Sports and Culture in 100 Years of Italian Art

The human body celebrated by masters in unique exhibition in Rome's Sala delle Capriate of Chiostro del Bramante

Futurism needs poets with free souls and athletes with powerful muscles." These words by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti inspired the exhibition displayed at the Sala delle Capriate of Rome's Chiostro del Bramante. The exhibition, conceived and financed by Credito Sportivo, covers a century of art history, from 1904 to 2004, retelling in 70 works how artists represented and conceptualized the relationship between art and sports. Pivotal to the exhibition are the works of the Futurists, who found an inexhaustible source of inspiration in sports.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the other artists who formed the movement celebrated speed and motion in their posters, depicting them thanks to a pictorial fragmentation of planes and spaces.
"Art," writes art director Mirella Panepinto, "has always been fascinated by athletes' bodies and the component of humanity so immediately recognizable in sports. It often searched for and celebrated their values, investigating just as often on the psychology of their protagonists, frequently seen in their solitary condition."
The same, however, also happened through the mutability of technology, expressed in the human sprint and strength, as told in the works of Umberto Boccioni, Mario Sironi, and Fortunato Depero; or in the more recent works of Gianfilippo Usellini, Salvatore Scarpitta, and Gianni Bestini, all of them represented in this exhibition. "When we reach the 30s," said curator Luciano Caprile, "there is a return to Greek and Roman classicity in how the body is depicted. We can see that in Oppi's Athletes, immersed in an Olympic atemporality; we see that in Carrà's 1934 painting The Soccer Match. Therefore, I'd like to underscore that for some artists of this period sport is an occasional theme, but for some others, e.g. Sassu or Guttuso, a recurring theme."
"These works are so beautiful," declared Fabio Benzi, art director of Chiostro del Bramante, "and have such an interesting theme. One always thinks that only ancient art expressed the relation between sports and culture in a complete and mature way, but the 20th century also devoted a lot of attention to it, at least on a par with the Classical age. This is what we wished to show with this exhibition."
All the artworks on display share a common trait: the ethical quality of sports, marked by the desire to compete and to impose not one's strength but the will to feel alive, to listen deeply to one's self.

Publication Date: 2004-08-01
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