Merjian, Aria H. (2019) - Fascist Revolution, Futurist Spin. Renato Bertelli's Continuous Profile of Mussolini and The Face of Fascist Time

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ara of Mussolini and the Face of
Fascist Revolution, Futurist Spin:
Fascist Time
Renato Bertelli’s Continuous Profile
Ara H. Merjian
rjian
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Fascist Revolution, Futurist Spin:
Renato Bertelli’s Continuous Profile
of Mussolini and the Face of
Fascist Time
Ara H. Merjian
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my

For ten years now, the prospect of undertaking a portrait of Mussolini has formed the own.
undying dream of artists the world over, renowned and obscure, old and young. Seeing up 1. Francesco Sapori, ‘Nel primo decennale
close this man endowed with extraordinary power, capturing in his visage the signs of the dell’Era Fascita: Ritratti del Duce’, Emporium,vol.
highest and most universal individuality in existence: this is the necessary point of departure 76, no. 455, pp. 259. [‘Fare il ritratto a
and daunting aspiration for he who trusts to marble or bronze those human features Mussolini è da dieci anni il sogno costante degli
touched by the spark of divinity. artisti di tutto il mondo; celebri e oscuri, vecchi e
giovanissimi. Vedere da vicino quest’uomo dotato
- Francesco Sapori, ‘Ritratti del Duce’, Emporium, November 19321 di straordinario potere, cogliere sul suo volto i
segni dell’individualità più alta ed universale che
Lavishly illustrated in the journal Emporium, Francesco Sapori’s survey of esista, è un miraggio e una premessa per chi
portraits of Benito Mussolini helped mark a decade of the Duce’s rule – an intende affidare al marmo o al bronzo le
sembianze umane toccate dalla scintilla divina’.]
anniversary celebrated more comprehensively with this same year’s Exhibition of
the Fascist Revolution (Fig. 1). One of the most active critics of the day, Sapori 2. Diane Ghirardo writes poignantly: ‘As
problematic as the issue is to us now, the question
had recently published Art and the Duce, followed two years later by a more of what constituted a Fascist culture was, if
ample tome on aesthetics under Fascism. The subject was not without anything, more pressing during the two decades
controversy. Since the regime’s establishment in 1922, Fascist propaganda – and of fascist rule. . .the question posed not as some
its attendant imagery – had oscillated among a range of subjects and styles, decorative to Fascism, but as lying at the heart of
its political enterprise’. Diane Ghirardo,
without settling on any unifying aesthetic imperative.2 Would the regime’s ‘Architects, Exhibitions, and the Politics of
culture stake itself upon the example of antiquity or a technophilic future? Culture in Fascist Italy’, Journal of Architectural
Upon an idiom duly classical or boldly contemporary? It would take a new Education, vol. 45, no. 2, Feb., 1992, p. 67.
World War and its various preludes – autarchy and empire chief among them – 3. Curzio Malaparte, response to debate on
to shore up that identity crisis. In the meantime, a survey of prominent Fascism and Culture, Critica Fascista, 15
intellectuals on the subject of ‘Fascism and Culture’ in 1926 prompted some November 1926, pp. 421–2, reprinted and
translated in Jeffrey Schnapp (ed.), A Primer of
fittingly conflicted replies. ‘Surely you jest?’ responded the journalist and Italian Fascism, p. 225. Piero Melograni writes
novelist Curzio Malaparte: ‘A Fascist art? Just what might that mean, a Fascist that the ‘organizational energies of the regime
art?’3 Others expounded – often at cross-purposes – upon the relative merits were permanently mobilized around the
of ancient or modern styles and themes. One subject, however, already offered existence of this cult; millions of Italians defied
the Duce. . .Indeed it is no paradox to say that in
a means of figuring Fascism’s abidingly equivocal essence. ‘For the moment’, Italy it was Mussolinianism, not Fascism, that
Malaparte writes, ‘the only original and powerful artistic expression of fascism won allegiance’. Pietro Melograni, ‘The Cult of
is Mussolini himself’.4 the Duce’, Journal of Contemporary History vol. 11,
Sapori remarks that portraits of the Duce already numbered in the no. 4, Special Issue: Theories of Fascism,
October 1976, p. 223. For a helpful synthesis of
thousands, and would soon exceed anything dedicated to Augustus or these polemics as they played out in Fascist
Napoleon, such that ‘we won’t be able to count them’.5 The critic’s language culture at large, and the work of Mario Sironi in
brims with the hyperbole familiar from writing on Mussolini’s leadership and particular, see Emily Braun, ‘Mario Sironi and a
appearance, including the ‘virile profile’ routinely invoked as his defining Fascist Art’, in Braun (ed.), Italian Art of the
Twentieth Century (Munich: Prestel, 1989) pp.
attribute. While artists, Sapori notes, had depicted the Duce seated, standing, 173–180.
and astride his horse, the majority of individuals have been drawn uniquely to
4. Malaparte, response to debate on Fascism and
his head – a ‘head which they had assumed to be menacing, but which they Culture, p. 226.
instead discovered full of an affective, plastic mobility’.6 For the most part,
# The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2019 1–27
doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcz019
Ara H. Merjian
5. Sapori, ‘Nel primo decennale dell’Era Fascita:
Ritratti del Duce’, p. 260.
6. Sapori, ‘Nel primo decennale dell’Era Fascita:
Ritratti del Duce’, p. 259.
7. Jeffrey Schnapp, ‘Epic Demonstrations: Fascist
Modernity and the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist
Revolution’, in Richard Golsan (ed.), Fascism,
Aesthetics, and Culture (Hanover, NH and London:
University Press of New England, 1992) p. 3.
For a recent synthesis of this strain of scholarship,
see Ara H. Merjian ‘Learning from Fascism’, Art
in America, April 2019, pp. 66–73.
Fig. 1. Domenico Rambelli, Benito Mussolini, 1932, in Francesco Sapori, ‘Nel primo decennale
dell’Era Fascita: Ritratti del Duce’, Emporium, vol. 76, no. 455, 1932, p. 258.
however, the images reviewed by Sapori hew to traditional models. With its
coarse, granular surface evoking pseudo-archaic gravitas (Fig. 1), Domenico
Rambelli’s three-quarters bust opens the essay, followed by a number of con-
ventional likenesses. Even the work of prominent Futurists, whether an early
adherent like Primo Conti or the ‘aeropainter’ Gerardo Dottori, appear in the
guise of thoroughly academic examples. Giacomo Balla, one of Futurism’s lead-
ing lights, likewise appears by way of a turgid representation of Mussolini be-
striding a large fasces with unsubtle phallic zeal. If, as Sapori insists, the Duce
manages always to ‘synthesize’ (an eminently Futurist shibboleth) his impres-
sions of the world around him, the examples of his likeness presented here re-
main anchored to the past.
In truth, Fascist art and architecture up to and throughout the early 1930s
revealed a striking diversity of styles, set on purposeful display at the Exhibition
of the Fascist Revolution, which welcomed millions of visitors beginning in
October 1932. Organizers commissioned an impressive slate of artists and
architects to transform the spaces of Rome’s Palazzo delle Esposizioni into a
narrative of Fascism’s founding and ensuing ‘revolution’ – a revolution still, the
regime hastened to remind visitors, ongoing. Dressing the building’s façade in a
sheath of soaring metal fasces, Adalberto Libera, Mario Sironi, Enrico
Prampolini, and Giuseppe Terragni joined other prominent modernists and
rationalists – as well as more conservative artists – in recounting the regime’s
origins and development. From mock-archaic equestrian statues of the Duce to
sculptural photomosaics depicting churning urban masses, the range of work on
display underscored the regime’s ideological conciliations between antiquity and
modernity, activism and administration, revolution and reaction. As Jeffrey
Schnapp writes of this spectacle and its staging of official cultural policy, ‘nei-
ther monolithic nor homogenous, Fascism’s aesthetic overproduction relied on
the ability of images to sustain contradiction and to make of paradox a produc-
tive principle’.7
Consider – particularly compared to its illustration of Sapori’s text –
Rambelli’s bust of Mussolini as it appears on the catalogue cover for the
Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in the same year (Fig. 2). Rather than isolated
4 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2019

Fascist Revolution, Futurist Spin
as a discreet (ersatz-archaic) object, it presides in a dynamic photomontage over
a phalanx of diagonally ranged, hyphenated ‘Du-ces’ – typographic equivalents
of a chanting, adulatory crowd. Depictions of Mussolini in fact stand out in
their formal and stylistic range over two decades of his rule, from Prampolini’s
Plastic Synthesis of the Duce (1925) – which distills the thrust of his jaw to a
bowed, metallic form indebted to Cubism – to the chromatic faceting of
Alfredo Ambrosi’s Physical-Psychic Portrait of the Duce (1935) ten years later. The
cult of Mussolini witnessed everything from ‘aeropainted’ portraits to
depictions of his solemn form clad in a toga, or crowned with Dantean laurel.
Alongside the (indeed countless) homages in an academic vein appear the nearly
abstract likenesses completed by artists like Alvaro Corghi, Nino Za, Mino
Rosso, and Mario Sironi. These disparate renderings offer a compendium of
Fascism’s aesthetic heterogeneity well into the 1930s – a pluralism still
contingent, to be sure, upon the restrictive measures of party affiliation and
patronage.8 Mussolini himself had famously declared the regime’s openness to
art that was ‘both traditionalist and modern’ in 1926. Ten years later, Antonio
Maraini – Secretary General of the Fascist Art Syndicate and Secretary General
of the Venice Biennale – reiterated the government’s endorsement of diverse
aesthetic tendencies under the aegis of a shared national cause.9 Fig. 2. Cover, guide to Dino Alfieri and
It is no coincidence that Sapori himself figures Mussolini as navigating Luigi Freddi (eds), Mostra della Rivoluzione
effortlessly between past glories and prospective challenges: ‘his greatness Fascista [Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution],
(Rome: Partito Nazionale Fascista, 1933).
consists in the superlatively modern universality of his mind, which extends Massimo and Sonia Cirulli Foundation,
from historical exegesis to the most arduous problems of the future’.10 These Bologna.
facets play out in respective representations of the leader’s body, such that ‘the
refined design of the academician sits peaceably side by side with the Futurist’s 8. Following Franco Sborgi, Giuliana Peri
fragmented and fitful lines’.11 The text abounds in this kind of juxtaposition, reiterates an iconographic schema of Mussolini
between ‘academics and avant-gardists’, ‘tradition and modernity’, the ‘ancient portraits according to three ‘phases’ of
iconography, as well as a set of ‘three categories’
and the modern’.12 Such conciliations formed the order of the day. Consider of images during the late 1920s. This paradigm
that the Accademia d’Italia had recently inducted into its ranks no less a seems to me somewhat overwrought, and
firebrand modernist than the Futurist leader, F.T. Marinetti. This undermined by all sorts of exceptions. While we
rapprochement was matched in high and popular culture alike: architectural, might trace some broad, associative strokes,
portraiture of the Duce appears – like Fascist
visual, and rhetorical examples in which the traditional and the modern either aesthetics at large – to defy any strictly
existed side by side, or else fused into a new – uniquely Fascist – unity. Of all chronological or stylistic sequence, as Peri notes
the disparate representations of Mussolini himself, however, very few had herself. More feasible might be groupings
reconciled in a single form the ‘productive paradox’ upon which Fascism staked according to theme, format, or material, though
such distinctions would be chiefly classificatory.
itself.13 This would soon change. Not long after commemorations of the Fascist See Giuliana Pieri, ‘Portraits of the Duce’, in
Revolution, a relatively unknown artist set about capturing the Duce’s Stephen Gundle, Christopher Duggan, and
‘universal individuality’ in a likeness at once new and old, notably singular and Giuliana Peri (eds), The Cult of the Duce: Mussolini
literally unlimited. and the Italians (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2013) pp. 163–4. On the
coercive essence of Fascist patronage networks,
see Ruth Ben Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy,
Patent Will 1922–1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2001) pp. 9–10, 20–29, and
Spurred by the retrospective attention to the Duce’s portraits in 1932, the passim.
sculptor Renato Bertelli (1900–1974) emerged from relative obscurity to
design one of the most striking images from Fascism’s twenty-year rule. The 9. Maraini notably circulated these notions
abroad, precisely during Italy’s invasion of
Continuous Profile of Mussolini (1933) (Fig. 3) renders its subject in the round, Ethiopia – an act which resulted in international
such that the Duce’s visage appears redoubled from nearly any angle.14 sanctions. See Antonio Maraini, ‘Italian Art
Seemingly throbbing yet utterly still, the sculpture conjures up at once the gyra- under Fascism’, The Studio, Fine Arts, Home
tion of some mechanical contrivance and – equally apparent to an Italian public Decoration and Design, vol. 112, n. 525,
December 1936, pp. 1–58.
– millennial depictions of the Roman god Janus. The work’s eponymous conti-
nuity obtains first and foremost in an illusion of unceasing movement: a rotation 10. Sapori, ‘Nel primo decennale dell’Era
Fascita: Ritratti del Duce’, p. 260.
virtual rather than actual, evoking an ever vigilant leader seeing simultaneously
in all directions. Belonging to the first Italian Prime Minister bereft of facial hair
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2019 5

Ara H. Merjian
11. Sapori, ‘Nel primo decennale dell’Era
13. Jeffrey Schnapp writes of the debates over
fascist culture which emerged by the late 1920s
in highly public forums: ‘Even within the
confines of a single contribution, one finds
recurring tensions between themes of
revolutionary activism and institutional
conservatism, between the celebration of heroic
individualism and corporate conformity, between
elitist and populist values, between cultural
internationalism and nationalism, between
ahistoricism and historicism’. Schnapp, ‘Epic
Demonstrations’, p. 3. In the regime’s first
decade, very few images, texts, or objects had
managed, however, to resolve and sublimate
these tensions into emphatic form.
14. Bertelli’s sculpture is known in English under
a variety of titles, including Head of Mussolini
(Continuous Profile), Continuous Profile – Head of
Mussolini, and Continuous Profile of Mussolini. I have
opted to use the latter.
15. On the ‘modernity’ of Mussolini’s lack of
facial hair, see Italo Calvino, ‘The Dictator’s
Hats’, Stanford Italian Review, vol. 8, no.s. 1–2,
1990, p. 196.
Fig. 3. Renato Bertelli, Profilo Continuo del Duce, 1933, painted cerami, 42 x 25 cm [‘Head of
Mussolini’ but is better known as ‘Head of Mussolini (Continuous Profile)’, ‘Continuous profile of
Mussolini’, or ‘Continuous Profile – Head of Mussolini’] Massimo and Sonia Cirulli Foundation,
Bologna. Estate of Renato Bertelli, courtesy of Marco Moretti.
(and increasingly of hair tout court), the profile boasts an unmistakably promi-
nent jaw and large round head – the subjects of countless elegies in their own
right.15
It was, in fact, the very countlessness of Bertelli’s portrait – or more
specifically, of its reproductions – that distinguished its import and impact. Not
long after the work’s debut, Bertelli applied for a patent. After it was granted
in July 1933, he set about distributing the design in a range of formats and
sizes. Illustrated business cards served to advertise the work’s availability in
media including metal, ceramic, and porcelain, and in dimensions ranging from
a small bust to a ‘monumental’ version (Fig. 4). The options only multiplied
thereafter. The Profile found eventual diffusion in terracotta, aluminum,
enameled brass, wood, marble, metal, bronzed terracotta, glass, glazed stone
wear, majolica, and iron. Some iterations (such as that depicted on Bertelli’s
calling card) bore a bespoke plinth reading ‘DUX’. Versions also emerged in
Bakelite and other ‘autarchic materials’, such as the so-called Alpha Berta alloy
from Florentine foundries – materials, that is, endemic to the Italian peninsula

and hence not contingent upon importation (and not subject to international
sanctions).16 The sculpture’s reproducibility and portability facilitated its distri-
bution to countless Case del Fascio (local branches of the Fascist National Party
[PNF]) as well as Party offices and gruppi rionali across the peninsula. In a sense,
Bertelli brought to fruition Sapori’s claim that ‘multiplying [Mussolini’s] Roman
profile will make that magical gaze reverberate’.17 How, though, might such
multiplication safeguard the ostensible singularity of its subject?
The mass replication of the Continuous Profile owed a notable debt to the
sculpture Dux, by fellow Tuscan artist Thayaht (Ernesto Michahelles) (Fig. 5).
Conceived in 1928 and first forged in 1929, Thayaht’s Dux enjoyed renewed Fig. 4. Business card of local authorized dis-
tributor in Turin of Bertelli’s Continuous
prominence on the occasion of Fascism’s decennial celebrations. The illustrated
Profile in various formats (‘Reproductions in
magazine of the Popolo d’Italia (founded by Mussolini himself in 1914) featured a metal, artistic maiolica, porcelain, etc., from
full page image of the sculpture during the 1932 Decennial celebrations, for small-sized bust to monumental format’.)
instance, and this same year it appeared on postcards and on a special medal Estate of Renato Bertelli, courtesy of Marco
forged by the Fascist Artists’ Syndicate.18 In its sculptural format alone, Dux Moretti.
had been produced in ninety-nine examples, all of them offered to local Case del
Fascio. Bertelli, by contrast, removed any possible limits to his work’s serializa-
tion.19 Perhaps more consequential to his design than the multiplicity of
Thayat’s Dux, however, was the latter’s studied fusion of antiquity and contem-
poraneity. Extant in steel, bronze, iron, and stone versions, Thayaht’s sculpture
presents a head indistinguishable from its helmet – particularly in the armored,
blind arches of eyes, and the raised ridge where the chin curls up into a de-
tached ear. Flesh and carapace become one, suggesting both a proud Roman
profile and the suit of armor of some medieval knight or Renaissance condot-
tiere.20 These allusions are counterposed by a severe, geometric angularity redo-
lent of both Cubism and Art Deco, in full international ascendance by the early
1930s and frequently merged with Futurist tendencies on the peninsula. Like
Bertelli’s in turn, Thayat’s sculpture hastened his induction into the Futurist
movement, which – as I discuss below – persisted even in the face of
Marinetti’s newfound ‘academic’ gravitas.
Published the same year as Thayat’s Dux, Marinetti’s poem-in-prose ‘Portrait
of Mussolini’ describes the leader’s body as massive and adamantine, yet bearing
‘ultradynamic eyes’ that ‘dart with the speed of automobiles’.21 The Duce,
Marinetti reports, regularly sits behind his desk tending to documents; yet he Fig. 5. Thayaht (Ernesto Michahelles), Dux,
remains poised to leap over this furniture, or indeed over any bureaucratic im- 1929, grey sandstone, approx. 33 x 24 x 18
pediment to sheer physicality. It is still, Marinetti insists, a ‘Futurist eloquence’ cm; as reproduced in Emporium, vol. 76, no.
and ‘Futurist temperament’ that distinguish Mussolini’s leadership. Accounts of 455, 1932, p. 269.
the Duce’s vigour were legion. Rumour had it that he never slept, or else slept
very little.22 Even the most trivial of administrative matters were said to pass 16. Following Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935
and the attendant trade embargos imposed by the
under his hyper-efficient gaze with unprecedented speed. The Italian press ech- League of Nations, autarchy would become an
oed foreign counterparts in describing Mussolini as a ‘human dynamo’; he, in important rallying point for Italian production
turn, exploited this attention in cultivating a ‘political fantasy of total and pride alike. Yet the stock market crash of
control’.23 1929 had already recommended to Mussolini the
need for self-sufficiency – an autonomy in no way
In evoking that hyper-physicality and controlling omniscience, Bertelli was inimical to the nation’s swelling imperialist ambi-
not the only artist to ply a metaphorical tack. Take, for instance, the neoclassi- tions across the Mediterranean. On the use of
cal bronze sculpture of Mussolini as a blacksmith, forging a sword on the alle- Alpha Berta metal for the production of certain
editions of Bertelli’s portrait, see Marco Moretti,
gorical anvil of ‘unitas’; or else Thayaht’s later painting of the Duce as a ship’s Renato Bertelli: La Parentesi futurista (Pontedera:
helmsman (1939), manning the tiller of an unfettered Italy, leaving broken Bandecchi & Vivaldi, 2012), p. 38.
chains in his wake. It is, I think, the formal economy of metaphor which sepa-
rates Bertelli’s image from these other examples – an economy at once defied Fascita: Ritratti del Duce’.
and underscored by the object’s reproducibility. In place of anecdote or narra-
18. See the objects collected in the Fondazione
tive we find two silhouettes, joined in a sweeping, pulsing continuum. Despite Cirulli, Bologna, particularly the postcard Effige

Ara H. Merjian
the stationary, cylindrical base on which the Continuous Profile rests, its striations
convey both a mythical indefatigability and a Futurist reverence for kineticism.
sintetica del Duce, and the 5cm medal forged for
Educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence from 1914 to 1922,
the ‘First Professional Gathering of Artists’, Bertelli could hardly have stood farther apart from Futurist circles. He studied,
1932. in fact, under Domenico Trentacose, an accomplished sculptor of fin-de-siècle
19. Moretti, La Parentesi futurista, p. 30. tendencies, specializing in languid female nudes and Old Testament figures
redolent of Rodin’s work. Participating in a few juried selections during the
1920s, Bertelli exhibited a bronzed plaster Bambina con coniglio (Child with
Rabbit) at the 1928 Venice Biennale – about as anathema to Futurist sensibilities
21. F.T. Marinetti, ‘Portrait of Mussolini’ as possible in both subject and form. An encounter with another Academy
(1929), in R.W Flint (ed.), Marinetti: Selected
Writings trans. Flint and Coppotelli (New York: graduate, the ‘dissident’ Futurist painter Antonio Marasco, led to Bertelli’s
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972) p. 160. adherence in 1933 to the Group of Independent Futurists, founded to challenge
22. See Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist
Marinetti’s monopoly on Italian avant-gardism. Marasco even launched a short-
Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy lived journal (Supremazia Futurista) and a requisite manifesto, drawing a number
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, of artists into the anti-Marinetti fold before losing momentum by the decade’s
1997) pp. 67, 68. end.
23. Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, p. 67. Bertelli’s association with the movement proved short-lived. His description
24. Renato Bertelli, ‘Domanda n. 822, Riv. Ind. of the Continuous Profile in his patent application, however, suggests the funda-
11612, 23 July 1933, Bertelli Archive; cited in mentally Futurist key in which he conceived it: ‘Head of the Duce in whatever
Moretti, Parentesi, p. 33, n. 14. material, in which the lineaments are reproduced synthetically along the periph-
25. It was Futurism’s very rejection of formal or ery of the molding’.24 Both practically and conceptually, the ‘synthesis’ of his
plastic boundaries that earned the reproach of the reproduction – and the reproductions of that synthesis – proceeded in a
British Vorticist painters, for example, who Futurist vein. To be sure, Futurist painting and sculpture disavowed the very no-
vowed – over and against these Italian examples
– to erect more decisively delineated forms. See tion of a traceable periphery or fixed lineaments.25 The intersection of bodies
Wyndham Lewis et al., letter, The New Weekly, 30 and the space they inhabit formed the willfully shifting foundation of Futurist
May 1914. aesthetics as articulated by Boccioni. Still, Bertelli seized precisely upon the
26. Dino Alfieri, (ed.), Mostra della Rivoluzione profile’s delimited contours as potentially stable and volatile in equal measure –
Fascista (Bergamo: Istituto Arti Grafiche, 1933) at once centripetal and centrifugal, impervious and expansive.
p. 50. See also Laura Malvano, Fascismo e politica The aesthetic economy of the profile was hammered home in the Exhibition
dell’immagine (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri,
1988) p. 64. [‘Ecco quindi staccarsi netto dalla
of the Fascist Revolution, just before Bertelli designed the Continues Profile. Traced
parete il profilo metallico di Benito Mussolini in metal relief down the wall of the exhibition’s Room O, Mussolini’s detached
riassumendo il profilo dell’Italia storicamente profile flanked the silhouette of an idealized Roman citizen (Fig. 6). The
fissata nella figura romana e il profilo dei neri apposition between these two nearly abstract forms (designed by Giuseppe
gagliardetti, sintesi delle nuove generazioni in
marcia. L’accostamento visivo dei tre elementi
Terragni) appear redoubled by a group of stylized ‘gagliardetto’ pennants –
rende evidente il concetto dell’unità spirituale emblems of the early Fascist squads – arranged behind them to form the
Duce–Italia–Fascismo’]. further, third profile of a classic Roman nose. As Dino Alfieri noted in the
exhibition’s catalogue, Terragni’s juxtaposition set into (literal) relief the
‘spiritual unity of Duce-Italy-Fascism’.26 Even more explicitly than the Room
O relief, a contemporary poster evoked the Duce’s profile as both the vessel of
the Fascist masses and isomorphic with their incorporation, such that they
shared ‘A single heart, a single will, a single resolve’ (Fig. 7). The poster
clearly anticipates Xanti Schawinsky’s prominent photomontage – later used as
a propaganda poster – from the following year, which renders Mussolini as the
literal incarnation of the Italian body politic, formed by its legion of isomorphic
subjects. The 1934 poster figures that notion in a seemingly spontaneous
shorthand. If the Duce’s profile distinguishes his inspiring singularity, it also
lurks already implicit in the Fascist masses.
The profile view also distinguished one of Mussolini’s earliest official
portraits – or rather distinguished its widespread photographic reproduction.
Rendered first in plaster and bronze, a large marble bust by the Novecento
sculptor Adolfo Wildt came to form one of the regime’s most broadly
disseminated likenesses. Having sculpted Mussolini’s likeness already in 1923,
Wildt went on to create bronze and marble versions of his portraits in a large

Fig. 6. Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista [Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution], Room O, designed by Giuseppe Terragni, Palazzo delle esposizioni, Rome,
1932 [detail].

Ara H. Merjian
bust and mask-like format. The former appeared in slightly less than three quar-
ters view on a later edition of the prominent 1926 biography DUX by
Margherita Sarfatti – a highly influential Venetian art critic and Mussolini’s
lover. In his recollections of the Duce’s ubiquity in the Italy of his youth, Italo
Calvino notes that the mounting fixation upon the leader’s profile – particularly
following an equestrian monument erected at Bologna’s Littoriale Stadium –
marked a turning point in its propagandistic reproduction:
from the frontal image to a side view, one that was put to much use from then on because
it brought out the skull’s perfect sphericity (without which the prodigious task of turning
the dictator into a designer-object would not have been possible), as well as the robust qual-
ity of his jaw (also underscored in three-quarter poses), the continuity of the back and front
of his neck, and the overall romanità of the whole.27
It is surely with Bertelli’s Continuous Profile in mind that Calvino recalls

Mussolini’s representation in the guise of a ‘designer-object’ of ‘perfect
sphericity’. For all that ostensible perfection, however, the regime expressed
only the faintest interest in Bertelli’s work – an indifference echoed in official
publications and the press alike. Mussolini personally approved the portrait’s
distribution. Yet this barely affected its sparse critical fortunes.
Fig. 7. Unknown artist, Propaganda poster, Critical interest has fallen, instead, to a subsequent generation. A recent
circa 1932 [‘A single heart, a single will, a sin- exhibition dedicated exclusively to the Continuous Profile ascribes the sculpture
gle decision’] Massimo and Sonia Cirulli
Foundation, Bologna.
to a ‘Futurist Parenthesis’ in Bertelli’s oeuvre – a reasonable claim in light of
the artist’s rather fitful career. Yet it would seem that another set of parentheses
27. Calvino, ‘The Dictator’s Hats’, p. 203. – those famously adduced by the philosopher Benedetto Croce as delimiting the
Graziosi’s Littoriale equestrian monument is Fascist regime to an anomalous interlude in modern Italian history28 – has
among those works illustrated in Sapori’s article likewise been brought to bear upon Bertelli’s portrait. For, the exhibition
on portraits of the Duce. rather improbably positioned the Continuous Profile as existing ‘today free of its
28. See Benedetto Croce, Scritti e discorsi politici historical legacy’.29 That the exhibition took place in the city of Predappio –
(1943–1947), vol. 1, ed. Angela Carella (Napoli: Mussolini’s birthplace – and in nothing less than the Duce’s childhood home
Bibliopolis, 1993), p. 61.
(remodeled into a museum) highlights the troubling irony of such a claim.
29. See the exhibition press release at http:// More disconcerting still, such an argument forms a piece with other efforts to
www.emiliaromagnaturismo.com/it/eventi/
forli-cesena/turismo-forlivese/renato-bertelli-la-
cast Bertelli as politically ‘non-committed’: that is, as an artist ‘fundamentally
parentesi-futurista (accessed 4 February 2019) detached from the regime’, whose work appears now ‘wholly redeemed from
[‘svincolato oggi dal retaggio della propria the political legacy of its time’.30 This reasoning echoes, in turn, growing calls
epoca’.] to view Italian art of the 1930s in a context ‘Beyond Fascism’ – as if the works
30. Giuliana Peri, ‘The Destiny of the Art and in question could be retrospectively excised from the ideological and historical
Artifacts’, pp. 233–243; Moretti, Renato Bertelli, matrices out of which they emerged.31
p. 148. Peri rightly notes the tendentious The present essay seeks instead to contextualize the reception of Bertelli’s
presentation in recent years of Bertelli’s sculpture
as created in ignorance of official Fascist aesthetic sculpture and its relationship to the regime’s imperatives, whether iconographic
canons. or ideological, formal or philological. The task conceals some abiding pitfalls.
31. Antonello Negri (ed.), The Thirties: The Arts
The work’s reproducibility resulted in a striking assortment of owners, from
in Italy beyond Fascism, exhib. cat., Palazzo Strozzi Mussolini’s son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, to Robert Mapplethorpe (on
(Florence: Giunti, 2012). See also Ara H. whom more below). For all this commercial success and latter-day visibility,
Merjian, review of The Thirties: The Arts in Italy however, the sculpture garnered almost no critical responses during the last de-
Beyond Fascism, frieze, April 2013.
cade of Mussolini’s rule.32 Period accounts of the Continuous Profile are essen-
32. On the dearth of critical responses at the tially non-existent. We may nevertheless set about imagining the parameters of
time, see Moretti, Renato Bertelli: La Parentesi
futurista, pp. 30, 34.
the work’s reception in their own right, just as we may, in turn, find in the
work’s visual and rhetorical aspects some of Fascism’s evolving conceptions of
33. Giuseppe Bottai, ‘La rivoluzione permanente: authority and sacrality. However unwittingly, Bertelli’s work evinces what
quarto anniversario’, Critica fascista vol. 4, no. 1,
November 1926, and Gerarchia, vol. 18, no. 9, Mussolini’s cultural minister Giuseppe Bottai had called, as early as 1926,
1939, p. 593. See also Alexander Nützenadel, Fascism’s ‘permanent revolution’.33 The resonance with the Marxist notion by
‘Faschismus als Revolution? Politische Sprache the same name – adduced first by Marx and Engels, and subsequently developed
und revolutionärer Stil im Italien Mussolinis’, in

by Leon Trotsky over three decades – is no accident.34 Bottai sought to expro-
priate aspects of Soviet state intervention (long-term planning, collectivization,
one-party hegemony) to nationalist and ‘corporativist’ ends.35 Christof Dipper, Lutz Klinkhammer, and
Fascism’s consolidation as a regime after 1925 saw it jettison the radical, Alexander Nützenadel, (eds), Europäische
anti-bourgeois impetus of its origins. The 1930s witnessed a further rigidifica- Sozialgeschichte: Festschrift für Wolfgang Schieder
tion of the governing elite and its penchant for hierarchy. Yet appeals to the fire- (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2000).
brand (and abidingly violent) inclinations of the regime’s populist ‘base’ 34. Though Bottai certainly recognized this
required a rhetoric of enduring insurgency. Marinetti’s Futurism had long since Marxist and Trotskyist precedence, he insisted
that Fascism’s permanent revolution entailed
pledged a commitment to the ‘continuous perfection and endless progress’ of
‘long-term change under state direction’. See
Italian culture.36 For his part, Mussolini echoed Bottai’s formulation in his Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New
‘Synthesis of the Regime’ speech, one year after Bertelli debuted his Profile. York: Vintage, 2005) pp. 288–9.
Here he warned citizens against ‘the ‘bourgeois spirit,’ a spirit, in other words 35. Vito Zagarrio, ‘Bottai: Un fascista critico?’,
of satisfaction and adaptation . . . For this danger this is only one recourse: the Studi Storici, vol.17, no. 4 (October–December
principle of continuous revolution [rivoluzione continua]’.37 The resonance of 1976), pp. 269.
Mussolini’s use of the term ‘continual’ (rather than the usual ‘permanent’) with 36. F.T. Marinetti, ‘War, the Sole Cleanser of the
Bertelli’s work is surely coincidental. Yet more than any cultural representation World’ (1911), translated and reprinted in
to date, the Continuous Profile rendered literal the notion of an unceasing revolu- Günter Berghaus (ed.), Marinetti: Critical
Writings, trans. Doug Thompson (New York:
tionary energy, particularly as it centered upon and issued from the Duce’s very Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2006) p. 53.
body.
37. Benito Mussolini, ‘Sintesi del regime’, 18
March 1934, in Scritti e discorsi. Dal Gennaio 1934
al 4 Novembre. 1935 (XII–XIV E.F.) (Milan: Hoepli,
Futurist Continuities 1935), p. 39 [‘Ma un pericolo tuttavia può
After reaching their peak during and immediately following World War One, minacciare il Regime: questo pericolo può essere
rappresentato da quello che comunemente viene
Futurism’s cultural fortunes had begun to wane in Italy by the late 1920s. In his chiamato ‘spirito borghese’, spirito cioè di
regular column for Emporium in 1927, the critic Raffaello Giolli noted that the soddisfazione e di adattamento . . . Contro questo
new generation of Futurist artists risked succumbing – despite themselves – to pericolo non v’è che un rimedio: il principio
their own set of conventions. Recourse to perfunctory interpretations of della Rivoluzione continua’].
‘dynamism’ and ‘simultaneity’ now came at the expense of actual plastic 38. Raffaello Giolli, ‘Cronache milanesi’,
innovation.38 The launching in 1929 of ‘Aeropittura’ (Aeropainting) thus Emporium, vol. 66, no. 396, 1927, p. 376.
breathed new, temporary life into the movement. As both subject matter and 39. F.T. Marinetti and Tullio d’Albisola,
the source of new aerial perspectives, the trope of flight insisted upon the ‘Ceramica e Aeroceramica: Manifesto Futurista’,
modernity of the Futurist-Fascist nexus. Indeed, propaganda celebrating Gazzetta del Popolo (7 September 1938).
Fascism’s youth, vigour, and virility stemmed directly from Futurist precedent, 40. The manifesto’s elegy to the artist Fillia, in
filtering into both the thuggish violence of the squadrists and the more euphe- fact, reads almost as a sidelong jab at Bertelli in
absentia: ‘FILLIA: one of the genius Futurist
mistic rhetoric of revolution. Even as much Fascist culture increasingly recoiled creators created in 1932
from urban, ‘cosmopolitan’ motifs in favour of rural purity, aeropainting of- aeroceramics. . .combining plastic architecture
fered an almost platonic version of technological zeal. with forms obtained through rotation obtaining a
Bertelli’s Continuous Profile today finds itself periodically classified as an superlatively original and new prodigious
ceramics’. Marinetti and d’Albisola, ‘Ceramica e
example of ‘aeroscultura’ and ‘aeroceramica’ – sub-genres which flourished briefly Aeroceramica’.
in the early 1930s alongside comparable two-dimensional efforts. In their 1938
manifesto of ‘Ceramics and Aeroceramics’,39 Marinetti and Tullio d’Albisola
paid homage to Umberto Boccioni’s foundational experiments and their influ-
ence upon ostensibly ‘aerosculptural’ works such as Thayaht’s Dux. Marinetti
made sure to note that Thayaht’s portrait had been appraised by the Duce him-
self. ‘Here,’ he quoted the Prime Minister as commenting, ‘is how Mussolini
looks to Mussolini.’40 Even as it seems to draw upon Thayat’s precedent,
Tullio’s own Vaso formichiere (Anteater vase) (1931–32) notably anticipates the
spherical, cephalic form of the Continuous Profile. The authors omit Bertelli
from discussion, however, surely due to Marinetti’s lingering contempt for the
‘Independent’ Futurists.
Bertelli’s inaugural Futurist efforts played out not in three dimensions but
rather two. Completed soon after he joined Marasco’s Independent group, his
works on paper reveal ‘simultaneous’ views of (and from) airborne planes

Ara H. Merjian
(Fig. 8). One drawing of the Ala Littoria (the Fascist national airline) plainly
draws upon Tato’s prominent 1930 aeropainting, depicting Rome’s Coliseum in
the wake of a soaring biplane (Fig. 9). In Bertelli’s image, the craft’s fuselage
and wing appear to extend from the curve of the Coliseum’s walls, while the
structure’s tiered seats double for the spiraled path of the airplane. We will
return again to the consequence of the spiraled form for Futurism at large and
Bertelli’s work in particular. For now, it suffices to note that aeropainted
representations of the Eternal City in a Futurist Key proliferated at the decade’s
turn – not only in the work of Tato, but also in the photographs of Filippo
Masoero (Fig. 10). The latter’s aerial views of the Roman Forum and of Saint
Peter’s confer upon these monuments a purposefully blurred turbulence. They
appear not as passive, ‘passéiste’ relics, but rather as hitching posts of high-tech
progress – a notion implicit in the Continuous Profile’s agitated update of Janus.
Masoero’s photographs themselves draw upon the ‘photodynamics’ of Anton
Giuglio Bragaglia, whose experiments at once complemented and diverged
from Futurism’s painterly corpus, and which clearly earned Bertelli’s interest in
turn. Working alongside his brother Arturo, Anton Giuglio imparted
photographs of everyday actions – smoking, slapping, typing – with mystical
Fig. 8. Renato Bertelli, Ala Littoria, early
and metaphysical dimensions, by way of seemingly ongoing movement
1930s, pencil on cardboard. Estate of Renato
Bertelli, courtesy of Marco Moretti. registered in the form of smeared and striated traces of light. The brothers’
‘photodynamics’ (fotodinamiche) draw upon E.J. Marey’s chronophotophraphic
compositions even as they disavow mere empiricism, exchanging quantifiable
motion for a less tangible and more expressive vitalism. As the pair’s theoretical
authority, Anton Giulio authored a 1912 ‘Manifesto of Photodynamism’, which
Marinetti summarily incorporated into the swelling empire of Futurist media.
Balla and Boccioni each sat for Bragaglia’s camera, and works such as The Cellist
and The Typist reveal a fundamental sympathy with Balla’s early Futurist
paintings of protracted movement such as Dog on a Leash (1912) or The Hand of
the Violinist (1912). Notwithstanding his obvious debts to Marey, Bragaglia
criticized chronophotography for failing to ‘synthesize’ movement rather than
break down its units positivistically. It is precisely the syntheses evinced in
Bragaglia’s so-called ‘poly-physionomic’ portraits which bear upon Bertelli’s
Continuous Profile. Images such as Oscillating Youth (1912) and Observing
(Scruttando) (c. 1915) (Fig. 11) reveal faces at once multiple and singular as they
move across the frame. The striations marking out the figure’s mouth – darker
bands smeared across the continuum of the white visage – merit comparison
with the grooves of Bertelli’s design. Yet Bragaglia’s simultaneous renderings of
frontal and profile views of the same individual – as in his noted portrait of
Boccioni – seem most apposite to the Continuous Profile, specifically to the way
it at once distends and redoubles Mussolini’s silhouette.
Despite Bragaglia’s claims to exchange ‘analysis’ for sensation, and in spite of
his own subscription to Henri Bergson’s metaphysical theorizations of memory,
his images fell foul of Boccioni’s aesthetic imperatives. As Futurism’s chief
theorist, Boccioni came to condemn Bragaglia’s Fotodinamiche as prosaic
inventories of movement – more proper to the cinematograph, he claimed,
than to an intuitive aesthetics. For Boccioni, the non-indexicality of painting and
sculpture differentiated their representations of the world from the camera’s
positivism. Despite Boccioni’s untimely death during World War One, his at-
tention to oblique, diagonal, and spiraled forms exerted an abiding sway on
‘Second’ Futurism and Aeropainting. Even as late as the early 1930s, the trope
of ‘continuity’ with which Bertelli baptized his sculpture would have evoked
Boccioni’s legacy (and the latter’s erstwhile friendship with Marasco would have
underscored the endurance of his example even for ‘dissident’ Futurists).

Fig. 9. Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni), Flying over the Colisseum in a Spiral [Sorvolando in spirale il Colosseo (Spiralata)], 1930, oil on canvas, 80 x 80cm, Ventura Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/oxartj/kcz019/5637353 by University of Waterloo Porter Library user on 07 January 2020
Collection, Rome. Courtesy of Sansoni heirs.
Considered a kind of Futurist manifesto in its own right, Boccioni’s Unique Forms
of Continuity in Space (1913) registers duration on the surface of sculpted form,
injecting a consummately spatial medium with aggressively temporal dimen-
sions. In place of successive notations, Boccioni synthesizes movement and ges-
ture into a single entity, pulsing with ‘continuity’ even as it is fixed upon a
plinth. More apposite still to Bertelli’s sculpture is Boccioni’s Development of a
Bottle in Space (1913), which collapses the envelope of the subject’s form into its

Ara H. Merjian
Fig. 10. Filippo Masoero, Descending over St. Peters [Scendendo su San Pietro], 1930–3. Touring
Club Italiano Archive, Milan.
Fig. 11. Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Scrutando, c. 1915, Photomechanical print on paper, 10.5 x 15 cm.
Massimo and Sonia Cirulli Foundation, Bologna.
surroundings, from the table on which the bottle rests to the negative space
around it. The ostensibly immobile object becomes a vortex: a site not of being
but of becoming, informed as much by the Nietzschean will to power as by
Bergson’s notions of flux and élan vitale. Though Bertelli smoothed his sculp-
ture’s proverbial continuity into uninterrupted, circular rings, something of
Boccioni’s precedent lingers in the Continuous Profile both nominally and
notionally.

It lingers, too, in Mario Ridolfi’s Helicoidal Vase (1933) from the same year
(Fig. 12). Ridolfi designed the object for the ‘Aviator’s House’ pavilion at
Milan’s V Triennale in 1933 – one of several rationalist interiors conceived for
different types of workers. No passive bauble, the embossed copper vase evokes
the spiralled path of the future occupant’s airplane – a conceit monumentalized
in the following year’s ‘Great Italian Airforce Exhibition’, featuring a 13-meter
high spiral in Giuseppe Pagano’s Icarus room (a designation oddly inauspicious –
and prophetic – in its mythical allusion). Ridolfi had already revealed an
appreciation for Boccioni’s work with his 1928 design for a restaurant tower,
which adapts Futurist dynamism to rationalist strictures, while preserving a
sense of movement and contingency. The rhyme between Ridolfi’s vase and
tower and Bertelli’s Profile in 1933 underscores the salience of aero-aesthetics at
the time. Bertelli’s extant drawings and paintings from the early 1930s appear
singularly focused upon coiled and curved forms, semi-abstracted from patterns
of flight. In addition to the Coliseum-airplane image discussed above, a large
portion of Bertelli’s works from this period are titled Spiralata, or ‘spiral-turn’,
in reference to aerial maneuvers.
Alongside this concern with spherical forms derived from modern
technology we must consider – particularly as it informs the Continuous Profile –
a decidedly non-avant-garde source, one that Bertelli nevertheless assimilated
to the Futurist preoccupation with ‘multiplied man’. Erected in 1626 to com-
Fig. 12. Mario Ridolfi, Helicoidal Vase for the
memorate the victory of Ferdinand I of Tuscany over Ottoman forces, Pietro
‘Casa del Aviatore’, 1933, embossed copper,
Tacca’s Monument of the Four Moors forms the most prominent public artwork in 120 cm. Massimo and Sonia Cirulli
the Tuscan port of Livorno (Fig. 13). Beneath a triumphant Ferdinand, chained Foundation, Bologna.
to the four corners of the monument’s base, sit four bronze prisoners of African
and Mediterranean extraction – the work’s titular ‘Moors.’ Bertelli later noted 41. La Belgique Judiciaire (Gazette des tribunaux
to his son the consequence of this work in conceiving his Mussolini portrait. belges et étrangers), vol. 2, no. 1, 3 December
From one side of the piazza, he averred, the profiles of the four bald, bronze 1843, p. 45.
statues appear visible at the same time – a multiplicity and simultaneity which 42. Reflecting on his interviews with Mussolini in
the Continuous Profile condenses into a single form. the spring of 1932, the German–Swiss
biographer Emil Ludwig drew upon modifiers
While Bertelli drew upon still other pre-avant-garde examples, these have long since prevalent in the lexicon on the Duce.
gone unacknowledged. In particular, the Continuous Profile closely resembles the Mussolini’s oratorial style, he noted, was
representations of Napoleon Bonaparte and French kings as carved into ‘metallic’, reminiscent of a ‘finely tempered
nineteenth-century walking sticks. Deemed cannes séditieuses, the canes’ ‘sedi- steel’. Ludwig also notably described the leader
as ‘devilishly Napoleonic’. Ludwig, Colloqui con
tion’ derived from the half-concealed effigies of successively deposed and rein- Mussolini (Milan: Mondadori, 1932), cited in
stated rulers etched into their knobs (Fig. 14). Turned in ivory or wood, the Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, p. 55.
silhouette cut into the cane’s handle would become apparent only upon closer 43. See the auction lot at https://www.1stdibs.
inspection, or else upon the ceremonious (or surreptitious) casting of its shadow com/furniture/decorative-objects/sculptures/
upon a wall. To take just one example of these objects’ reception, consider one busts/futurist-benito-mussolini-shadow-walking-
document from 1844 describing an anti-royalist conspirator; he is said to have stick-cane/id-f_6379053/ (accessed 4 February
2019).
schemed ‘to overturn Louis XVIII, to stop Alexander [of Russia], and to free
Napoleon, dressed in blue and carrying a canne séditieuse and forty-five francs’.41
Mussolini was himself routinely compared to Bonaparte in Italy and abroad.
Shortly after the March on Rome, for example, the New York Times described
him as a ‘Napoleon turned pugilist’. Other common comparisons were to
Caesar, Garibaldi, Augustus, and Alexander the Great, among others.42 Bertelli
may even have sculpted his own walking stick version of the Continuous Profile.
Dated between 1933 and 1940, one such example recently surfaced on the mar-
ket, inscribed with the artist’s initials.43 The cane’s knob bears a rather blocky
version of the Continuous Profile, carved in ebony with silver trim. The work
might have been intended to capitalize upon the variety of designs permitted by
Bertelli’s patent (in the same way that the artist at one point authorized a table
lamp version of his sculpture). Whatever this walking stick’s provenance,

Ara H. Merjian
Fig. 13. Pietro Tacca, Monument of the Four Moors, 1926, marble and bronze, various dimensions,
Piazza Micheli, Livorno. Fondazione Federico Zeri, Bologna.
Fig. 14. Canne séditieuse figuring Napoleon’s likeness, early 19th century, ivory and wood.
Courtesy Goxe and Belaisch Associés.
however, it seems highly unlikely that Bertelli would have remained ignorant of
the cannes séditieuses and their ideological significance.
The resonances and origins of any art work exceed – or fall short of – its
author’s intentions. The Continuous Profile courts associations both deliberate
and involuntary. Materially and formally, the sculpture resonates, for example,
with various types of ceramic electrical insulators, prevalent in Italy and
elsewhere by the 1930s (Fig. 15). Uniformly rounded and often bearing circular
ridges or rings capped by a bulbous crown, these objects would have lent

44. Ken Silver (ed.), Chaos and Classicism (New
York: Guggenheim Museum, 2011) p. 30.
45. F.T. Marinetti, ‘Portrait of Mussolini’,
p. 159.
46. Military technology increasingly drew the
attention of Europe’s Fascist and philo-Fascist
cultural elite. Having authored a paean to the
glories of trench warfare, the German writer
Ernst Jünger prefaced a new, 1933 edition of the
volume Luftfahrt ist not! (Aviation is Necessary!),
illustrated with photographs of aircraft,
anthropomorphic motors, and other devices.
Jünger’s proto-fascist apotheosis of both war and
machinery, writes Todd Presner, formed ‘a radi-
cal distillation of Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’,
transported to the German front on the darkest
days of the First World War – and placed there
forever’. See Todd Presner, ‘On the End of Sex
and the Last Man: On the Weimar Utopia of
Ernst Jünger’s ‘Worker’’, qui parle, vol. 13, no.
Fig. 15. Ceramic insulators, 1930s. Photo by Rob L. Dey. 1, Fall–Winter 2001, p. 104.
Bertelli’s object not simply visual touchstones, but a further association with
the Futurist trope of voltage and its (metaphorical) conduction. One art
historian recently likened Bertelli’s Profile to a ‘bullet’.44 More apposite still, I
would argue, are various military explosives in the wake of World War One.
Marinetti’s 1929 ‘Portrait of Mussolini’ notably evokes the Duce’s head as ‘a
squared-off projectile, a package full of good gunpowder’.45 Recall, too, that
the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution dedicated extensive attention to Italy’s role
in the Great War, particularly as a crucible of irredentist and nationalist senti-
ments. Various objects, documents, and paraphernalia from the Great War sat
on display at the 1932 exhibition in Rome. Wrought from materials like brass
and steel, the fuses of artillery shells strikingly resemble the Continuous Profile in
their conical, striated crowns. The pyrotechnical dimensions of these howitzer
and mortar fuses – far more familiar to an interwar audience than to today’s
viewer – would have heightened the sculpture’s Futurist allusions.46
Of course, a bellicose technophilia had already galvanized the Italian avant-
garde during the First World War. Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero’s influ-
ential manifesto ‘The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe’ (1915) not only
featured kinetic sculptures by the two signatories, but associated these efforts
with incitements ‘to physical courage, struggle and WAR’.47 During the 1920s,
Rome’s Futurist ‘Mechanical Art’ group further developed aspects of Balla and
Depero’s experiments, marrying them to International Constructivist princi-
pals. Artists like Naum Gabo had ventured less aggressive examples of sculp-
tural animation; his Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave) (1919–20) (Fig. 16), for
example, uses a concealed electric motor to spin a plain steel rod from its base.
The resulting form oscillates and undulates in a blur of (seemingly plural) whip-
lash lines. If Bertelli’s Continuous Profile exchanges actual rotation for an illusion
thereof, its implied kineticism inevitably recalls these avant-garde precedents,
Fig. 16. Naum Gabo, Kinetic Construction
both Futurist and foreign. Yet as much as any technical, formal, or functional (Standing Wave), 1919–1920; replica 1985.
influences and resonances, we must consider the no less vital consequence of The Work of Naum Gabo # Nina &
Fascism’s anti-positivist ethos, for these inform the illusory continuum of Graham Williams, #Tate, London 2019.

Ara H. Merjian
Bertelli’s work to the same degree, whether in its evocation of temporality and
gender, or its troping of the mythical origins of sculpture itself.
Primitivism/Palingenesis
As the art historian Meyer Schapiro writes in his essay ‘Frontal and Profile as
Symbolic Forms’ (1973) Western medieval artists deployed the profile to quite
different iconographic ends. Used to render Judas and demonic figures, profile
views were just as frequently deployed for the representation of pious donors,
painted into their own commissioned images of the Virgin or Christ.48
A secular religion unto itself, Fascism left little quarter to Christian
iconography. The mythical conceits of which the regime routinely availed itself
Fig. 17. Etruscan cippo, Orvieto, Italy, I-III derived almost exclusively from antiquity (or else from an emphatically secular
century BCE, Abbazia di Sant’Antimo/Museo modernity). Compared to the arcane and occultist predilections of Nazi figures
Archeologico di Montalcino, Italy. Courtesy
like Alfred Rosenberg or Heinrich Himmler, Italian Fascism’s exploitation of
of the Museo Civico e Diocesano, Raccolta
Archaeologica di Montalcino. romanità proceeded chiefly along martial and archaeological lines, from the
proliferation of lictors’ fasces to the use of neo-Roman mosaics.49 That said, a
sense of pre-Christian sacrality also inflected Fascist rituals and symbols.
47. Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, ‘The
Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe’, in Augustus, after all, was not only Rome’s first emperor but pontifex maximus,
Lawrence S. Rainey, Christine Poggi, Laura chief priest. Enshrined now as a giant sphinx sculpted in the Ethiopian desert,
Wittman (eds), Futurism: An Anthology (New now as a portable, votive icon inside the home, Mussolini – or rather, his
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009) p. 212.
iconographic figurations – followed precisely in this imperial mold. Giordano
48. Meyer Schapiro, ‘Frontal and Profile as Bruno Guerri writes of the Duce’s increasing deification:
Symbolic Forms’, in Words and Pictures: On the
Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text
Mussolini was the conscious object of a collective and intimate exaltation, which
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013 [1973]) p. 45.
remarkably corresponded to the irrational ecstasy of pre-Catholic religions and to the more
49. A notable exception is the work of the obscure afterlife of a visionary, medieval Catholicism. Well before being elevated to the ob-
painter, philosopher, and esotericist, Julius Evola, ject of a cult, he had become a fetish, a kind of talisman of personal and collective
recently reprised as a lightning rod for the salvation.50
American and European ‘alt–right’. See, inter
alia, Jeffrey Schnapp, ‘Bad Dada (Evola)’, in Leah The circulation of the Continuous Profile in domestic and bureaucratic settings
Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky (eds), The
Dada Seminars, (Washington, DC: CASVA, 2005) not only contributed to a sense of ‘public intimacy’ with the Duce, but its
pp. 31–56, on Evola’s early aesthetics; and format – a compact object at once identifiable and strange, seemingly
Elisabetta Cassina Wolff, ‘Evola’s interpretation primordial and newfangled in equal measure – evinced a fetishization in Futurist
of fascism and moral responsibility’, Patterns of
Prejudice, vol. 50, no.s 4–5, pp. 478–494.
terms. As much as a whirring machine, Bertelli’s Profile recalls the polished,
black lithic cippi (memorial or boundary stones) of the Etruscans, prevalent in
50. Giordano Bruno Guerri, Il culto del Duce the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, and occasionally reused by the Romans as
(1922–1945), (Salò: Museo di Salò, 2016) p. 5.
weights (Fig. 17).51 Whether as cult objects or aniconic divinities, these sacred,
51. See in particular Giovanni Colonna, ‘Una spherical stones were seized upon by Italian scholars in the late nineteenth and
categoria particolare di cippi etruschi: i ciottoloni
di pietra scura’, in Steingraeber Stephan and
early twentieth centuries as examples of pre-Roman religion – a distinction
Bruni Stefano (eds), Cippi, Stele, Statue-Stele e which further inflects the ‘primitive’ simplicity of Bertelli’s portrait as a kind of
Semata Testimonianze in Etruria, nel mondo italico e stylized talisman. Its paradoxical morphology revived some of Futurism’s found-
in Magna Grecia dalla Prima Età del Ferro fino ing notions: whether the movement’s adherents declaring themselves ‘primi-
all’Ellenismo (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2015) pp. 180–
4. My thanks to Vincent Jolivet and Pietro
tives of a new sensibility’, or Boccioni’s insistence upon art’s ‘primordial
Tamburini for bringing this to my attention. psychology’. In other words, even Futurism’s most mechanical imagery lay
claim to a fundamentally atavistic impetus.
That impetus routinely took three dimensional form, both actual and virtual.
Futurism’s founding texts reveal the primacy accorded to sculpture – not as an
unrivaled aesthetic medium per se, so much as an ür-metaphor for the
movement’s larger ambitions. Well in advance of Boccioni’s theoretical
treatises, Marinetti’s novel Mafarka the Futurist (1909) figured sculpted and
sculpting bodies as the arbiters of a willful new universe. Published the same
year as the ‘Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, Mafarka follows a marauding
Futurist strongman as he subjugates colonies and bodies alike in a fictional

North African province. Boasting a prehensile, elastic penis several meters
long, the eponymous protagonist eventually sets about constructing a winged –
and eminently sculptural – son. Wrought from eclectic materials ‘without the 52. See Ara H. Merjian, ‘Manifestations of the
help of the vulva’, Mafarka’s airborne offspring not only anticipates the Futurist Novel: Genealogy and the Sculptural Imperative
obsession with flight, but stages the hyper-masculinist embodiments which in F.T. Marinetti’s Mafarka le futuriste’,
came to drive the movement’s aesthetic theory.52 Significantly, Marinetti’s only Modernism/Modernity, vol. 23, no. 2, Winter
2016, pp. 365–401.
extant self-portrait (from 1914) is a sculptural one: a hanging wooden figure
suspended in the act of running. 53. Marinetti, ‘Portrait of Mussolini’ (1929),
p. 158.
We have already seen with what ease Marinetti transposed Futurism’s
‘physical transcendentalism’ to his descriptions of Mussolini. Tellingly, it is not a 54. Marinetti, ‘Portrait of Mussolini’ (1929),
painterly or literary dynamism which emerges in that elegy but a three- p. 158.
dimensional one. Marinetti evokes the Duce’s body as ‘forged and carved to the 55. The interchangeability between objecthood
model of the mighty rocks of our peninsula’, resulting in ‘the cubic will of the and agency crop up in official, rhetorical accounts
from the period; for while Bottai deems
State’.53 His form is presented not simply as the result of the sculptural act, but Mussolini the only true Fascist artist, Malaparte –
also its agent. For, Mussolini is said to wield an ‘intelligent hand which shaves as we have already seen – declared him Fascism’s
off the useless clay of hostile opinions’.54 Such a portrayal not only echoes only true expression.
Marinetti’s Mafarka, but anticipates Sapori’s description of the Duce as both 56. Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian
‘artist and patron’.55 Mussolini, writes Karen Pinkus, viewed his own form as Advertising Under Fascism (Minneapolis: University
‘a detached object that could be manipulated’56 – a sentiment wholly amenable of Minnesota Press, 1995) p. 16.
to sculptural representation and replication. Rather than merely the passive ob- 57. See S. K. Doherty, The Origins and Use of the
ject of representation, the Duce was figured as the ultimate creator, the demi- Potter’s Wheel in Ancient Egypt (Oxford:
urge of a nation forged in his image by his own hand. Archaopress, 2015).
In this sense, Bertelli’s Continuous Profile conjures up the origins of ceramics 58. A. Baldinotti et al. (eds), La Manifattura di
itself, particularly the potter’s wheel and its prominence in origin myths. More Signa (Florence: S.P.E.S., 1986).
specifically, the blurred silhouette of the Profile resembles a slab of clay being 59. See Yves Bonnefoy, Greek and Egyptian
turned on the wheel – a practice which anchors origin stories from Pharaonic Mythologies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Egypt, to the Qur’an, to the Book of Jeremiah.57 Interestingly, at his Lastra a Press, 1992); and R.A. Simkins, ‘The Embodied
World: Creation Metaphors in the Ancient Near
Signa studio (just east of Florence), Bertelli produced at least one example of East’, Biblical Theology Bulletin, vol. 44, 2014, pp.
the Profile in a particular kind of clay. Named ‘melletta d’Arno’ after the 40–53.
Florentine river from whose flooded banks it was periodically gathered, the clay 60. Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric,
had helped drive a renewed craze for modern copies of ancient sculptures at the Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy, (Minneapolis,
turn of the century.58 Once again, Bertelli’s work unwittingly brushes up MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
against millennial myth, for, one of the earliest Egyptian deities, the Divine 61. Christopher Duggan, A Concise History of Italy
Potter named Khnum, derived his association with fertility from the Nile’s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)
fecund silt, from which he fashioned both other gods and men. Khnum appears p. 222.
in Dynastic reliefs seated in profile at his life-giving potter’s wheel. His very
name stems from the root words ‘to join’, ‘to unite’.59 Representations of
Mussolini did not stray far from this type of epic narrative, particularly in evok-
ing him as Italy’s providential father. Barbara Spackman has convincingly argued
that the regime’s disparate cultural facets found consistent resolution in the
trope of virility, a ‘node of articulation’ binding together disparate, even con-
flicting, elements. Several artists, including Bertelli, lent that node literal
form.60
Perhaps inspired by the Continuous Profile, the 1934 draft for a sculpture by
the artist Mino Rosso hyperbolizes the sexual dimensions of Bertelli’s work
(Fig. 18). The image by this fellow traveler of the Futurists depicts a shiny
helmet topped by what can only be described as the stylized glans of an erect
penis. The sculpture’s two-tiered base echoes the overlapping of ‘head’ and hel-
met, countering the work’s rigidity with a degree of implied movement. As
much as stylized portrait, Rosso’s work – like Bertelli’s before it – suggests the
difference between a virile dictatorship and a ‘flaccid parliamentary system’.61
Italians were not the only ones keyed into that difference. Virginia Woolf fa-
mously described Fascism as suggesting ‘an age to come of pure, self-assertive

Ara H. Merjian
62. Virginia Woolf Miscellanies: Proceedings of the
First Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf (New
York: Pace University Press, 1991) p. 24.
63. Charles Dana Gibson, The Weaker Sex: The
Story of a Susceptible Bachelor (New York:
Scribner’s Sons, 1903). My sincere thanks to
Giuseppe Virelli for bringing Gibson’s work to
my attention.
Fig. 18. Mino Rosso, Il Duce, 1934, graphite on paper; uncertain dimensions. Courtesy of Rosso
heirs.
Fig. 19. Charles Dana Gibson (1867–1944), The Weaker Sex II, 1903, one of eighty illustrations
for The Weaker Sex: The Story of a Susceptible Bachelor (New York: Scribner’s, 1903), Ink on paper,
Cabinet of American Illustration (Library of Congress). Accession no. DLC/PP-1935:0140.
virility. . .unmitigated masculinity’.62 An illustration by the American artist

Charles Dana Gibson strikingly anticipates the aesthetic form and sexual rhe-
toric that such potency would take in Bertelli’s hands (Fig. 19). Collected in
1903 under the title The Weaker Sex: The Story of a Susceptible Bachelor, Gibson’s
pen, ink, and graphite drawings brought visions of independent, modern
women to popular, middle class periodicals like Collier’s Weekly.63 For our pur-
poses, however, it is the male figure in one plate – presumably courting two
women at once – which resonates unmistakably with Bertelli’s Continuous Profile
(and uncannily suggests Mussolini’s facial structure). For, if Gibson’s figure
evokes a bachelor susceptible to multiple charms, it also figures a kind of
Nietzschean superman able to manage simultaneous distractions. It is precisely

Fig. 20. Renato Bertelli, Continuous Profile of Mussolini, various dimensions. Estate of Renato Bertelli, courtesy of Marco Moretti. Massimo and Sonia
Cirulli Foundation, Bologna.
this sense of simultaneity that Bertelli’s sculpture concretizes, in line with pre- 64. Pinkus, Bodily Regimes, p. 17.
vailing lore about the Duce’s sexual prowess. 65. Sapori, for one, evokes ‘the goodness of [the
The multiplication and ‘infinitization’ of his likeness suggested a natural Duce’s] heart, a father to all’ [‘la bontà del suo
outgrowth of his preternatural fecundity.64 Displays of Bertelli’s work in its cuore, per tutti paterno’]. Sapori, ‘Nel primo
decennale dell’Era Fascita: Ritratti del Duce’, p.
various sizes reveal the extent to which his Profile – and its exponential formats 277.
– performed and metaphorized that fecundity (Fig. 20).65 Set next to smaller
66. L.A. Milani, Il R. Museo Archeologico di Firenze
versions, the large head looms like a paterfamilias. Yet it also evokes a mother (Florence, 1912) cited in Colonna, ‘Una
hen with her clutch of chicks. The fungibility of masculine and feminine traits categoria particolare di cippi etruschi’, p. 179.
bears some exalted, theological origins in both myth and Fascist modernity.
Acquired in 1888 by the archaeological museum of Florence, one of the above-
mentioned spheroid Etruscan cippi was notably identified as evoking ‘either a
Baetylic symbol of Giove or else the mother Thufltha’ – a changeability con-
ferred only upon superhuman entities in myths both ancient and modern.66 As

Ara H. Merjian
Luisa Passerini and other scholars have demonstrated, Mussolini himself came
to comprise a spectrum of gender identities in the popular imaginary, from
stern father to ‘oceanic’ mother. That feat remained exceptional to his
quasi-divine person, however. While the Duce could be perceived to conflate
the ostensible polarities of gender, ordinary citizens were held to strictly pre-
scribed and policed roles. In its seemingly parthenogenic reproduction,
Bertelli’s object echoed something of its subject’s presumed sexual exceptional-
ism: not merely in the immaculateness of conception but also an almost magical
multiplicity.
Mussolini’s singularity notably extended from the domain of gender and
Fig. 21. Roman Bust of the god Janus, mar- sexuality to the phenomenon of time. Recall again the ancient representations
ble, 50 x 34 cm. Vatican Museums, Rome.
Image in the public domain.
of Janus, the Roman God of gates, beginnings, transitions, and of duality itself
(Fig. 21). Endowed with insight into both past and future, the deified Janus lent
Mussolini’s authority some auspicious allusions. To be sure, the notion of a
67. On such irresolution as a potential driving ‘Janus-faced’ rule risked suggesting a certain insincerity or equivocation,
force in Fascism, Ruth Ben Ghiat writes: ‘Six epithets which dogged the Duce’s ongoing political crises. One historian
months before taking power, Mussolini asked has described the regime as prey to a ‘vicious circle of paradoxical
readers of his new review Gerarchia, ‘Does
fascism aim at restoring the State, or subverting contradictions’ – a phrasing which suggests the potential hazard of the spinning
it? Is it order or disorder? . . . Is it possible to be metaphor as a vehicle of the Duce’s depiction.67 Torn between activist ‘Fascists
conservatives and subversives at the same time? of the first hour’ and the duties of respectable administration (particularly on
How does fascism intend to escape this vicious
circle of paradoxical contradictions?’ Ben Ghiat,
the world stage), Mussolini did not always manage to resolve the regime’s
Fascist Modernities, p. 17. contradictions so tidily. In Italian as in English, the term ‘bifronte’ evokes the
sense of (potentially duplicitous) variability suggested by the possession of two
68. Giovanni Calendoli, quoted in Manlio
Pompei, ‘Dialettica fascista’, Critica fascista, 1 faces. Yet Bertelli’s design elides the duality intrinsic to Janus’s representation.
February 1931); cited in Ben Ghiat, Fascist In fact, the Continuous Profile at once nullifies and exploits the very principal of
Modernities, p. 22. duality; for its circular grooves efface any trace of dichotomy, or of the
69. See Roy Eriksen, The Building in the Text: dialectical tension which might result therefrom. To the unresolved questions of
Alberti to Shakespeare and Milton (Pittsburg, PA: Fascism’s historical achievement – rupture or return? revolution or return to
Penn State University Press, 2000) p. 39. order? – the sculptor posed a form at once unresolved and decisive.
70. On de Chirico’s close study of Nietzschean To be sure, Fascist philosophy and cultural policy occasionally paid lip service
(and Heraclitean) models of time, see Ara H. to dialectics as an instrument of intellectual refinement. Even these instances
Merjian, Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical
City (New Haven, CT and London: Yale
betray a fundamentally coercive agenda, however. Quoted in the journal Critica
University Press, 2014). fascista in 1931, the theater critic and essayist Giovanni Calendoli notes that
‘dissent is manifested, clarified, and eliminated dialectically, leading to a
granite-block synthesis that represents the new civilization’.68 As a totem of
this new civilization – and underscoring once again the primacy of sculpture in
Fascist rhetoric – the granitic synthesis of Bertelli’s Profile appears purged of any
dialectical tension. We find instead a fait accompli, unchanging and unceasing in
equal measure. Rather than simply continuous, the piece renders Mussolini’s
visage as a continuum. Whether Bertelli knew it or not, ancient authors such as
Macrobius had ascribed to Janus’s very name the notion of cyclical – rather
than vacillatory – movement: ‘the world always turns in a circle, and from the
point of beginning returns to itself’ (‘mundus semper eat dum in orben volvi-
tur, et ex se initium faciens in se fefertur’).69
The neutralization of diachronic time in Fascist culture far exceeds the image
of Janus, however. The notion of a temporal continuum proved vital to
Fascism’s ideological underpinnings, and to its reinforcement through various
cultural representations. In Giorgio de Chirico’s Metaphysical cityscapes of the
early 1910s – paintings which combine a Nietzschean penchant for secular
soothsaying with tropes of Mediterranean ‘pre-history’ – Fascist culture found
one model for its own ‘eternal return’.70 De Chirico’s anti-positivist anti-
dialectical aesthetics bore the further boon of a primitivism entirely indigenous
to Greco-Roman antiquity, nourished upon pre-Hellenic and even Etruscan

allusions. In other words, de Chirico’s architectural aesthetics did not need to
make recourse to far-flung cultures; its visual atavisms thus recommended
themselves as ideal sources of readymade, ‘autarchic’ imagery propitious to 71. Giovanni Gullace, Translator’s introduction
modern romanità. Like the Fascist ‘new towns’ built in their image during the to Giovanni Gentile, The Philosophy of Art (Ithaca,
1930s, the Metaphysical cityscapes neutralized the tensions between historicism NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1972)
and ahistoricism. And like Bertelli’s sculpture two decades later, de Chirico’s ar- p. xxv. Gullace notes further: ‘The spirit is an act
which has neither past nor future, for it contains
chitectonics appear endowed with the gravitas of antiquity even in the smooth, everything within itself, in an eternal present and
generic modernity of their surfaces seemingly untouched by time. eternal becoming. . .Idealism reconciles all
As germane to the (often ineffable) essence of Fascist aesthetics – if less distinctions, but does not, like mysticism, cancel
demonstrably consequential – were the writings of the regime’s chief them’ (pp. xxvii, xxxvii).
philosopher, Giovanni Gentile. Over and against the Bolshevik ‘revolution of 72. Benito Mussolini, La dottrina del Fascismo, ed.
matter’, Gentile famously cast Fascism as a ‘revolution of spirit’. The duly Marco Praiano and Stefano Fiorito (2014 [1933])
§3.
metaphysical potential of this concept found elaboration in various writings,
including those – like ‘The Doctrine of Fascism’ (1930) – ostensibly penned by 73. Roger Griffin has adduced a theory of fascism
the Duce’s own hand. Like his former colleague Benedetto Croce (with whom as a form of ‘palingenetic nationalism’ in a
number of studies. See in particular, Modernism
he broke over the matter of Fascism’s legitimacy), Gentile approached and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini
aesthetics as the repository of ‘spiritual eternity’. The word ‘spirit,’ in fact, and Hitler (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan,
appears thirty-nine times in the approximately thirty-three pages of ‘The 2007); and Matthew Feldman (ed.), A Fascist
Century: Essays by Roger Griffin (Houndmills:
Doctrine of Fascism’. ‘The material world does not exist but only insofar as, by
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Griffin’s arguments
thinking it, we dematerialize it and resolve it entirely into the life of the spirit’: have been countered by Andrew Vincent, who
thus Gentile’s English translator glossed The Philosophy of Art, disseminated well sees Griffin’s account as masking ‘the internal
beyond Italy’s borders as evidence of the regime’s intellectual bona fides.71 If deep tensions within the various fascist
arguments’. Andrew Vincent, Modern Political
Gentile’s notion of ‘eternal becoming’ risked a certain evanescence in its spiri- Ideologies, 3rd edn (Chichester: John Wiley &
tual dimensions, Mussolini’s insistence upon ‘action’ anchored Fascism’s philo- Sons Ltd, 2010), p. 137.
sophical posturing in embodied form. Man was to remain ‘manfully aware’
74. Barbara Spackman, ‘Fascist Puerility’,
[‘virilmente consapevole’] of the challenges facing him.72 As physical model and qui parle, vol. 13, no. 1,, Fall–Winter 2001,
metaphysical metaphor, Mussolini’s hyper-vigilance ensured the defense of pp. 13–14.
Fascism’s supposedly open-ended insurgency. 75. Calvino, ‘The Dictator’s Hats’, p. 200.
Of course, by the early 1930s, little about the regime remained
revolutionary. Even the Fascist Revolution found itself the subject of
museological retrospection in 1932. In political terms, the government had
hardened into an ever more rigidly bureaucratic apparatus, while potentially
progressive phenomena like Bottai’s corporativism took a back seat to imperialist
ambition. The expediency of images of romanità to such ambition was without
rival. Consider the use of Roman numerals for the Fascist calendar: a resetting
of the nation’s proverbial clock by way of its past. Fascist culture constantly
moved backward as a means of moving forward. Such was the logic of
palingenetic nationalism.73 The regime’s modification of the Gregorian calendar
signified not merely a practical or symbolic change, but an ontological revision
inspired by the French Republican calendar of post-Revolutionary France. As
Barbara Spackman writes in an essay on Fascist temporality, the regime ‘rejected
the philosophical heritage of the French Revolution. . .even as it mimed one of
its inaugural gestures’.74 Inscribed onto the base of Bertelli’s sculpture are his
signature and the Roman numerals ‘XI’, standing for year eleven of the Fascist
Revolution. Alongside these quantitative, calendrical integers stands the sculp-
ture’s defiance of horological measurement: an abjuration of diachronic or dialec-
tical time in favour of a seamless and ageless duration.
‘O Patria immortale. . .’ (‘Oh, immortal Fatherland’) commenced the
Fascist Party’s official hymn, composed in 1922 and updated in 1924. If
Mussolini’s rule embodied a providential rebirth, it was also deemed undying.
In his recollection of Mussolini’s ubiquitous likeness, Italo Calvino notes that
the Duce’s image evoked for a wide swathe of Italians ‘modernity, efficiency,
and a reassuring continuity’.75 Continuity never ensured perpetuity, however.

Ara H. Merjian
In the event, the Fascist patria proved as mortal as Mussolini. A summary
execution and defilement by partisan crowds on 29 April 1945 left his body
battered beyond recognition. Photographs of the Duce’s hanging and prone
corpse reveal a face at once crushed and bloated, flattened and swollen in equal
measure. His creased, globular head and indistinct features suggest a travesty of
Bertelli’s heroic Profile: the temporal fate of actual flesh pressed into a ghastly
new metaphor of Fascism’s demise.
From Fatality to Caricature

For one latter-day owner of an edition of the Continuous Profile, the sculpture
formed both an influence and a subject in its own right. Robert Mapplethorpe
had come to possess one of the Bertelli sculptures – a black version, presumably
Fig. 22. Robert Mapplethorpe, Photograph of painted ceramic – and photographed it for an editioned print in 1988, just
of Bertelli’s Continuous Profile of Mussolini,
1988, 82 x 72 cm. (32.3 x 28.3 in.) Robert
before he succumbed to AIDS. Set upon a square black base, the sculpture
Mapplethorpe Foundation. appears before a white wall, interrupted only by a wedge of black in the photo-
graph’s upper left corner (Fig. 22). Like a swatch of abstraction, the black trian-
76. I owe this observation to Frances Terpak and
gle offsets the sculpture with a duly Futurist diagonal, lending the composition
Michelle Brunnick’s essay, ‘A Photographer’s an even more modernist air. With one side illuminated and the other in shadow,
Cabinet of Wonders’, in Terpak and Brunnick the sculpture’s lighting as photographed by Mapplethorpe appears to cleave the
(eds), Robert Mapplethorpe: The Archive (Los head into two, respective profiles. The illumination of the left side exposes the
Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015) pp.
174–6. work’s material and ambient particularities, setting into relief its graduated
ridges; the uniform flatness of the right side instead delineates Mussolini’s pro-
77. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Il poema dei
sansepolcristi (Milan: Tipografia del Popolo d’Italia
file in a crisp, uncanny silhouette.
1939) p. 15. Like Bragaglia’s ‘photodynamic’ images, Bertelli’s sculpture had influenced
Mapplethorpe’s work several years earlier. A 1985 self-portrait depicts his torso
78. To this end, Bertelli’s sculpture also distills
and metaphorizes Mussolini’s ingenious (and in three-quarters view, his pensive eyes staring out toward his right (Fig. 23).
insidious) strategy of cultural pluralism and The left edge of Mapplethorpe’s face peels off into an ethereal smear in profile.
coercive inclusiveness – a strategy which the The darker areas demarcating mouth, nose, and eyes bleed into the striations of
literary scholar Alice Kaplan has described in
terms of a ‘polarity machine’. Particularly to the
his silhouette, recalling both Bertelli’s Profile and the distorted physiognomies of
extent that it suggests a mechanized magnet (or Bragaglia’s images. Though created on the eve of his HIV diagnosis the follow-
other mineral) vacillating between poles, the ing year, the self-portrait seems already steeped in a sense of mortality – a sub-
notion of a polarity machine seems especially ject explored more explicitly in subsequent works (such as his prominent 1988
apposite to Bertelli’s Profile. See Alice Kaplan,
Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and
Self-portrait with a skull).76 The 1985 self-portrait came, in fact, to illustrate a
French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis, MN: memorial card created after the photographer’s death. The head’s blurred turn
University of Minnesota Press, 1986). suggests not a straining toward the future, but an allusion to corporeal imper-
79. Christopher Duggan, ‘The Propagation of the manence. It is precisely such impermanence that Bertelli’s Continuous Profile dis-
Cult of the Duce, 1925–26’, in Gundle, Duggan, avows, even as it lays aesthetic claim to contingency.
and Peri (eds), The cult of the Duce, p. 38. Twenty years after Fascism’s founding rally in Milan’s Piazza San Sepolcro,
Marinetti – himself in attendance that fateful March morning of 1919 –
composed a Futurist eulogy to ‘The Duce up close the Duce radiating power
from a solid elastic body ready to be detonated weightless and spontaneous a
continuous thinking willing deciding seizing squashing. . .’77 Marinetti’s
recollection here in 1939 may well have been molded by Bertelli’s Profile. For
no other likeness had so pithily synthesized Mussolini’s body (the stuff now of
myth as much as history) in an image at once solid and elastic, pensive and
active, spontaneous and continuous.78 Of course, the cult of the Duce had
already proliferated as of the mid-1920s, when – to quote the historian
Christopher Duggan – it ‘became institutionally embedded in the Fascist state
and remained the main political focus and emotional bedrock of the regime’.79
At one point during the 1930s, Mussolini’s raw, symbolic potency appeared
quite literally embedded in Italian bedrock. Atop the so-called Furlo Pass in the
Marche region, members of the state forestry corps carved his gargantuan

80. Marinetti, ‘Portrait of Mussolini’, p. 158.
81. Guerri, Il culto del Duce, p. 5.
82. Oxford English Dictionary, ‘profile’:
‘Italian profilare is <pro– ( < classical Latin pro–
PRO–PREFIX) þfilare to spin (thread) (a1308; <
post–classical Latin fı̄lare to spin: see filament)’.
83. Interestingly, the English word ‘spin’ itself
denotes – first and foremost – the threading of
fibers. Ibid, ‘spin’: ‘1. a. intransitive: To draw
out and twist the fibres of some suitable material,
such as wool or flax, so as to form a continuous
thread; to be engaged in or to follow this
occupation’.
Fig. 23. Robert Mapplethorpe, Self-portrait, 1985, gelatin silver print, 390 x 394 mm. Robert
Mapplethorpe Foundation.
profile into an exposed peak of Mount Pietralata, situated along the ancient con-
sular route of Via Flaminia. Whether in person or on postcards, the ‘masculine,
Napoleonic profile’ appeared immortalized in and as the very earth (Fig. 24).
There regularly obtained a reciprocity between verbal or visual evocations of
the Duce and the natural world. If a rock face or mountain could take the form
of his image, his visage evoked the wonders of nature in turn. Consider
Marinetti’s encomium of Mussolini’s body as ‘forged and carved to the model
of the mighty rocks of our peninsula’80 – a notion which also took hold in
reverse. Scholars have since elaborated upon the syllogisms through which the
Duce appeared commensurate with Italy’s larger polity, even in his singularity.
‘Mussolini’, writes Giordano Bruno Guerri, ‘was Fascism. Fascism was the
fatherland. The fatherland was Mussolini. . .In Mussolini the people could not
help but worship themselves’.81 As I hope to have demonstrated, that
syllogistic circularity takes literal shape in Bertelli’s Continuous Profile.
The word ‘profile’ generally refers to the silhouette of a face seen from the
side, or the outline of an object, in addition to the lines used to trace them.
The tracing of lines lingers in the word’s etymology: as the delineating thread
(filum) which is set forth (pro-).82 So too – and here Bertelli’s work rears its
head – does the word preserve the notion of spinning; for, the verb profilare
means literally to spin forth an outline in (metaphorical) filament or fabric.83
For its part, the word ‘spin’ signifies the act of turning or rotating, but has also
come to denote the dissemination of biased political information (as in the
expression ‘spin doctor’). The notion of political ‘spin’ has entered the Italian

Ara H. Merjian
84. See, for example, Giancarlo Bosetti, Spin:
trucchi e tele–imbrogli della politica (Venice:
Marsilio, 2007).
85. Meyer Schapiro, ‘Frontal and Profile as
Symbolic Forms’, p. 45.
86. In this sense, Schapiro’s choice of the word
‘affront’ suggests a dual allusion both to full,
unmitigated representation and to frontality.
87. Matt Petronzio, ‘Vero Eretico’ The Observer, 3
August 2011.
88. Matt Petronzio, ‘Vero Eretico,’ n.p.
Fig. 24. Profile of Mussolini, Gola de Furlo, Passo del Furlo, period postcard. Image in the public
domain.
lexicon only recently, and Romance languages bear no exact equivalent of the
term.84 The closest cognate is ‘propaganda’. On that score, the Fascist ventennio
bears a hefty history. Bertelli’s sculpture offers up not merely a condensation
and reconciliation of the regime’s abiding paradoxes, but embodies – however
unwittingly – the semantic rapport between spinning form and public
persuasion.
Representations in profile have served as mass-reproducible images of au-
thority for millennia; think of the proud numismatic depictions of Alexander
the Great or of emperors from Augustus to Licinus. Yet the accentuation of dis-
tinctive features afforded by a profile in silhouette has also long appealed to cari-
caturists. ‘[T]here were,’ Meyer Schapiro writes, ‘perhaps in some uses of the
profile in early caricature a nuance of detachment that mitigated the affront of
political mockery’.85 In other words, the profile’s separateness from the full
face or head, its partialness, affords a degree of hedging or equivocation.86 The
potential critique of political power lurking in the Continuous Profile has been set
into relief in twenty-first-century iterations both verbal and visual. The Italian-
American poet Matt Petronzio, in some recent verse, invokes Bertelli as
Mussolini’s virtual and exponential progenitor: ‘Renato gives birth to Benito a
second time, a thousand times over’.87 More poignant, however, are
Petronzio’s poetic evocations of his grandparents, born in Italy under the Fascist
regime and subjected to Blackshirt violence. Visiting an American museum
where Bertelli’s sculpture is displayed, the poet’s ninety-one year-old grandfa-
ther sneers at the object’s pretension to omniscience. ‘If he can see every corner
of his empire,/why can’t he look me in the eye?’88
Following the USA’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq in 2003, the artist Julian
LaVerdiere updated Bertelli’s work as the model for the Continuous Profile
Sculpture of George W. Bush (2004) – a work subsequently nicknamed ‘The
Decider’. The moniker derives, of course, from the President’s much-repeated
declaration to the press corps when queried about his leadership: ‘I’m the de-
cider – I decide what’s best’. However unintentionally, the work thus echoes
the trope of Mussolini’s profile as embodying a single line of singular ‘decision’,

imposing form upon otherwise atomized masses. Still more recently, the artist
williamCromar adapted the same model for his Head of Drumpf (2017)
(Fig. 25), alluding to the subject’s original (German) family name, anglicized in
some previous century. Comparisons between Trump and Mussolini have
cropped up with increasing frequency in both journalistic and scholarly con-
texts, though the leaders’ respective cults of personality derive from very differ-
ent origins and assume different incarnations. Perhaps with a nod to King
Midas’s ill-fated touch (and to Trump’s gold-plated properties), Cromar’s 3D
printed sculpture deploys orange-tinted gold leaf to subtly caricatural effect.
No longer do we find the radiation of power concretized in a self-contained,
semi-divine likeness, as Mussolini’s effigy was widely presented. Gone are the
attendant historical and art historical allusions – gone, that is, not from
williamCromar’s sculpture but from the context of its reception, as well as
from the contemporary practice of propaganda. A would-be dictator need no
longer exploit cultural representations in a traditional sense; indeed, to do so Fig. 25. williamCromar, Continuous Profile
might invite charges of elitism, laying bare the charade of false populism. If (Head of Drumpf), 2016, orange-gold leaf on
hydrocal plaster cast from a laser-sintered
Head of Drumpf trades the notorious comb-over for a more subtle bulb of bur- plastic 3D print, 13 x 11 x 11 inches.
nished hair, the sculpture’s gaping mouth lends it an aural – and hectoring – Collection of the artist. Photo: With permis-
lifelikeness. For all its loud-mouthed cant, modern demagoguery turns in sion of the artist.
williamCromar’s piece upon a more crude, though no less dangerous, axis.
Instead of alluding to the complex and insidious origins of Fascist philosophy,
the artist portrays mere spin incarnate, strident and tottering precisely in its
solipsism.

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Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.

1093/oxartj/kcz019/5637353 by University of Waterloo Porter Library user on 07 January 2020

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my

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as a discreet (ersatz-archaic) object, it presides in a dynamic photomontage over

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It is surely with Bertelli’s Continuous Profile in mind that Calvino recalls

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by Leon Trotsky over three decades – is no accident.34 Bottai sought to expro-

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North African province. Boasting a prehensile, elastic penis several meters

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virility. . .unmitigated masculinity’.62 An illustration by the American artist

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allusions. In other words, de Chirico’s architectural aesthetics did not need to

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In the event, the Fascist patria proved as mortal as Mussolini. A summary

From Fatality to Caricature

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