Aldo Cazzullo (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
margherita Sarfatti he didn’t just love Benito Mussolini. Before the future Duce, he was romantically linked to Umberto Boccioni, the great painter.
It is a story that emerges from the pages of Humbert Boccioni. Life of a subversivethe definitive biography of the leader of futurism, written by Rachele Ferrario – also biographer of Sarfatti – and just published by Mondadori.
When they meet in 1909, he is the great artist who will soon paint the Rising city and the Fight in the galleryshe is the art critic who occupies the scene in Milan with her living room and will be among the first to support the novelty of the avant-garde.
Sarfatti, cultured, international, impetuous and unprejudiced just like Boccioni, immediately invites him to lunch.
She knows he’s considered a womanizer. He also knows that he loves women as he can love an artist, who will not be able to replace the passion that his “Mugik”, as Boccioni calls after a trip to Russia, has for art.
“Umberto Boccioni. Life of a subversive” by Rachele Ferrario (Le Scie, Mondadori).
Boccioni doesn’t want distractions when he creates. Nothing, not even the flu, stops him. «Tonight, if you come very late, you will find me, but I will work until late… Hello dear, don’t be discouraged, be strong even if you won’t find me and come back when you can. You are the only creature that interests me.’
Who wouldn’t want to receive a letter like this? Their bond is stronger than you might think. At the time of the passion Boccioni gets to scar the portrait that he has just painted (and that she will keep for the rest of her life); then when love diminishes Boccioni portrays it in one of the official versions of the Antigrazioso, a futurist synthesis of beauty and makes it the symbol of the aesthetic idea of the new time.
“Margherita Sarfatti” by Rachele Ferrario (Mondadori).
Their tormented love will have moments of struggle and disagreement, especially on painting. But it is an authentic partnership. Boccioni dies at the age of 33, in uniform, falling from his horse, in the rear of the Great War.
In Milan she is the only one to have understood Mugik’s sculptural research and to inherit Boccioni’s art column. Thirty years after she wrote about him, she was still jealous of him: she thought he had died of “loving vanity, while going to see a woman.”
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