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Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy, Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum, eds. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. vi + 293. $24.95 (paper).
In 1982 Norberto Bobbio still spoke for the majority of historians when he declared in an interview with L'Espresso, "Where there was culture, there wasn't Fascism, where there was Fascism there wasn't culture. There never was a Fascist culture." Since then a velvet revolution has taken place in the academic understanding of generic fascism (still arrogantly and ignorantly dismissed in some quarters as no more than a modish genuflexion to the "linguistic turn") which in the context of Mussolini's Italy has meant growing recognition that Italian fascism, despite the many contradictions and extreme heterogeneity of its ideology, is to be approached as a sustained attempt to create a new type of "total culture." Moreover, it is now widely accepted that, at least until the late 1930s, fascism's revolutionary experiment mobilized a significant section of the nations artistic and intellectual elite, some of whom devoted enormous creative energy to imparting ideological expression and plastic substance to the "reborn Italy" in the deepest sense of the term "propaganda," namely to propagate the new faith.
The fourteen essays of Donatello among the Blackshirts supply an abundance of fresh grist to this interpretive mill thanks not only to its sustained focus on the generally neglected visual dimension of cultural production under fascism, but also to the overall cohesion of its heuristic approach and a consequent synergy between the various articles rarely encountered in multi-author volumes on fascist aesthetics. The high standard of conceptualization that permeates the whole set of essays is established at the outset in section I, "Italy's Past as Mussolini's Present." Here Claudia Lazzaro stresses the utopianism underlying the regime's bid to "forge a visible Fascist nation." Claudio Fogu then explores how it set out to "make history present," supplanting the "historical" with the "historic" to make Italians feel they were experiencing the living presence of an...