Il Novecento Italiano

Il Novecento Italiano (Italian for The Italian Twentieth Century) was an Italian art group formed in Milan in 1922 with the aim of reviving the tradition of large-scale painting and sculpture in a classical, monumental style. The movement arose within the wider European return to order after the First World War, when many artists abandoned radical avant-garde experiment in favour of clarity, weightiness of form and a connection to the Italian classical heritage, from Roman antiquity to the masters of the early Renaissance. The group's ideologist and promoter was the critic and collector Margherita Sarfatti, and among its artists were Mario Sironi, Achille Funi, Anselmo Bucci and Ubaldo Oppi. Their painting is marked by simplified, sculptural volumes, static compositions, muted colour and a sense of solemn stillness. Novecento gained official recognition under the Fascist regime, with which some of its members were associated, which later complicated assessment of the movement. Nonetheless, Il Novecento Italiano remains an important example of interwar Neoclassicism and a testimony to the complex relations between modern art, tradition and politics in the twentieth century.