Luigi Russolo, Futurist

by Luciano Chessa

  I. The Futurist theoretician should be a Professor of Hoffman [sic] Romance, and attempts the manufacture of a perfect being.

  Art merges in Life again everywhere.

  Leonardo was the first Futurist, and, incidentally, an airman among Quattro Cento angels.

  His Mona Lisa eloped from the Louvre like any woman.

  She is back again now, smiling, with complacent reticence, as before her escapade; no one can say when she will be off once more, she possesses so much vitality.

  Her olive pigment is electric, so much more so than the carnivorous Belgian bumpkins by Rubens in a neighbouring room, who, besides, are so big they could not slip about in the same subtle fashion.

  Rubens IMITATED Life—borrowed the colour of it’s [sic] crude blood, traced the sprawling and surging of it’s [sic] animal hulks.

  Leonardo MADE NEW BEINGS, delicate and severe, with as ambitious an intention as any ingenious mediaeval Empiric.16

  IL LEONARDO

  Veneration of Leonardo among the futurists had deep roots in the prehistory of the movement, that is, in the Movimento Fiorentino, a group of intellectuals active in Florence at the beginning of the twentieth century, whose goal was to reawaken Italian cultural life from its gilded sleep. Marinetti eventually made this mission his own.17

  The Movimento Fiorentino disseminated its ideas most distinctively by means of periodicals. Among them, Il Leonardo (1903-07), which distilled the experience of the earlier periodical Il Marzocco, became the Florentine movement’s most popular publication. Of the first series of Il Leonardo, Martin has written that it was “infused with mysticism and D’Annunzian aesthetics.”18 The periodical passed through a more pragmatic second phase but then returned to a mystical-spiritual third phase.

  The general editorial tone, determined by the two founders Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, was “mercurial and polemical,” in the tradition of mordant Tuscan invective.19 The content alternated between philosophy and politics, occasionally dipping into art and literature. Philosophically, Il Leonardo affirmed a kind of mystical idealism over the positivism and materialism prevailing in the cultural debate of those years; politically it was nationalist. Its idealism was sui generis; the writers for Il Leonardo went to great lengths to exclude, at least in the early phases, the name of Benedetto Croce from their debate, and they frequently critiqued Hegel in their columns.

  Papini’s imprint determined Il Leonardo’s character. His essays emphasized symbolist literature and critical-philosophical literary studies; in many of them, the key voices were those of Bergson, Nietzsche, and Steiner. Though Bergson’s philosophical approach in those years had not yet developed into a philosophy of action—his élan vital would not take shape until 1907—the periodical rallied behind the critique of positivism and materialism laid out in Bergson’s 1896 Matière et mémoire.

  Il Leonardo’s important conjunction of symbolist thinking and condemnation of positivism, along with the influence of Nietzsche, Bergson, and Steiner, anticipated the antimaterialism that futurists, including Russolo, soon espoused. In what was almost a natural progression (and perhaps owing something to the stormy circumstances of the famous brawl of 1911 between Papini and Soffici, on one hand, and Marinetti and Milanese futurists, on the other, and the reconciliation that followed), the positions of the futurists and that of the most representative members of Il Leonardo converged in 1913 in of Giovanni Papini’s and Ardengo Soffici’s biweekly publication Lacerba.20

  FIGURE 29. Adolfo De Carolis, header for Il Leonardo (1903). Courtesy of the Images Archive of Vallecchi.

  From the periodical’s name Il Leonardo to the motto by Leonardo da Vinci reproduced in the header in every issue—Non si volge chi a stella è fisso (He does not turn who is fixed on a star)—the homage to Leonardo could not have been more explicit (fig. 29).21 The motto, adopting the metaphor of sailing that is guided by stars, emphasized the importance of the inner spiritual quest, an undertaking that requires perseverance ruled by firm inspirational principles, especially when it concerns travel toward the Ideal.

  At the turn of the twentieth century, Leonardo da Vinci was thought to be the guide who was supposed to rescue the new generation from the stagnation of the Italian cultural swamp. This is clearly expressed in the Leonardo group’s mission statement—and founding manifesto—which was published in their first issue of January 4, 1903.

  SYNTHETIC PROGRAM

  A group of youths desirous of liberation, wishing for universality, yearning for a higher intellectual life, gathered in Florence under the symbolic augural name of Leonardo to intensify their own existence, elevate their own thought, exalt their own art.

  In LIFE they are pagans and individualists—lovers of beauty and intelligence, adorers of profound nature and the fulfilling life, enemies of every form of Nazarene sheepishness and plebeian servitude.

  In THOUGHT they are individualists and idealists, that is to say beyond every system and every limitation, convinced that every philosophy is only a personal way of life—Therefore they reject every other existence outside of thought.

  In ART they love the ideal transfiguration of life and fight its inferior forms, they aspire to beauty as evocative portrayal of a profound and serene life.

  Among the expressions of their strengths, of their enthusiasms, and of their disdains will be a periodical entitled “LEONARDO.”

  The signers gathered in Florence in the name of Leonardo considered him not a simple role model but their nume protettore, spirito-guida, a god who blessed their pagan ecclesia. This evangelic tone recurred in futurist rhetoric not only in the writings of the orphans of Il Leonardo—Soffici (in Pittori e scultori sacri), Papini, and Prezzolini (whose La Voce was conceived as a mission toward moral purification)—but even, and just as forcefully—in those of Marinetti and Boccioni. Veneration of Leonardo as a mystic, or initiate (but also the reliance on him as a banner, protective shield, and talisman symbolizing the power of the Ideal over Matter), had its roots in symbolism and was fully espoused by the European movement of decadentism toward the end of the nineteenth century.22

  In 1855 the French art historian Alexis-François Rio had described The Last Supper, despite its degradation and faded color, as “a great mystical composition.” Rio’s judgment spread rapidly among adherents of the decadent movement such as Moreau, Walter Pater, and Mallarmé, who read spiritual and occultist meanings into the celebrated fresco; the judgment was later reinforced by Valéry and Freud.

  From within turn-of-the-twentieth-century Italian culture, which was clearly infused with symbolist and idealist thought—the most authoritative judgment of the Last Supper was offered by the father of Italian decadentism, Gabriele D’Annunzio, who in 1901 emphatically called it a “mirror of the Ideal [ . . . ] the summit of Art, the vertex of Thought and of Mystery, the visible sign of the Immortal.”23 This opinion must have influenced Papini and Prezzolini, and through them, Russolo.

  Il Leonardo was highly esteemed in symbolist, progressive circles such as that around Marinetti’s Poesia, which Russolo frequented, and he certainly knew about the periodical. Though he was never as intimate with Papini and Soffici as Carrà was, and though he parted ways with them after the quarrels in 1915 between them and Marinetti, Russolo published several articles in their Lacerba, and one of these articles included his only surviving musical fragment—the famous seven bars from Risveglio di una città of 1913.

  Russolo’s notion of Leonardo as “spirit guide” cannot but have derived from Il Leonardo. This is confirmed in his late period, which was, as is often the case, a time of confessions. In Al di là della materia, Russolo places Leonardo among the fari (beacons) of the human spirit, in the company of Dante, Shakespeare, and Palestrina.24 Here Leonardo is still regarded as a “spirit guide,” uncorrupted by positivism and materialism, while Russolo’s language is that of thirty-five years earlier:

  If his contemporaries did not see anything but the artist in Leonardo, posterity, amazed
by his experimental science, ended up wanting to make him into a positivist and even almost a materialist. But this is a clumsy error. His stupendous definition: “painting is poetry that one sees” is an all-inclusive motto and certainly does not mean that poetry and painting must be merely descriptive.

  He said “poetry” and not history, description, or speech, because in poetry one presupposes an evasion of the laws of necessity to reach a higher harmony that is spiritual, through the harmony of verses.

  (On this definition of Leonardo all painters who make only description or speeches—and they are legion—should meditate!) Leonardo wrote “He does not turn who is fixed on a star!” And almost to explain the one and the other he has established the hierarchy that “our body is ruled by the sky and the sky is ruled by the spirit.”

  This hardly amounts to materialism!”25

  In addition to quoting from Leonardo’s Il Paragone, Russolo repeats—symptomatically—the motto used by Il Leonardo (fig. 29); Papini and Prezzolini’s reverence toward Leonardo, which may very well have guided Russolo’s lifelong Leonardine investigations, was still imprinted on his mind.

  THE REASONS FOR SILENCE

  Russolo mentioned Leonardo often, but he never openly acknowledged his debt to him. Could it be that, like his fellow theosophist Giacomo Balla, he believed himself to be Leonardo’s reincarnation? Could it be that he self-identified with Leonardo to such a point that he thought it unnecessary even to acknowledge his borrowings?

  Russolo believed in reincarnation and wrote at length on this subject in Al di là della materia. Nor would this have been the only time that Russolo speculated on his past lives: his friend Nino Frank maintained that Russolo considered himself a reincarnation of Cardinal Richelieu.26 Russolo believed—another principle derived from theosophy—that a person’s thoughts subsist “for a certain time after their emission in and around the places where they emerged [ . . . ]. Having the property of being received, [those thoughts] help [ . . . ] and go to enrich other men.”27

  A few paragraphs before this passage, Russolo even wrote about a “spiritual conversation” among artists of different epochs as a sort of migration of the spirit, a passing of the baton between one artist of genius and another. Russolo believed that such migration could manifest independently from the means of artistic expression and beyond the sensory field in which these means operate (as in the synesthetic theory of Marinetti’s tactilism): “A close kinship, an exchange of spiritual energies, a passage of divine fire occurs therefore between the great artists through the spiritual world where the arts no longer have the diversity of the matter from which they are shaped but rather conserve only their intimate final spirituality.”28

  Russolo must have considered a passage of “divine fire” between Leonardo and himself perfectly plausible, not only because Russolo lived in Milan (where Leonardo worked) but also because of the time he spent in contact with the spirit of Leonardo’s oeuvre. He may have thought the Stanze of the Sforza Castle to be still imbued with Leonardo’s spirit—an idea also explored by the experimental playwright Giovanni Testori, who in one of his theater works staged the sighting of Leonardo’s ghost floating over the castle ramparts.29

  Although this is a fascinating hypothesis, more concrete interpretive pathways ought to be explored. The reader will decide which of these hypotheses is the most compelling, keeping in mind that they may not be entirely incompatible.

  Maffina emphasized that “Russolo, in the abundant masses of annotations, writings, and notes on his instrument, is silent on every technical description of the construction.”30 This silence may have been due to Russolo’s unconscious embarrassment about the origin of his ideas: heavily marketed as futurist and yet at least in part derived from such a celebrated historical source as Leonardo.

  To rely openly on received tradition, especially a canonized one, was contrary to all the principles of novelty and originality that futurists incessantly proclaimed. Official futurist doctrine, though often contradicted in diaries and letters, dictated complete rejection of the past. One could not admit loving Leonardine thought, let alone applying it: the futurists could admire Leonardo privately but had to censure him publicly.

  This double standard is one of the many contradictions of the futurist movement, and it points to subconscious denial. There is much to learn from analyzing the reasons for this phenomenon; behind subconscious denial are often ill-concealed traces of personal feelings incompletely suppressed. But analysis can show that subconscious denial often reveals more than it conceals: it always attracts attention and thus often ends up exposing what had been intended to be concealed.

  Leonardo = Tradition was the futurists’ official equation. They could not openly admit to loving a tradition, for tradition burdened them unbearably. And because it frightened them, they hoped not to have to confront it. This is why the futurists attacked Leonardo publicly, and it may explain why Russolo could not admit a special connection with Leonardo, let alone admit to borrowing from him. Russolo may have been afraid that it would become public that Leonardo’s manuscripts were for him a source not only of research objectives but also of construction principles. And though the intonarumori and the nuovo istrumento musicale a corde were not merely replicas of Leonardo’s instruments, Russolo may have failed to recognize the extent of his own contribution and therefore feared being deemed unoriginal. It was necessary to keep silent.

  Maria Zanovello naïvely recounted an anecdote that reveals Russolo’s nervous embarrassment about Leonardo.31 While reading the galleys of Al di là della Materia—notably a section of part 2, “Alla ricerca del bello,” which Russolo dedicated to beacons of the human spirit—Zanovello realized that Leonardo da Vinci had not been included in the list. Familiar with her husband’s admiration for Leonardo, she was surprised at the omission and resolved to ask him why.

  Russolo was unprepared for his wife’s question but responded as best he could: “Leonardo is not an artist; he is a scientist.” When she reminded him of all that he had taught her of Leonardo’s spiritual importance, Russolo grew irritated. All he said, however, was: “To speak of Leonardo is not an easy thing.” But knowing that his wife considered him practically infallible, Russolo must have thought that to fail to include a section on Leonardo would make her even more suspicious. As Zanovello recounts, the next day, having thought the matter over, Russolo composed the passage on Leonardo cited above.

  Reading those lines, so infused with candid admiration for Leonardo the man and artist, with an understanding of the context in which they were written, leaves a bitter aftertaste of extorted confession. Had Russolo’s wife not persisted, there would not be a section on Leonardo in Al di là della materia. In all of his writings, this is the only instance in which Russolo explicitly cited Leonardo’s manuscripts and revealed his familiarity with them.

  Subconscious denial serves well to explain Russolo’s silence on the subject of his Leonardine borrowings, but his silence can be read in yet another way. Knowing that he felt protective about the insides of his intonarumori, we can just as reasonably assume that Russolo chose to avoid discussing specific mechanical principles so as not to trivialize the ultimate creative aims of his art of noises.32 And since Russolo gave a specific meaning to the word creativity, these aims may have been for him, at their core, ineffable. Let us unveil them.

  CHAPTER 11

  Third Level

  Beyond the process of spiritualizing / sanctifying the noise (first level) and that of synthesizing different noises into unity (second level), Russolo contemplated a third level. During the creative process described so far, the inspired artist is transported to a higher plane of consciousness, which allows him to comprehend the world from a privileged point of view. At this stage the artist enters a new level, one in which he can communicate with the spirits of the dead he has conjured up, who fluctuate in the same plane, awaiting reincarnation.1 The intonarumori were thus intended as a portal to the beyond; the disturbing brute
materiality of their noise was the call that conjured the spirits—a futurist, simultaneous, and dynamic call that was to guide the artist-creator in his process of transformation.

  Testimony of mediumistic music—that is, music produced at séances where a medium-musician plays under spirit dictation—became increasingly popular from mid-1800 on, and in Russolo’s day the practice would not have been unusual.2 The most convincing testimony of Russolo’s mediumistic music practices once again comes from Paolo Buzzi, Russolo’s intimate friend from the time of their first futurist struggles until Russolo’s last years in Cerro di Laveno.

  RUSSOLO WOUNDED

  On December 17, 1917, while defending the summit of Monte Grappa at Malga Camperona from the Alpenkorps’ offensive—a key moment of the battaglia d’arresto that finally succeeded in halting the Austro-German offense after the bloody Caporetto—Lieutenant Luigi Russolo of the Sixth Alpine Battalion “Val Brenta” was wounded in the head by the explosion of a grenade. In a futurist announcement of January 1918 celebrating his heroism in combat, for which he was decorated with a silver medal, Buzzi wrote of his friend in a brief text titled “Russolo ferito” (Russolo wounded): “Wherever he passed, with his hobnailed boots, there was a burst of sparks which resembled a halo [ . . . ]. But also his brain added to it the aureole of ingenious scintillations.” Buzzi also remembered Russolo as “the thin, electric Russolo living in our plane, who painted blue concentric atmospheres of music using elusive flashes of the paintbrush and conducted orchestras of intonarumori in theaters worldwide with gestures that recalled those of the Spirits conjured up by the tongue of Swedenborg.”3