Ritratto aereo di Mario Carli

Mitchell Wolfson Jr. 2007 Genova - donazione

Dottori, Gerardo

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.