Baroquemania : Italian Visual Culture and the Construction of National Identity, 1898–1945

__Baroquemania__ explores the intersections of art, architecture and criticism to show how reimagining the Baroque helped craft a distinctively Italian approach to modern art. Offering a bold reassessment of post-unification visual culture, the book examines a wide variety of media and ideologically charged discourses on the Baroque, both inside and outside the academy. Key episodes in the modern afterlife of the Baroque are addressed, notably the Decadentist interpretation of Gianlorenzo Bernini, the 1911 universal fairs in Turin and Rome, Roberto Longhi’s historically grounded view of Futurism, architectural projects in Fascist Rome and the interwar reception of Adolfo Wildt and Lucio Fontana’s sculpture. Featuring a wealth of visual materials, __Baroquemania__ offers a fresh look at a central aspect of Italy's modern art. Front matter 1 Dedication 7 Contents 9 Figures 10 Acknowledgements 17 Introduction 21 Decadent Seicento: the emergence of the Baroque in the Italian fin de siècle 37 The Baroque’s revenge: the 1911 jubilee exhibitions and the search for an Italian style 75 Baroque Futurism: Roberto Longhi, seventeenth-century art, and the Italian avant-garde 108 Classical Baroque: the Seicento and the return-to-order 142 Baroque memories in the architecture of interwar Rome 180 Form and formlessness: the reimagination of Baroque sculpture during Fascism 217 Conclusions 257 Selected bibliography 266 Index 274 Baroquemania offers a new account of Italian post-unification visual culture through its entanglement with the Baroque. Interrogating the Baroque's fraught afterlife in the work of Giorgio de Chirico, Armando Brasini, Lucio Fontana and others, the book reveals its role in crafting a distinctively Italian approach to modern art. -- .