between art and politics, both described as acts of creation—and included over a hundred artists, including Carlo Carrà, Giorgio de Chirico, Felice Casorati, and Ardengo Soffici. e second exhibition of the Novecento Italiano, held in Milan in , hosted works by about a hundred artists (among whom were Carrà, Giorgio Morandi, Gino Severini, Arturo Martini). By then a semantic shi had been operated, as Laura Malvano notes, which denoted an identification of the movement with a significant cross-section of modern Italian art. Novecento was meant to be equated with modernity, Italianness, and consequently Fascism. It was through the promotion of Novecento that Sarfatti voiced her views on the political and social role of art throughout the s. She used her position at Il popolo d’Italia to give the Novecento movement resonance and visibility, and used her personal relationship with Mussolini to present the group as the artistic expression of the new Italy, a product of the same spiritual change that had brought about the rise of Fascism. As Rossana Bossaglia has noted, the fact that Novecento was founded in the same year as the march on Rome was not coincidental, as Sarfatti intended to link the movement to Fascism’s rising power. Similarly, Philip Cannistraro and Brian Sullivan point out that, by inspiring the creation of a new artistic movement at the same time as Mussolini presided over the march on Rome, Sarfatti managed to unite art and politics. According to these scholars, the founding of Novecento and the Fascist seizure of power represented different  Pontiggia, ‘Alle origini del Novecento Italiano’, pp. –. See Rossana Bossaglia, Sironi e il Novecento (Florence: Giunti, ), p. .  ‘Discorso di Mussolini per l’inaugurazione della prima mostra del Novecento Italiano’, in Rossana Bossaglia, Il Novecento Italiano (Milan: Charta, ), pp. –.  Malvano, p. .  Bossaglia, Il Novecento Italiano, p. .   Margherita Sarfatti and ‘Il popolo d’Italia’ attempts to reach the same ends: the reimposition of order on Italian society and the restoration of Italy to the centre of a European civilization whose references were to be found in the Roman Empire. In her articles Sarfatti insisted on the need to create a classical style as the expression of a reconciliation between the old and the new, a rejection of archaism, and the combination of modern sensibility and traditional technique. Creating a dynamic interaction between old and new was essential in her discourse. She acknowledged the key role played by avant-garde movements (particularly Futurism) in the renewal of Italian art, and declared the need for reconstruction aer the avant-garde destructive phase. Yet reconstruction was not to be identified with pedantic imitation of the past. ‘L’arte nuova’, she claimed, ‘tanto più sarà classica, quanto meno incapperà nel neoclassicismo.’ e aim of modern art, she declared, was non rinunciare al moderno, e portarlo al clima storico dell’eterno. Definire il momento attuale dell’anima umana, e la nostra visione moderna, sul modo e con l’accento delle cose durevoli; dal groviglio delle impressioni labili e complicate, scernere l’essenziale, che solo è semplice e non mutevole. e classicism invoked by Sarfatti entailed a synthesis of Italian history and identity, a newly found sense of unity expressed in a re-envisioned sense of the monumental, which was meant to reinforce the idea of the primacy of the Italian cultural tradition and at the same time to express the spirit of the new Italy. Modernity, according to Sarfatti, was to be incorporated into a tradition which was generically defined as ‘forza di sangue e di coltura, di stirpe e di atmosfera insita nell’organismo dei popoli e delle nazioni, come dei singoli uomini’. Sarfatti promoted the Novecento painters as a group of artists who, despite having different styles, managed to achieve a synthesis between modern sensibility and subjects and traditional technique. e achievement of a balance between tradition and modernity produced classicità, a concept intended as ‘ordine, misura, armonia; profondità di contenuto, palese attraverso la semplicità della sintesi, attraverso il sacrificio di ogni bravura e svolazzo nella chiarezza delle apparenze essenziali’. Sobriety, simplicity, and composure were the main characteristics attributed  Cannistraro and Sullivan, p. . Margherita Sarfatti, ‘La seconda Biennale di Roma’, Il popolo d’Italia,  March , p. .  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Dagli impressionisti ai neoclassici’, Il popolo d’Italia,  July , p. .  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Dove va l’arte in Italia’, La rivista illustrata del popolo d’Italia, . (April ), – (p. ).  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Alla prima mostra del Novecento Italiano’, La rivista illustrata del popolo d’Italia, . (March ), – (p. ).  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Alcuni problemi e alcuni pittori alla mostra del Novecento’, Il popolo d’Italia,  March , p. .  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Spunti polemici’, Il popolo d’Italia,  April , p. .  Sarfatti, ‘Alcuni problemi e alcuni pittori’.            to the Novecento artists, qualities which Sarfatti associated with the masters of the Italian tradition. For instance, she mentioned Raphael with reference to the work of Mario Sironi, particularly his early s landscapes: il Sironi afferma [. . .] le stesse doti di forza e di grazia che tra i disegnatori contemporanei gli assegnano un posto di primo ordine. Sua è questa caratteristica grande: la conciliazione, in una superiore unità di sintesi, delle antitesi apparentemente più stridenti. Il suo segno è conciso e persin brutale, senza concessioni all’allisciata superficialità; ma è tutto improntato a un senso di bellezza austera e di raffinata bellezza aristocratica. La sua gamma cromatica è parsimoniosa, ma io non conosco nessun moderno che come lui abbia imparato da Raffaello a giuocare con vellutata e morbida preziosità su due toni di grigio e di bruno. Egli ha appreso dagli antichi la lezione della misura, della compostezza e della sobrietà squadrata e semplice: ma questa misura aurea della classicità la desume dai grandi maestri senza imitarli; e gli aspetti più disordinati e più squallidi della vita odierna per essa restano glorificati. Sarfatti promoted Novecento as a movement possessing those classical qualities which were essential for the construction of a national culture. ese were at the same time artistic, technical, and moral. In an article on Ubaldo Oppi, she identified the painter as a natural follower of the new classical tendencies of Italian painting for his ‘ottimismo, valore e sanità morale’. Reviewing in another article the work of Carlo Carrà, she defined the painter as ‘probo’. His technical ‘honesty’—that is, his clarity of execution—warranted his spiritual sincerity. Honesty, both technical and spiritual, was seen as the basis of Carrà’s artistic accomplishment. In a review of the third Roman Biennale she described the work by the Novecento artists (exhibited under the collective title ‘Compagnia del Novecento Italiano’) using the adjectives ‘calmo’, ‘solido’, ‘maestoso’, ‘possente’, ‘corposo’, terms that denoted an emphasis on volume and a static character, which moved away from the lightness and flickering character of Impressionist painting and Futurist dynamism. Such terms highlighted qualities which were spatial and temporal at the same time, and which connected those works to centuries of artistic tradition, as well as alluding to a timeless monumentality which implied a sense of solidity and power that could be interpreted in both aesthetic and political terms. In an article on the first exhibition of the Novecento Italiano movement in , she criticized nineteenth-century art for its emphasis on individual sensibility, to the detriment of the sense of composition and of technical discipline, qualities in which Italian art had excelled in the fieenth and  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘La nuova galleria d’arte’, Il popolo d’Italia,  April , p. . Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Artisti nuovi: Ubaldo Oppi’, La rivista illustrata del popolo d’Italia, .– (November–December ), – (p. ).  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Pittori d’oggi: Carlo Dalmazzo Carrà’, La rivista illustrata del popolo d’Italia, . (May ), –.  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Pittori e scultori alla terza Biennale di Rome’, La rivista illustrata del popolo d’Italia, . (April ), –.   Margherita Sarfatti and ‘Il popolo d’Italia’ sixteenth centuries. e call for a return to technique was also a call for the return of Italian artistic primacy. e name Novecento Italiano was meant to reinforce the notion of the Italian reappropriation of that pre-eminence in the twentieth century. In this sense the artistic history of Italy was seen as inextricably linked to its identity: an artistic renaissance would correspond, in Sarfatti’s view, to a political renaissance, and both would contribute to a renewed domination of Italy on the international scene. In the same article Sarfatti also invoked a rethinking of the idea of beauty, which would be in tune with modern sensibility while not succumbing to the utilitarian aesthetics brought about by mechanization: indeed, it had to incorporate the distinctive cultural legacy of the nation. She did not overlook the importance of the avant-garde experience and its legacy in the post-war years, but she reiterated the need to move beyond avant-garde experimentalism. She summarized the common traits that characterized the Novecento painters as: precisione nel segno, decisione nel colore; risolutezza nella forma; sentimento profondo e sobrio scavato e scarnito attraverso la meditazione, l’eliminazione e lo studio: aspirazione verso il concreto, il semplice e il definitivo, questi sono [. . .] i tratti comuni [. . .] di questa generazione di artisti che aspira a dare una fisionomia e un’impronta — cioè un ideale collettivo al quale convergere; cioè una linea e uno stile — all’arte, alla vita, ai bisogni morali, estetici e sentimentali del nostro tempo. Precision, decision, simplicity, concreteness, depth, and sobriety emerged as some of the defining features of the new Italian art. Significantly, each of these qualities carried a spiritual and moral as well as a stylistic resonance. A notion of style began to emerge which collapsed formal as well as moral values, was the expression of a collective ideal, and aimed to shape both life and art. In an article in  Sarfatti had noted that the end of the war brought about the need for a style that reflected an ‘assestamento collettivo’. Indeed, she claimed, ‘il problema dello stile è il problema ossessionante dell’età nostra’. e definition of the Italian style became fundamental in her discourse: her reflections on the need to create a new style reflected a generational desire, noted by Emilio Gentile, to create a discipline and a sense of order as the expression of victory over the chaos and uncertainty brought about by the war. e notion of style, as elaborated by Sarfatti, went beyond purely formal definitions to be conceived of as the expression of the character both of an epoch and of a country. e creation of a style therefore originated in the identity of a nation and at the same time was collectively used to  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Alcune considerazioni intorno alla prima Mostra del Novecento Italiano’, Il popolo d’Italia,  February , in Il Novecento Italiano, ed. by Pontiggia, pp. –.  Ibid., p. .  Sarfatti, ‘La nuova galleria d’arte’.  Emilio Gentile, Il culto del littorio: la sacralizzazione della politica nell’Italia fascista (Rome and Bari: Laterza, ), p. .           establish and reinforce the national characteristics. Sarfatti defined the aim of the Novecento movement as to create ‘una impronta, uno stile, una fisionomia italiana, che duri nei secoli, e lo definisca nei secoli’. Style therefore assumed a political connotation. As Simona Urso observes, ‘la politicità dell’arte doveva essere esperibile attraverso la classicità della forma. Lo stile diventava così politico, assumendo una funzione di coagulo nazionale.’ In Sarfatti’s writings of the second half of the s the style of the epoch came increasingly to be described as coinciding with the Fascist style: the pursuit of modern classicism in art responded to the same stylistic quest as Fascism. e category of the classical, with all its moral as well as aesthetic qualities, was applied by Sarfatti to Fascism, which was described as a ‘movimento classico, fuor delle intemperanze romantiche’. She associated Fascism with honesty and sincerity, and with the pursuit of truth and the accomplishment of a ‘moral’ revolution. Fascism was described as ‘agile, semplice, sobrio, dinamico, elastico e moderno’, as well as ‘giovanile e classico’, where the concept of classical acquired a timeless configuration which rooted the notion both in an Italian cultural tradition as grounded in the legacy of its Roman past, and in Fascism as the direct heir of that legacy. e ideas of Fascism, classicità, and Romanness were made to coalesce into a concept of Italianness envisaged in terms of a nationally specific cultural tradition that Fascism aimed to embody. is was identified in an idea of ‘sana, costruttiva e umana romanità’, to be opposed to North European ‘Romanticismo’, conceived of as ultra-individualism and decadent aestheticism. Cultural, moral, and aesthetic values were made to coincide, therefore the self-proclaimed anti-rhetorical attitude of Fascism could be conceptualized as an aesthetic, a political, and a moral trait, through the merging of past and present. e classical therefore acquired a political as well as an aesthetic value, as the expression of a millenary tradition of harmony, order, sobriety, and, above all, discipline. Art was the expression of a hierarchy which was aesthetic as well as moral and, ultimately, political. In an article written in , Sarfatti explicitly outlined her views on the strict interconnection between aesthetics and politics and the key role of art in political life, by claiming that ‘la vita si inspira all’arte e la segue, perché lo spirito più della materia è nelle sue creazioni duttile e lungimirante. [. . .]  Sarfatti, ‘Alla prima mostra del Novecento Italiano’, p. . Urso, p. .  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Atti di fede’, Il popolo d’Italia,  February , p. .  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Arte, fascismo e antiretorica’, Il popolo d’Italia,  February , p. .  Ibid.  On the conflation of past and present as a typical strategy in the production of Fascist visual culture see Dennis P. Doordan, ‘Piazza della Vittoria, Brescia: A Case Study in Fascist Urbanism’, in e Architecture of Politics: –, ed. by Samuel C. Kendall (Miami Beach and Genoa: Wolfsonian Foundation, ), pp. –, and Claudio Fogu, ‘To Make History Present’, in Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy, ed. by Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, ), pp. –.   Margherita Sarfatti and ‘Il popolo d’Italia’ L’arte è stata fascista prima che esistesse il Fascismo: ha preparato quel clima fascista il quale contribuisce a svilupparla in determinate direzioni.’ Not only was art seen as inherently political; it was considered as key in the formation of a political milieu. In her article Sarfatti stressed the fact that an Italian culture existed before the political unification of Italy: it was history that followed the path already traced by art. e Decorative Arts and Architecture: Styling the Modern Nation In her articles for Il popolo d’Italia and La rivista illustrata del popolo d’Italia, Sarfatti devoted considerable attention to the decorative arts, which she deemed particularly important regarding the issue of the relationship between the aesthetic sphere and daily life. She saw the decorative arts as key to the definition and presentation of national identity, both in Italy and abroad, and to the establishment of a relationship between the vernacular idiom of traditional crasmanship and modern industrialized production. Key events, providing an occasion to discuss the role and the aesthetics of the decorative arts in Italy, were the biennial Monza International Exhibitions of Decorative Arts. In  the Istituto Superiore delle Arti Decorative was founded in Monza, which was followed by the organization of the first Biennale d’Arte Decorativa, with the aim of contesting the spreading in Italy of foreign industrial art and design, especially German and Hungarian, so as to protect the national market. e first Biennale took place in Monza in  and was structured according to a regional organization of the artefacts. Initially, Sarfatti tended to defend the artistic dignity of the decorative arts and rejected the notion of serialization associated with industrially produced objects. In an article written in October  she criticized the intention of exhibiting industrial products at the forthcoming  Monza Biennale, as she believed that they could never be considered as art. She rejected what she called the ‘illusoria fede democratica nella taumaturgia della macchina’, and was convinced that ‘la bellezza a buon mercato non esiste’. e article expressed an anxiety about the democratization of the notions of art and beauty brought about by industrial serialization, and defended the value of crasmanship and technique in the production of decorative artefacts. She partially reconsidered her views on the occasion of the  Monza Biennale. Reviewing the exhibition, she affirmed that small factories constituted an ideal example of the necessary supersession of the notion that only the handmade object could have an artistic value. Sarfatti saw in the association between  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘L’arte e il fascismo’, Il popolo d’Italia,  February , p. . Rossana Bossaglia, Il ‘Déco’ italiano: fisionomia dello stile  in Italia (Milan: Rizzoli, ), pp. –.  ‘El Sereno’, ‘Arte decorativa o decorazione industriale?’, Il popolo d’Italia,  October , p. .            technical perfection and stylistic care, which characterized the objects produced in small factories, the redemptive factor that saved them from industrial serialization and made them closer to art. She identified the greatest challenge of modernity in the decorative arts as the striking of a balance between the creation of rare and unique pieces and tasteless industrial serialization. In this context, small village factories assumed specific connotations in terms of national identity, as they were seen as ‘fedeltà al tipo vetusto, trasmesso per tradizione [. . .] segni della perennità e della augusta semplicità della stirpe, ricorrente a uguali forme, nell’uguale espressione di immutati bisogni’. Sarfatti’s interest in the decorative arts intensified aer , when she organized the Italian exhibit at the Paris International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts. At the Paris exhibition Sarfatti served in several official capacities, including president of the Italian jury and vicepresident of the international jury. Commenting on the Exposition, Sarfatti expressed some reflections on the decorative arts as the vehicle for Italy to elaborate and channel its national modernity. e challenge posed to Italy, in her view, was the reconciliation of its artistic heritage and the demands of urban modernity. In this respect, she invoked a rejection of imitative styles and articulated a quest for a ‘new primitivism’ in which past, heritage, and tradition would function as stimulation and enlightenment, instigating inspiration rather than imitation. With regard to the Paris Exposition, in her  book Segni, colori e luci she noted that in Italy the decorative arts were represented either as the product of vernacular and peasant culture or of ultramodern, out-of-touch avant-garde experimentalism; what seemed to be missing was the useful, well-designed object which was at the same time practical and decorative and which responded to the needs of modern urban living. She therefore called for the creation of beautiful objects whose aesthetic qualities were determined by appropriateness to their function. In her considerations on the role and aesthetics of the decorative arts, Sarfatti showed an ambiguous position which oscillated between elitism and the acknowledgement of mass modernity, which in turn was the expression of the contradictions she incurred in her attempt to integrate aesthetics into everyday life while rejecting the idea of the massification of culture. Sarfatti’s vision, at least up to , implied the development of an idea of the applied arts which did not eliminate the intervention of human cra. Crasmanship had, according to Sarfatti, a redemptive value within the serialization brought  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Le arti decorative a Monza’, La rivista illustrata del popolo d’Italia, . (July ), –.  Cannistraro and Sullivan, pp. –.  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘La mostra delle arti decorative di Parigi’, La rivista illustrata del popolo d’Italia, . (October ), – (p. ).  Margherita Sarfatti, Segni, colori e luci (Bologna: Zanichelli, ), pp. –.  Margherita Sarfatti and ‘Il popolo d’Italia’ about by mechanical production. e well-made, technically accurate object was invested with a character of wholeness, which responded to a metaphor of national unity and moral integrity. e wholeness of the object reflected a sense of cultural veracity and unified identity, which was to be nurtured and protected. In this respect, both high art and decorative art shared a use of technique, which was the essence of the artistic definition; such a sense of technical perfection, in Sarfatti’s view, distinguished decorative arts from simple industrial production. Within that context she advocated the creation of technical schools which could teach the crasman’s skills, not least because crasmanship was part of Sarfatti’s idea of ‘gerarchia’. e preservation and encouragement of crasmanship assumed not only a patriotic significance, in so far as the protection of local art was concerned, but also a distinct social value, as a preservation of artistic hierarchies which responded to the need to create a structured society. Furthermore, the beautiful common object acquired a moral connotation, bringing beauty and order in everyday life. Sarfatti’s contacts with modernist architects resulted in a partial revision of her views on industrial design. In particular, she focused her attention on Gio Ponti, whose neoclassical style, both as a designer and as an architect, was acquiring increasing popularity. She did not always provide a detailed commentary on Ponti’s work, but she focused on the characteristics that mostly fitted her discourse. For instance, with regard to Ponti’s ceramics, designed for the Richard-Ginori factory, she claimed that they participated in a truly national and modern classicism, expressed by a quest for stylistic simplicity and geometric neatness. e fact that Ponti was an architect as well as a designer was of particular interest for Sarfatti, not only because she perceived his designs as informed by the principles of his architectural work, but also because Ponti’s architectural background transferred the same values attributed to architecture to his designs, almost by metonymical association. Regarding Ponti’s ceramics, she declared: ‘Classico’ è in questi segni vivaci e vivissimi del nostro vivo tempo, il modo con cui sono concepiti, la linea in cui sono rinchiusi, di sintesi saporita e di nettezza concisa; classica la semplificazione della forma a pochi tratti essenziali, e, sopra tutto, la composizione libera e spigliata, compresa idealmente dentro una chiusa forma geometrica, una forma statica e costruttiva. Non invano Ponti è architetto. Sarfatti’s position on the decorative arts further evolved on the occasion of the  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘La figura e l’oggetto’, Il popolo d’Italia,  December , p. , and ‘Le arti decorative a Monza’.  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘La mostra degli scialli’, Il popolo d’Italia,  February , p. .  Graziella Roccella, Gio Ponti –: Master of Lightness (Cologne: Taschen, ), p. ; see also Richard Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture – (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, ), pp. –.  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Ceramica italiana di ieri e di oggi’, La rivista illustrata del popolo d’Italia, . (September ), – (p. ).            Monza Biennale. She was appointed to the organizing committee of the exhibition, together with Gio Ponti and Novecento artists Sironi and Carrà. Probably taking inspiration from the  Paris Exposition, the committee decided to eliminate the emphasis on rural cra that had characterized previous exhibitions, opting instead for a radically modern look for the Italian pavilion, a shi which resulted from the collaboration between modernist artists, rationalist architects, and innovative designers. Sarfatti’s appreciation of classical order led her to deplore any folkloric elements or excesses of vernacular style in the decorative arts. In her comments on the exhibition, she presented classicism as the expression of an aristocracy of taste which was at the same time highly comprehensible and accessible, almost imprinted in the national consciousness. e pursuit of the classical in the decorative arts was therefore meant to establish parameters of good taste and make them accessible to a wider market. In this sense, the shi from just decorative arts to industrial arts represented, in her view, an important move towards educating the people, not only in terms of taste, but also in terms of providing them with a sense of national identity. Like high art, decorative and industrial art acquired for Sarfatti a value that transcended the object itself and became the expression of a national character. Reviewing the  Biennale, she commented: Monza  [. . .] si è messa con risoluto passo per le vie maestre, per le grandi vie dell’orientamento classico e aristocratico. Perciò non si rivolge più solo al dilettantismo tra snobistico e balordo di pochi cosiddetti raffinati, ma — perché è classica e aristocratica — veramente si rivolge al popolo e cerca di diffondere dall’alto il buon gusto e il gusto moderno e penetrare d’esso gli strati vasti e profondi della nazione. On these grounds Sarfatti described the Russian exhibits at the  Monza Biennale as saturated in rustic vernacular style and representing the ‘gravità e [. . .] indolenza, fanatica e indolente insieme’ of the Soviet Republic. In contrast, the Italian exhibits, especially Gio Ponti’s work as a designer of both objects and furniture, could provide a model capable of shaping modern Italian taste. In particular, Sarfatti detected in Ponti’s work (especially in his furniture, whether it was luxury or cheaper furniture for the Milanese department store La Rinascente) three main qualities which she associated with modern life, namely dynamism, agility, and flexibility. ese were reflected in a neat, solid, and practical style which contributed to the creation of a modern beauty informed by speed, a quality of contemporary life which the everyday object must reflect (the legacy of the Futurist avant-garde is apparent here). She reclaimed an aesthetic component for the serialized object, which participated in the education of the masses and the creation     Cannistraro and Sullivan, pp. –. Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Monza ’, Il popolo d’Italia,  June , p.  Ibid. Ibid.  Margherita Sarfatti and ‘Il popolo d’Italia’ of a modern mentality. In this process, designers such as Ponti had a key role in modernizing the national taste. Similar considerations pervaded Sarfatti’s comments on Ponti and Lancia’s ‘Casa per le vacanze’, exhibited for La Rinascente at the Monza  Exhibition (aer the  exhibition Sarfatti suggested that the fairs be held every three years instead of two, to allow more time for the development of the exhibits). e ‘Casa per le vacanze’ was praised for its sober, streamlined modernity, almost resembling the fashion images of the time, where women appeared as sophisticated, slim, and svelte, and offered a dynamic image, in contrast to the rounded, placid, patriarchal, and matronal images of women and homes of the past: Varrebbe la pena di soffermarsi sui particolari di questa manifestazione così moderna, di un gusto sobrio, sbrigativo e un po’ magro, simile alle figurine femminili di moda, così diverse dalle antiche e piene, matronali e patriarcali figure della donna e della casa di una volta. Quelle offrivano ampiezza, spazio e riposo. Queste sono agili, minuscole, raffinate e svelte. Sarfatti’s ideas both on modernity and on the classical equally contributed to her vision of a Fascist life that implied solidity, velocity, and order. Her reinterpretation of the relationship of the modern with antiquity turned the classical into a timeless yet patriotically charged idea, which could always be mobilized for the definition of identity, as an inclusive concept in which the masses could participate. In this context, the development of the decorative and industrial art was seen as a national effort, reflecting Italian industriousness and achievements in the fields of industry and agricultural science, but also as encompassing the whole of Italian culture, from the remote past to Fascism. But what is more significant is that Sarfatti praised industrial art as an expression of collective work, in which the individual disappeared and all the people involved made a united effort, involving discipline, order, and organization, to produce artefacts which, as communally made, were not associated with any individual artist, but became national products. e most praised qualities and those which emerged as essential in the forging and presentation of a newly shaped Italian identity, both in the creation of such artefacts as well as in the organization of the exhibitions, were energy, organization, and above all discipline, that is, the qualities whose lack in Italian culture was traditionally deplored at home and abroad. ese were mentioned in a review of the  Monza Biennale, where she commented: Ecco finalmente quella esposizione d’arte che aspettavamo. [. . .] Essa ci appartiene nello spazio e nel tempo. Moderna, solare e italiana, audace e sobria, novissima, vivace e classica, a doppio titolo è interamente ‘nostra’. È della nostra epoca, della nostra    Ibid. Cannistraro and Sullivan, p. . Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Arti e industrie oggi a Monza’, Il popolo d’Italia,  May , p. .           terra e soprattutto della nostra civiltà, tipica e caratteristica, quale la foggiarono la scienza agricola e la grande industria, la competizione mondiale e le grandi scoperte, i laboratorii e la fabbrica, la guerra e il Fascismo, le eredità del remoto passato e le anticipazioni del fremido futuro. Considerations concerning the need to reformulate and visualize notions of italianness pervaded Sarfatti’s reflections on architecture. She had developed an active interest in architecture as early as , when she bought two of Antonio Sant’Elia’s drawings for the Città Nuova project at the first exhibition of the Nuove Tendenze group, for which she wrote a review in L’Avanti. She devoted a section of Segni, colori e luci to contemporary architecture, praising the innovativeness and modernity of the late Sant’Elia and expressing her appreciation of contemporary architects such as Marcello Piacentini and Armando Brasini, who, in her view, best elaborated the legacy of Roman architecture and heritage: the former with sober and modernized allusions to the classical style, the latter with grandiose yet modern recreations of the more monumental aspects of the Roman architectural tradition. In particular, she praised Brasini’s overly neoclassical design for the Italian pavilion at the Paris Exposition: in a polemical attack on Functionalism, she praised the Italian pavilion for its desire to extend beauty to the decorative arts. e quest for formal beauty implied an almost ‘nostalgic’ comfort, generated by the recognition of beauty as a historical component of Italian identity and culture. Sarfatti praised Brasini’s pavilion for its ‘Romanness’ but also for its ‘Italianness’, the expression of a rising country, symbolized by the vertical lines that characterized the architecture of the pavilion. Her interest in Brasini and Piacentini’s somewhat rhetorical style, however, did not prevent her from developing a fascination for the most innovative modernist architecture. She was particularly intrigued by the ideas promoted by Le Corbusier and the Modern Movement, which she deemed very innovative and worthy of attention, despite considering them overly radical, iconoclastic, and imbued with an excessive austerity which she associated with North European Protestant culture. In the mid-s she developed an interest in the ideas of the Gruppo , the early core of Italian architectural rationalism. Her admiration for the work of Giuseppe Terragni led her to commission the architect in    Ibid. See Marina Sommella Grossi, ‘Sarfatti e Terragni: accenni a una storia parallela’, in In cima: Giuseppe Terragni per Margherita Sarfatti. Architetture della memoria nel ’, ed. by Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Venice: Marsilio, ), pp. – (p. ).  Sarfatti, Segni, colori e luci, pp. –.  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Alcune architetture alla esposizione di Parigi’, Il popolo d’Italia,  September , p. .  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Artigianato o industrialismo nella decorazione’, Il popolo d’Italia,  October , p. .  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Razionalismi ed estetismi’, Il popolo d’Italia,  October , p. .  Margherita Sarfatti and ‘Il popolo d’Italia’ for the memorial monument to her son Roberto at the summit of the Col d’Echele, near Asiago. Sarfatti saw architecture as the ‘mother of all arts’, the most significant artistic expression in terms of the collective representation of a people and a historical period, and above all as an eminently collective, social, and political form of artistic expression. For this reason, she condemned pastiche and the imitation of past styles, whose presence she identified in both contemporary Roman and Milanese architecture, and she supported instead the adoption of a contemporary style for public buildings. She also criticized the American habit of copying old buildings and monuments, as she was convinced that architecture ought to be the expression of its time. Her support for the functionalist approach of architectural Modernism, both in Italy and in Europe, was permeated by the conviction that an aesthetic originating from function responded both to an almost ‘biological’ imperative, which translated function into form, and to a re-elaboration of a classical tradition going back to the Roman architect Vitruvius, according to which architecture and the proportions of the human body were interconnected. For Sarfatti, Functionalism was at the same time a product of the practical approach championed by the machine age—and therefore by a materialist and utilitarian spirit—and of an abstract concept of intransigent and almost fanatic purity and sincerity. In this sense, which she saw springing from Ruskin, utilitarianism became an almost ethical concept, infused with spiritual values of simplicity and honesty, which she saw as the products of Protestant culture, where materialism and spirituality merged. Conclusion In  Sarfatti stopped writing for Il popolo d’Italia, allegedly at the instigation of Mussolini’s wife Rachele, who, annoyed at the prominence assumed by Mussolini’s mistress, put pressure on her husband to dismiss her from the newspaper. e s also marked a decline in her influence on the artistic policy of the Fascist regime, as her relationship with Mussolini came to an end in the early s, and as the Novecento movement dissolved. Sarfatti lost some of her official functions and her profile declined significantly. None the less, she fully supported the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, inaugurated  See Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ‘Il monumento senza stile’, in In cima, ed. by Schnapp, pp. –; Sommella Grossi, ‘Sarfatti e Terragni’, pp. –; Marina Sommella Grossi, ‘Monumento a Roberto Sarfatti sul Col d’Echele’, in In cima, ed. by Schnapp, p. .  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Architettura’, Il popolo d’Italia,  March , p. .  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Imitazioni, contraffazioni e contaminazioni dell’architettura’, Il popolo d’Italia,  June , p. .  Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Le cronache d’oggi: stoccolma e il funzionalismo’, Il popolo d’Italia,  August , p. .  Cannistraro and Sullivan, pp. –.           in , hailing it as an innovative exhibition that achieved the visualization of the Fascist revolution, and as a work of art in itself which managed to be history in the making as well as a collection of historical material. e exhibition managed to conflate art and history, thereby creating a work of art which in itself represented a historical event, therefore attaining the perfect fusion of aesthetics and politics that Sarfatti had aimed to achieve with her critical work. With her writings on art, she contributed to the creation of the rhetorical atmosphere that permeated Il popolo d’Italia and transformed it into the Fascist ideological tool that underpinned the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista. e notion of history in the making which was at the centre of the creative effort of the exhibition participated in the same notion of political aesthetics that was at the centre of Sarfatti’s artistic project. In Sarfatti’s reinterpretation of classicism, the use of the legibility of the classical idiom and of its iconic status implied self-referential allusions to its ideological meaning. e notion of modern classicità promoted by Sarfatti was not just evocative of past Italian artistic glories, but had the power to mobilize the symbolic capital of the past in order to redefine the present and project it into the future. With her writings she provided a key contribution to the rethinking of the role of the past which, as Claudia Lazzaro has pointed out, was used during Fascism to pursue the goal of shaping a common national identity for the Italians. Ultimately, she articulated a version of Italian national culture steeped in classicism, as a repository of political as well as aesthetic values which could transcend the realm of high art and permeate all aspects of life. Her project was to reclaim for Italy the status of a ‘classical’ nation, through the ideological convergence of history, art, and politics. is project did not come to fruition. None the less, Sarfatti’s work remains one of the most significant and sophisticated examples of the ideological manipulation of aesthetics under the Fascist regime. U  L  S S Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Architettura, arte e simbolo alla mostra del fascismo’, Architettura,  (), repr. in Schnapp, Anno X, pp. –.  See Claudio Fogu, ‘L’immaginario storico fascista e la mostra della rivoluzione’, in Schnapp, Anno X, pp. –; Claudio Fogu, ‘To Make History Present’, in Donatello among the Blackshirts, ed. by Lazzaro and Crum, pp. –.  Claudia Lazzaro, ‘Forging a Visible Fascist Nation’, in Donatello among the Blackshirts, ed. by Lazzaro and Crum, pp. – (p. ).