A new series of talks organised by ICI London and ASMI
It was the world’s first fascist movement and would have a lasting and ongoing impact in political and social life in many regions of the world. To discuss its meaning and consequences, the Italian Cultural Institute will host a series of conversations and discussions looking at new research and contemporary interpretations of Italian fascism. Themes to be discussed include violence, antifascism, Mussolini as a model for other strongmen, the fascist empire, Mussolini and his image, the March on Rome, Italian history and violence and the biographies of leading fascists and antifascists.
Friday 30 April, 6pm
Photographing Mussolini: The Making of a Political Icon (Palgrave, 2020)
Alessandra Antola Swan in conversation with Martina Caruso, Stephen Gundle and Giuliana Pieri (John Foot – Chair).
This pioneering book offers the first account of the work of the photographers, both official and freelance, who contributed to the forging of Mussolini’s image. It departs from the practice of using photographs purely for illustration and places them instead at the centre of the analysis.
Throughout the 1930s photographs of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini were chosen with care by the regime. They were deployed to highlight those physical traits – the piercing eyes, protruding jaw, shaved head – that were meant to evoke the Duce’s strength, determination and innate sense of leadership in the mind of his contemporaries.
The chapters in this volume explore the photographic image in the socio-political context of the time and shows how it was a significant contributor to the development of Italian mass culture between the two world wars.
Martina Caruso is an art historian and writer. Since completing her BA at the University of Oxford and her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, she has lectured on the history and theory of photography at the University of the Arts London, Paris Assas and John Cabot University in Rome. She published her book Italian Humanist Photography from Fascism to the Cold War with Bloomsbury in 2016. Currently Martina is the Paris x Rome Fellow at the Max Planck Institutes of the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome and the DFK in Paris.
John Foot is Professor of Modern Italian History at the School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol. A renowned historian, Professor Foot spent twenty years in Milan in the 1980s and 1990s and specialises in twentieth century and contemporary Italian history on which he has published extensively. His publications include: Milan Since the Miracle; Calcio. A History of Italian Football; Italy’s Divided Memory; Pedalare! Pedalare!; The Man Who Closed the Asylums and, more recently, The Archipelago. Italy since 1945. Professor Foot is also a regular contributor to The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and History Today.
Stephen Gundle is Professor in the Film and Television Studies Department at the University of Warwick. His books include Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943-92 (2000), Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy (2007), Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (2008, with David Forgacs), Glamour: A History (2008) and Death and the Dolce Vita: The Dark Side of Rome in the 1950s (2011). Co-editor, with Christopher Duggan and Giuliana Pieri, of The Cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italians (2013), he is also the author of Mussolini’s Dream Factory: Film Stardom in Fascist Italy (2013), Fame amid the Ruins: Italian Film Stardom in the Age of Neorealism (2020).
Giuliana Pieri is Professor in Italian and the Visual Arts and Head of the School of Humanities at Royal Holloway University of London. She has published widely on 19th and 20th century visual culture, cultural history and popular literature. Her research interests are firmly in the area of comparative and interdisciplinary studies, especially the intersection of the verbal and the visual, and the role of Italian visual culture in the construction of Italian identity both in Italy and abroad. Recent volumes include The Cult of the Duce. Mussolini and the Italians (2013, with S. Gundle and C. Duggan), and Italian Crime Fiction (2011). As Principal Investigator, Pieri’s contribution to Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2020: Interart/Intermedia focuses on Italian Modernism and the intersection between design (pre- and postwar) and Italian culture as part of the project’s collaboration with the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art.
Alessandra Antola Swan is a cultural historian and independent researcher. Her PhD on Mussolini and photography was part of the AHRC project The Cult of the Duce. Mussolini and the Italians, 1918-2005. In 2013 she organised the annual conference Iconic Images in Modern Italy: Politics, Culture and Society for the Association for the Study of Modern Italy. In 2016 she was the guest editor for the ASMI journal special issue ‘Iconic Images in Modern Italy’. Her research on photographs, as meaningful historical material, has an interdisciplinary approach and focuses on propaganda, fascism, antifascism, the history of emotions-mentalities and the visual imagery connected to political events. As well as articles, chapters in collective publications (The Cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italians; The Political Portrait: Leadership, Image and Power), her monograph Photographing Mussolini: The Making of a Political Icon was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020.
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