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From Modern to Eternal: Art and Mathematics in the Return to Order of the 1920s

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Abstract

The subject originates from the study, still undergoing by the present author, of Margherita Sarfatti archive, acquired by the Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (MART). Margherita Sarfatti was one of the most important Italian art critic of 1920's and she played a key role in the international art scene between the two world wars. As is known, the threads of her personal and professional lives were interwoven with socialist thought, and then with the newborn Fascist movement. The Sarfatti archive includes materials that are almost completely unpublished and which makes it possible to study in depth her work as a publicist, art critic and promoter of Italian culture in the period 1919–1939. From Sarfatti's idea of development of art dal moderno all'eterno (from modern to eternal) and beginning with her theoretical starting points, it is possible to note some points on the arts and mathematics relations in the return to order, seen through the works of some of the Italian masters who worked with this poetic, including Gino Severini, Carlo Carrà, Felice Casorati, Mario Sironi.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In [19], the critic wrote: Un volume di critica e storia artistica, e di riflessioni intorno all’arte, Dal moderno all’eterno, è da tempo fra le carte della mia cartella e fra i pensieri cari e accarezzati dal mio spirito (A volume of criticism and art history, and of reflections about art, From modern to eternal, has been among the papers in my files, and in the thoughts most dear to and cherished by my spirit). Margherita Grassini was born in Venice in 1880, to a wealthy Jewish family. After her marriage to the lawyer Cesare Sarfatti and their move to Milan, her work as an art critic intensified, and she came increasingly closer to the definition of a consistent and complex aesthetic vision. As is known, the threads of Sarfatti’s personal and professional lives were interwoven with socialist thought, and then with the newborn Fascist movement; her contribution to the political development of Benito Mussolini remains an open historiographical question. Research concerning Sarfatti only began with the studies of Rossana Bossaglia and Claudia Gian Ferrari [20]. For her work as an art critic, see [21] and [22]. However, much still remains to be investigated, and the present author is currently involved in the study of the Sarfatti archive acquired by the Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (MART) (MART, Archivio del ‘900, Fondo Margherita Sarfatti), comprised of materials that are almost completely unpublished and which makes it possible to study in depth Sarfatti’s work as a publicist, art critic and promoter of Italian culture in the period 1919–1939.

  2. 2.

    Among the numerous studies and publications on the return to order, see the fundamental exhibition Les Realismes entre révolution et réaction, 1919–1939 [23]. For bibliographical references see also [24, 25] and the most recent exhibitions [26, 27].

  3. 3.

    Sarfatti’s conception of synthesis was one of the cardinal points of her critical theory. For example, she wrote, Ma l’epoca dell’analisi è finita; la guerra ne ha segnato il tramonto, con la simbolica e allegorica sconfitta del popolo analizzatore per eccellenza, la Germania. L’ora della sintesi è suonata (But the epoch of analysis is finished: the war marked its decline, with the symbolical and allegorical defeat of the analyzing people par excellence, Germany. The hour of synthesis has arrived) ([1], p. 143). For the symbolist origins of the concept of synthesis, see the famous essay by [23].

  4. 4.

    See [1], p. 24, where she states that impressionism ‘negates the stable and definitive, this highest aspiration of ideal and classical art’ (my trans.).

  5. 5.

    See ([1], p. 28 and p. 31, and 146–147): Precisione nel segno, decisione nel colore; risolutezza nella forma; sentimento profondo e sobrio, scavato e scarnito attraverso la meditazione, l’eliminazione e lo studio; aspirazione verso il concreto, il semplice e il definitivo; ecco i tratti comuni—l’aria di famiglia—di questa generazione di artisti (Precision in sign, decisiveness in colour; resolution in form; profound and sober sentiment, hollowed out and stripped of flesh by means of meditation, elimination and study; an aspiration to the concrete, simple and definitive; these are the common traits—the family resemblance—of this generation of artists). These concepts are constants in Margherita Sarfatti’s thought; see also [29]. There is a vast body of critical literature concerning Cézanne and his success during the 1910s and 1920s; here we need only note that in 1920 the Venice Biennale dedicated an entire room to his work alone.

  6. 6.

    MART, Archivio del’900, Fondo Margherita Sarfatti, Sar 3.3.28 Giudizii su 6 pittori del 9cento, draft manuscript. In 1924 Sarfatti published the article “Mostra di ‘Sei pittori del’900’” in the catalogue of the 14th Venice Biennale. Some parts of the manuscript do not agree with the text published in the catalogue, in particular the phrase ecco ora “i concetti” (here now are “the concepts”) appears only in the manuscript.

  7. 7.

    According to Pythagorean philosophy, everything in nature is number, and the divine cause itself had used a numerical ratio to create the universe, conferring on it a peculiar character of harmony and equilibrium. Identifying the constitutive formulas of reality, the ratios that bind things, in short, that number underlying all things visible, signifies following the divine gesture at the moment of creation. Not by chance was this ratio called by Luca Pacioli divine proportion, by Leonardo ‘golden section’, by Kepler sectio divina. It is the golden number, God’s secret cipher, a constant that must be identified and reprised by the artist.

  8. 8.

    Pontiggia, in his Italian edition of Du cubisme [30], cites, among others, Theon of Smyrna’s Mathematics Useful for Understanding Plato, a work from the age of Hadrian that was translated into French in 1892.

  9. 9.

    See also [31].

  10. 10.

    [32] also contains the most recent bibliography for Severini. Further stimulation arrived to Severini by the coeval work of Paul Sérusier who published his ABC de la peinture in 1921, and from the reflections of George Seurat and Maurice Denis, who published his Théories 1890-1910: Du symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique in 1912. On the theory of colour see also ([33], pp. 153–154), cited in ([32], pp. 176–177).

  11. 11.

    On ‘humanism’ see also [1], p. 135: Questa eresia di logica estrema, paradossale e puritana; questo eccesso di ragione pura sino all’irragionevole, è di sua natura nordico, cioè fanatico e vorrei dire protestante. Risponde al materialismo cerebrale e al raziocinio astratto della geometria e della matematica applicate ai fenomeni dello spirito, che è complesso, delicato, duttile (This extreme, paradoxical and puritan heresy of logic; this excess of pure reason up to the irrational, is part of its Nordic character, that is, fanatic and I would say Protestant. It responds to cerebral materialism and abstract reasoning of geometry and mathematics applied to phenomena of the spirit, which is complex, delicate, ductile). For Sarfatti’s judgment of Du Cubisme see [34]. As regards Leonardo, it is useful to recall that his Trattato had been translated into French in 1909 and circulated in the Parisian artistic milieu.

  12. 12.

    Monferini writes, Attraverso il manichino, Carrà vuole invece rifarsi a un’idea semplificata e astratta del corpo umano come elemento geometrizzante in un’armonia di accennati rapporti matematici e spaziali (By means of the mannequin, Carrà wishes to remake a simplified and abstract idea of the human body as a geometricizing element in a harmony of accented mathematical and spatial relationships) ([35], p. 87). Carrà’s Platonism has been widely discussed; instead, often neglected is how close the artist was to Margherita Sarfatti and the fact that he carried on an uninterrupted epistolary relationship with her until her decline and exile.

  13. 13.

    For more by Carrà, see (C. [36–38]). The artist also published a monograph on [39].

  14. 14.

    See also [40], where she notes that Carrà himself followed the example of the Giotto maestro of Aix-en-Provence and had already in 1919, in La Ronda, proclaimed modernity.

  15. 15.

    Translated from the entry on Silvana Cenni compiled by the present author, in ([41], pp. 134–135).

  16. 16.

    In Pittura metafisica [1919], Carlo Carrà had this to say regarding the concept of reconstruction during the years between the two world wars: Noi che ci sentiamo figli non degeneri di una grande razza di costruttori (Giotto, Paolo Uccello, Masaccio, ecc) (We who feel ourselves to be not-unworthy sons of a great race of constructors (Giotto, Paolo Uccello, Masaccio, etc.) (quoted in [3]). On Sironi, see [42], especially chap. V.

  17. 17.

    MART, Archivio del ‘900, Fondo Margherita Sar 3.3.42. See also [43].

  18. 18.

    For the painting of 1928, see the intense narrative of [44].

  19. 19.

    See ([18], pp. 28–44). For the theme of melancholy, see the fundamental works [45–47]. For Sironi, see also [48] and [49].

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  1. PhD student in Arts and Cultural Heritage, Doctoral School of Humanities Studies, University of Verona, Verona, Italy

    Elisabetta Barisoni

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  1. Mathematics, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Michele Emmer

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Barisoni, E. (2015). From Modern to Eternal: Art and Mathematics in the Return to Order of the 1920s. In: Emmer, M. (eds) Imagine Math 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01231-5_3

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