Dead at thirty-three

Futurism had glorified war. Marinetti’s founding manifesto had promised to “glorify war, the world’s only hygiene,” and when the First World War came, several of the Futurists, Boccioni among them, volunteered. It is one of the bleak facts of the movement that the men who had spent years celebrating speed, force, and violence got the real thing, and it killed some of them. Boccioni enlisted, served, and in 1916 was in a cavalry training unit near Verona, in northern Italy.

He died in a way that reads almost as a grim joke at the movement’s expense. The artist who had remade the human body as an aerodynamic engine, who had put a racing car above a Greek goddess, was not killed by any machine. He was thrown from a horse during a cavalry training exercise, and died of his injuries. He was thirty-three. The most modern artist in Italy, the prophet of the machine age, was undone by the oldest transport there is.

And here is what he left behind, where this figure is concerned. He left the plaster. That was all. He had modeled Unique Formsin 1913, exhibited his Futurist sculptures, written the theory that the figure fulfilled, and then he was gone, at thirty-three, with the sculpture that would become his masterpiece still a white plaster cast, never once committed to permanent bronze by the hand that made it. Whatever the figure was going to become in metal, he would have no part in it. The version of this sculpture that hangs in the world’s great museums, the gleaming bronze on the coin, is a thing he never saw and never made.

Nor did he live to see where the movement went. A few years after his death, Futurism’s founder Marinetti would help launch Italian Fascism and tie the movement to Mussolini’s regime. Boccioni, dead in 1916, had no part in that; the Fascism came three years after he was buried. But the worship of war and force that ran through Futurism from the very first manifesto did not stay on the page, and the man who wrote those words lived long enough to put them into politics.