Plaster, not bronze

In 1913, with the manifesto a year behind him, Boccioni made the figure. He modeled it in plaster, a soft white material you build up wet and let set hard, the standard way a sculptor works out a form before it is ever cast into permanent metal. (You will occasionally see it claimed that he made it in wax; that is a minority story, and the strong consensus, including the original that actually survives, is plaster.) This matters more than a footnote, because plaster is the version Boccioni himself shaped with his own hands, and it is the only version he ever saw. It survives, today, in a museum in São Paulo, Brazil. The famous gleaming metal ones came later, and not from him.

What he built was a single human figure in mid-stride, and then he attacked the human figure with his own manifesto. He gave it no fixed outline: its surfaces do not close over the body the way skin does, but peel back and stream off it in curved fins and blades. And he stripped the arms away entirely. There are no arms. Where they should hang, there are flanges of metal flaring out into the space behind. A walking man, opened up like a window, with the environment he moves through built right into him: the manifesto, made solid.

Boccioni had a name for what he was reaching for: dynamism, and specifically plastic dynamism, “plastic” here in its old art-school sense, meaning to do with shaping and modeling form, not the material plastic, which did not yet exist as we mean it. Plastic dynamism was not a snapshot of a moving thing, the way a photograph freezes a runner. It was the fusion of a body with the motion and the space it generates, the moving man and the rushing air and the trailing wake all made into one continuous form.

He was clear that this was not done by piling up more body parts. Writing about exactly this work, he said the continuity he wanted was “not to be found in repetition of legs, arms and faces” but was achieved “through the intuitive search for the unique form which gives continuity in space.” Read those last words again, because they are not a description of the sculpture. They are the sculpture. Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. The title is lifted, almost word for word, out of the artist’s own statement of what he was after. The flanges streaming off the figure are not decoration and not damage. They are the wake of the stride, motion made solid, the one unique form that gives a body continuity into the space around it.