Machine, Monument, Mannequin: The New Italian Man

This essay aims to conduct a close, cross-disciplinary examination of the concept of “performativity” in interwar Italy, that is, the uses made of the body and the ways in which it was represented both in civil and political life, which the regime highly aestheticized, as well as in the production of visual culture, which was driven by a desire to draw on real life for the sake of a total art. The phenomena and the works examined reveal certain recurring models to which the body is likened at different points: the machine, the monument, and the mannequin. Rather than an embodiment of the new man, these “bodies” served as surrogates, containers assigned with a projection of society which at times was in line with Fascist propaganda, at other times against it