This book radically reconceptualises Italian post-unification visual culture by exploring an element that has, until now, been systematically ignored: its fraught entanglement with the Baroque.
Evoking a glorious past - the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance - played a key role in constructing a common Italian identity following the country's unification in 1861. But the Baroque was considered too extravagant, kitsch, and whimsical to serve the aggressive nation-building impulse that led to Fascism. Baroquemania sets out to redress this narrative. It interrogates a diverse range of media, from paintings, sculptures, and buildings to commercial illustrations, postcards, posters, pageants, photographs, films, and exhibitions. Situating Italy within European and Latin American reimaginings of the Baroque, the book proves how widespread use (and misuse) of the style was integral to articulating Italians' ambivalent relationships with modernity and tradition. Unravelling the Baroque's protean afterlife in the work and writings of Umberto Boccioni, Giorgio de Chirico, Armando Brasini, Adolfo Wildt, and Lucio Fontana, among others, this book reveals the Baroque's role in pioneering a distinctively Italian approach to modern art, one that was neither anti-modernist nor fully committed to avant-garde values. By examining how the Baroque haunted Italian visual culture, Baroquemania offers a fresh look at an essential aspect of Italy's development into a modern nation.