Plans by Giorgia Meloni’s government to open a state museum in Rome dedicated to the Modernist painter Mario Sironi have drawn a sharp warning from two leading historians: the project must not slip into an endorsement of fascism. Sironi joined the Italian fascist movement in 1919 and remained a supporter of Benito Mussolini. The new institution is expected to open next year.
A museum inside a fascist-era building
The museum is due to occupy the headquarters of the Associazione Nazionale fra Mutilati ed Invalidi di Guerra, the National Association of War Disabled and Wounded Veterans, a monumental building inaugurated in 1928. The walls already carry two large frescoes that Sironi painted a decade later. One of them shows Mussolini on horseback.
Visitors will see more than a hundred works. Italy’s culture ministry recently bought thirty paintings, drawings and preparatory sketches from the Mario Sironi Archive in Rome; a further ninety pieces will arrive on loan from the same archive. The display is meant to span more than four decades, from the 1910s to the 1950s, and to take in Sironi’s Futurist beginnings, works touched by metaphysical painting, and the monumental commissions he received under the fascist regime.
What the announcement left out
When culture minister Alessandro Giuli unveiled the plans earlier this week, he called the museum “the defining achievement of my term in office, and the one of which I am most proud”. Press materials for the project do not mention fascism or Mussolini. Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy, has its political roots in the country’s postwar neo-fascist movement.
Sironi’s political labour was not a sideline. He contributed more than 1,700 cartoons and illustrations to Il Popolo d’Italia, Mussolini’s newspaper. That record is precisely what historians say a public museum cannot treat as background noise.
“No endorsement of fascism”
Tomaso Montanari, an art historian and rector of the Università per Stranieri di Siena, sits on the culture ministry’s scientific committee. He told The Art Newspaper that he does not oppose the museum, but that it must draw a clear line. “Since Italy is a republic founded on anti-fascism, the museum’s educational material must make clear that there is no endorsement of fascism,” he said. Montanari added that the first version of the project concentrated “overwhelmingly” on work from Sironi’s fascist period, and that the ministry only “partially” accepted his argument for including other chapters of the artist’s career.
The art historian and curator Fabio Benzi, who serves on the Sironi museum’s own scientific committee, struck a similar note in remarks to the French journal Le Journal des Arts: “The danger is of legitimising a certain authoritarian aesthetic under the guise of cultural rediscovery.” The culture ministry was asked for comment.
The announcement does not stand alone. Last year the same ministry acquired the former Rome home of Giacomo Balla, the Futurist painter who at first supported fascism and whose house now functions as a museum. On 5 November, senior figures in Meloni’s government presented a new exhibition marking the ninetieth anniversary of the EUR district, Rome’s grandest piece of fascist-era urban planning. Together, the gestures have left historians asking a simple question of the Sironi project: will the rooms explain the politics that produced the pictures, or will they quietly set those politics aside?