Articles liés à Foro Italico

Foro Italico - Couverture rigide

Ballerini, Luigi; Sabatino, Michelangelo

 
9781576871690: Foro Italico
Couverture rigide
ISBN 10 : 157687169X ISBN 13 : 9781576871690
Editeur : powerHouse Books, 2003

Synopsis

Boasting to everyone that his forum would be grander than the Colosseum, Mussolini created the Stadio dei Marmi, or Stadium of Statues, an arena built outside Rome for the 1944 Olympic Games that were postponed by World War II. Believing a fascist state required the top level of physical fitness, Il Duce provided inspiration for his nation in the form of monumental art, commissioning sculptors from all over the country to create sixty Herculean statues of white marble to be put atop six-foot pedestals surrounding the stadium. The statues, based on figures from Italian war memorials, embodied the glorification of the athlete and the mannered heroism of the soldier. Startlingly erotic and poetic, each statue stands twelve feet tall, nude but for the occasional headband or sandals. So blatant was their sexual presence that the statues later provoked furtive attempts at “decency” involving fig leaves and loincloths.

Once relegated to the category of political kitsch, these statues have, in recent times, been re-evaluated and are being recognized as objects of beauty and merit. “The Foro Italico…sustains a guileless, perhaps unique, male eroticism which is at odds with the grandiloquent intentions of its planner and creators in Mussolini’s fascist regime,” explains George Mott, who first glimpsed the statues in 1962 and photographed them twenty years later. His black-and-white and color images of the statues have been sought by collectors in Europe and America, and have been used repeatedly by fashion designers and art directors. In Foro Italico, for the first time, these photographs are being shown collectively, exquisitely reproduced in a remarkable, deluxe, slip-cased edition that includes an introduction by Giorgio Armani, himself a connoisseur of 1930s art and architecture.

Les informations fournies dans la section « Synopsis » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

Présentation de l'éditeur

Boasting to everyone that his forum would be grander than the Colosseum, Mussolini created the Stadio dei Marmi, or Stadium of Statues, an arena built outside Rome for the 1944 Olympic Games that were postponed by World War II. Believing a fascist state required the top level of physical fitness, Il Duce provided inspiration for his nation in the form of monumental art, commissioning sculptors from all over the country to create sixty Herculean statues of white marble to be put atop six-foot pedestals surrounding the stadium. The statues, based on figures from Italian war memorials, embodied the glorification of the athlete and the mannered heroism of the soldier. Startlingly erotic and poetic, each statue stands twelve feet tall, nude but for the occasional headband or sandals. So blatant was their sexual presence that the statues later provoked furtive attempts at “decency” involving fig leaves and loincloths.

Once relegated to the category of political kitsch, these statues have, in recent times, been re-evaluated and are being recognized as objects of beauty and merit. “The Foro Italico…sustains a guileless, perhaps unique, male eroticism which is at odds with the grandiloquent intentions of its planner and creators in Mussolini’s fascist regime,” explains George Mott, who first glimpsed the statues in 1962 and photographed them twenty years later. His black-and-white and color images of the statues have been sought by collectors in Europe and America, and have been used repeatedly by fashion designers and art directors. In Foro Italico, for the first time, these photographs are being shown collectively, exquisitely reproduced in a remarkable, deluxe, slip-cased edition that includes an introduction by Giorgio Armani, himself a connoisseur of 1930s art and architecture.

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

Éditeur
powerHouse Books
Date d'édition
2003
Langue
anglais
ISBN 10 
157687169X
ISBN 13 
9781576871690
Reliure
Relié
Numéro d'édition
1
Nombre de pages
64
Coordonnées du fabricant
non disponible
Personne responsable
non disponible