Plans by Giorgia Meloni’s government to open a new museum in Rome dedicated to Mario Sironi, the Modernist painter who was a supporter of Benito Mussolini, risk sanitising Italy’s fascist past, two leading historians have warned.
The state-run museum is expected to open next year within the Associazione Nazionale fra Mutilati ed Invalidi di Guerra (National Association of War Disabled and Wounded Veterans), a monumental fascist era building inaugurated in 1928. The building is home to two major frescoes by Sironi painted ten years later. One depicts Mussolini on horseback.
The museum will display 30 works recently acquired by Italy’s culture ministry from the Mario Sironi Archive in Rome, including paintings, drawings and preparatory sketches. A further 90 works will be loaned by the archive.
Unveiling the plans on Tuesday, Alessandro Giuli, the culture minister, said the project was “the defining achievement of my term in office, and the one of which I am most proud”.
Meloni’s Brothers of Italy has political roots in the postwar Italian neo-fascist movement. Press materials for the museum do not mention fascism or Mussolini.
Sironi joined the fascist movement in 1919, contributing more than 1,700 political cartoons and illustrations to Il Popolo d’Italia, Mussolini’s newspaper. The museum will feature works spanning more than four decades from the 1910s to the 1950s, covering distinct phases from Sironi’s artistic development including Futurism, metaphysical-influenced works and monumental commissions awarded under the fascist regime.
Mario Sironi, Cavallo e Cavaliere (1953)
Courtesy of the Italian ministry of culture
Members of Italy’s cultural sector have emphasised the need for the institution to address Seroni’s politics.
Tomaso Montanari, an art historian and rector of the Università per Stranieri di Siena (University for Foreigners of Siena), said that he did not oppose the museum but insisted it must explicitly distance itself from fascism.
“Since Italy is a republic founded on anti-fascism, the museum’s educational material must make clear that there is no endorsement of fascism,” Montanari told The Art Newspaper.
Montanari, who sits on the culture ministry’s scientific committee, said that the initial project for the museum focussed “overwhelmingly” on Sironi’s fascist period work. He added that the ministry “partially” heeded his argument for works from other periods to be included.
Mario Sironi, Autoritratto (Self-portrait)
Courtesy of the Italian ministry of culture
The art historian and curator Fabio Benzi, who is on the Sironi museum’s scientific committee, told the French-language publication Le Journal Des Arts: “The danger is of legitimising a certain authoritarian aesthetic under the guise of cultural rediscovery”.
The culture ministry has been contacted for comment.
Last year, the ministry announced it had acquired the former Rome home of Giacomo Balla, the futurist painter who initially supported fascism, which operates as a museum.
On Thursday [5 November], key members of Meloni’s government presented a new exhibition celebrating the 90th anniversary of the EUR district in Rome, the city’s grandest example of fascist-era planning.
