Abstract
‘The photograph as a source and agent of history’ reviews the way photographs of Mussolini have been treated in the historiography of Fascism, including works specifically concerned with visual material. Themes and issues are identified within broader academic debate and the field of photography that deal with the representation of Mussolini. Selected works allude to the photographic representation of Mussolini and provide an opportunity for some general observations.
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Notes
- 1.
On history and other disciplines and the use of non-textual sources, see seminal works by Walter Benjamin (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935); John Berger (Ways of Seeing, 1972); Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida, 1980), Susan Sontag (On Photography, 1971) influenced succeeding publications on the theme. See in particular Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: the Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), pp. 9–19; Adolfo Mignemi, Lo sguardo e l’immagine. La fotografia come documento storico (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003), pp. 9–25; Gabriele D’Autilia, L’indizio e la prova. La storia nella fotografia (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2005), pp. 125–156; Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice, 2nd edn (London: Hodder, 2006), pp. 59–86 and pp. 150–172, Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies (London: Sage, 2007), pp. 1–27.
- 2.
Ernesto Laura, Immagine del fascismo. La conquista del potere [1915–1925] (Milan: Longanesi, 1973).
- 3.
Pasquale Chessa, Dux. Benito Mussolini: una biografia per immagini (Milan: Mondadori, 2008).
- 4.
Renzo De Felice and Luigi Goglia, Storia fotografica del fascismo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1981); Mussolini. Il mito (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1983). The appeal of symbols nurtured by Fascism is the underlying theme, the importance of the relation between aesthetics and politics in Fascist Italy and elaborates the concept of Mussolini the politician-artist, Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 82.
- 5.
This theme had previously been analysed by several other authors, who referred to Mussolini as a ‘stagemanager’ and actor, see Piero Melograni, ‘The Cult of the Duce in Mussolini’s Italy’, Journal of Contemporary History, 11, 4, (1976), 221–237 (p. 226).
- 6.
A few of the better known photographers who portrayed Mussolini over a number of years such as Ghitta Carell, Vincenzo Carrese and Adolfo Porry Pastorel are mentioned, see for example in Giuliana Scimé, Fotografia della libertà e delle dittature, da Sander a Cartier-Bresson. 1922–1946 (Milan: Mazzotta, 1995); Chessa, Dux, p. 12, including Vitullo, a forgotten independent photographer who is said to have been one of Mussolini’s favourites.
- 7.
Aspects of the aesthetic impact of the regime have been treated by historians and other scholars concerned with symbols and images. Luisa Passerini’s Mussolini immaginario (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1991) is an example of a scholarly work entirely dedicated to the myth of the Duce, where the author highlights the importance of photography. Passerini explains that her use of the term ‘imaginary’ is relevant not to photographic but rather to ‘mental’ and ‘emotional’ images. The material she analyses draws exclusively on imaginary physical features of the Duce drawn from written accounts. In Fascist Spectacle, Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi demonstrates how the Duce could be perceived iconic even when absent with his presence evoked, p. 49. The religious character of Fascism is emphasised in Emilio Gentile’s study Il culto del littorio (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1998) ‘where the regime’s ritual events, the commemoration of Fascist martyrs and pattern of the Duce’s personality cult were all elements of a secular religion which the regime presented to Italians and indeed wished to impose on them’ in Sergio Luzzatto, ‘The Political Culture of Fascist Italy’, Contemporary European History, 8 (1999), 317–334 (p. 323).
- 8.
Piero Melograni, ‘The Cult of the Duce in Mussolini’s Italy’, p. 226.
- 9.
Liliana Ellena, ‘Rifare gli italiani. Spazi, appartenenze e identità nello sguardo del Luce’, in L’Italia del Novecento. Le fotografie e la storia. Il potere da Giolitti a Mussolini (1900–1945), ed. by Giovanni De Luna, Gabriele D’Autilia and Luca Criscenti, 3 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), p. 203.
- 10.
Sergio Luzzatto, ‘Niente tubi di stufa sulla testa’, in L’Italia del Novecento, pp. 117–201.
- 11.
Ellena, ‘Rifare gli italiani’ in L’Italia del Novecento, p. 203.
- 12.
Rose, Visual Methodologies, pp. 22–27.
- 13.
Jordanova, History in Practice, p. 38.
- 14.
Ibid., p. 164.
- 15.
Stephen Shore, The Nature of Photographs (London: Phaidon, 2007), p. 10.
- 16.
Ibid., p. 97.
- 17.
The term ‘photographic base’ refers to a base of paper, card or material coated with a light sensitive emulsion which when exposed fixes the image from the negative (or negative plate) as a physical object. ‘A photograph is flat, it has edges, and it is static; it doesn’t move. While it is flat, it is not a true plane. The print has a physical dimension’, in Shore, The Nature of Photographs, p. 15.
- 18.
Jordanova, History in Practice, p. 165.
- 19.
Ibid., p. 165.
- 20.
Gabriele D’Autilia, ‘Le fonti per la storia del Luce: un mosaico (quasi) completo’, in Fonti d’archivio per la storia del LUCE 1925–1945, ed. by Marco Pizzo and Gabriele D’Autilia (Rome: Istituto Nazionale Luce, 2004), p. 13.
- 21.
Jordanova, History in Practice, p. 167.
- 22.
Ibid., p. 166.
- 23.
D’Autilia, L’indizio e la prova, p. 158.
- 24.
Laura Malvano, Fascismo e politica dell’immagine (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1988), pp. 32–33.
- 25.
See, for example, Richard Bosworth, Mussolini (New York: Hodder, 2002), pp. 1–12; Anthony L. Cardoza, ‘Recasting the Duce for the New Century: Recent Scholarship on Mussolini and Italian Fascism’, The Journal of Modern History, 3, 77 (2005), pp. 722–737; Ferdinando Cordova, Il ‘consenso’ imperfetto. Quattro capitoli sul fascismo (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, 2010).
- 26.
D’Autilia, ‘Le fonti per la storia del Luce’, in Fonti d’archivio, p. 17.
- 27.
Originally published in Repubblica, 10–11 July 1983, the article was reprinted with the title ‘I ritratti del Duce’, in Italo Calvino, Saggi 1945–1985 (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), pp. 2878–2891.
- 28.
Calvino, Saggi 1945–1985, pp. 2878–2891.
- 29.
Antonio Gibelli, ‘Un’epoca in transizione: dall’età liberale alla società di massa’, in L’Italia del Novecento, pp. 3–36.
- 30.
Claudia Schmölders, Hitler’s Face: The Biography of an Image (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
- 31.
Ibid, p. 150.
- 32.
Ibid., p. 38.
- 33.
See papers by Catriona Kelly, Jan Plamper and Alice Mocanescu presented at the conference on Stalin and the Lesser Gods, ‘The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorship in Comparative Perspective’, held at the European University Institute in Florence in May 2003, which resulted in the volume: The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc, ed. by Balázs Apor, Jan C. Behrends, Polly Jones and E. A. Rees (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), in Alexis Schwarzenbach, ‘Royal Photographs: Emotions for the People’, Contemporary European History, 3, 13 (2004), 255–280; Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007) a recent biography with photographs purely for illustrative purposes, similar to other Mussolini biographies. Also relevant are two exhibitions, one in 2007, ‘Art and Propaganda’ in the first half of twentieth century, and more recently ‘Hitler and the Germans’, in October 2010, on the personality cult of the Nazi dictator, both at the German Historical Museum in Berlin.
- 34.
Mille facce per un Duce was the title of the whole cultural insert in which various pieces by different authors appeared: Italo Calvino ‘Cominciò con un cilindro’, Alberto Arbasino ‘Il Canto del Pipistrello’, Luigi Malerba ‘Quella voce che mi insegue’, and Enzo Forcella ‘E finì come Popeye’, in La Repubblica, 10–11 July 1983.
- 35.
Enrico Sturani, Le cartoline per il Duce (Turin: Edizioni del Capricorno, 2003), pp. 127–128.
- 36.
Schmölders, Hitler’s Face, p. 37.
- 37.
Bosworth, Mussolini, p. 125.
- 38.
For the full report, see Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario 1883–1920 (Turin: Einaudi, 1965), pp. 725–737.
- 39.
Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, p. 86.
- 40.
Mention of loudspeakers installed in piazze is made by Piero Melograni, ‘The Cult of the Duce in Mussolini’s Italy’, Journal of Contemporary History, 4, 11 (1976), p. 231 and in Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, p. 86.
- 41.
Gabriele D’Autilia, ‘Il fascismo senza passione’, in L’Italia del Novecento, p. 107 and mentioned also by Falasca-Zamponi “his face (Mussolini) was a spectacle in itself, appropriately coordinated with Mussolini’s oratorical tone and body movements” in Fascist Spectacle, p. 86.
- 42.
Sturani, Le cartoline per il Duce, pp. 174–175.
- 43.
Passerini, Mussolini immaginario. The author discusses the same concept in ‘Costruzione del femminile e del maschile dicotomia sociale e androginia simbolica’, in A. Del Boca, M. Legnani, M.G. Rossi, Il regime fascista (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1995), p. 504.
- 44.
Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ‘18 BL: Fascist Mass Spectacle’, Representations, 43 (1993), 89–125.
- 45.
The metaphor of ‘metallisation’ central to Marinetti’s writings is cited in the epilogue to Walter Benjamin’s, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: ‘War is Beautiful Because It Initiates the Dream of Metalisation of the Human Body’, Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 241, in Schnapp, ‘18 BL’, p. 124.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 117.
- 47.
Cinzia Sartini Blum, ‘Fascist Temples and Theaters of the Masses’, South Central Review, 3–4, 14 (1997), 45–58, (p. 55).
- 48.
Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, p. 44.
- 49.
Ibid., p. 51.
- 50.
Ibid., p. 51.
- 51.
Ibid., p. 73.
- 52.
Annitrenta. Arte e Cultura in Italia (Milan: Mazzotta, 1982).
- 53.
Francesca Alinovi, ‘La fotografia in Italia negli Anni Trenta’, in Annitrenta. Arte e Cultura in Italia, 2nd edn (Milan: Mazzotta, 1983), p. 409.
- 54.
Ibid., pp. 409–434.
- 55.
D’Autilia, ‘Il fascismo senza passione. L’Istituto Luce’, in L’Italia del Novecento, p. 102.
- 56.
Ibid., p. 102.
- 57.
Ibid., p. 175.
- 58.
Ellena, ‘Rifare gli italiani’, in L’Italia del Novecento, pp. 202–277.
- 59.
Carlo Bertelli and Giulio Bollati, Storia d’Italia. Annali 2. L’immagine fotografica 1845–1945, 2 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), p. 178.
- 60.
The theory that sees Roosevelt as a model for Mussolini is rejected by Bosworth who believes that the former was in fact quite the opposite: ‘Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Baldwin, Chamberlain, Roosevelt, Blum and Franco, were […] less expansive than the Duce they timidly kept their bodies as private concerns’, in Bosworth, Mussolini, p. 212.
- 61.
Bertelli and Bollati, Storia d’Italia, p. 181.
- 62.
Ibid., p. 86.
- 63.
Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, p. 65.
- 64.
Sturani, Le cartoline per il Duce, p. 193.
- 65.
Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing, p. 21.
- 66.
Graham Clarke, The photograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 19.
- 67.
On how to interpret visual materials see in particular, the works by John Berger (1977), Peter Burke (1992).
- 68.
Graham Clarke (1997), Hal Foster (1988), Colin Jacobson (2002), Ludmilla Jordanova (2000), Gillian Rose (2007), Claudia Schmölders (2005), Stephen Shore (2007), David Levi Strauss (2005), John Taylor (1998) and Penny Tinkler (2013) all specifically concentrate on vision and visuality in context. Quoting Victor Burgin, Clarke suggests that the ‘photographic discourse’ which can be read like text in the image is the ‘site of a complex intertextuality, an overlapping series of previous texts taken for granted at a particular cultural and historical conjuncture’. Clarke continues by saying that the photograph depends ‘on a series of historical, cultural, social and technical contexts’ to understand it as both an object as well as an image. The meaning of images is subject to continuous transformation according to technical variations in texture, colour or site, whether we see it in a newspaper, in an album or on a wall, and also in what social or historical circumstance (Graham Clarke, The Photograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 27.
- 69.
The historian Angela Madesani interviewed Laura Gasparini, the curator of the Fototeca Biblioteca Panizzi in Reggio Emilia, about issues relative to the situation in Italy of photographic archives and cataloguing systems. Gasparini defined the photographic archive as an ‘organic collection of documents’, a ‘place of collective memory’, and a ‘metaphor for the medieval workshop’, in ‘Intervista a Laura Gasparini’ in Angela Madesani, Storia della fotografia (Milan: Mondadori, 2005), pp. 351–361.
- 70.
Giovanni De Luna, ‘Prefazione all’opera’, in L’Italia del Novecento, p. xxxvi.
- 71.
Lucia Salvatori Principe, ‘Premessa’, in Fonti d’archivio, ed. by Pizzo and D’Autilia.
- 72.
The ICCD (l’Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione) has drawn up a form ‘Scheda F’ to be used when cataloguing photographic material with the intention of compiling data in a universally comparable format, in Chiara Micol Schiona, L’archivio fotografico (Milan: Editrice Bibliografica, 2019), pp. 54–55.
- 73.
Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive. Une impression freudienne (Paris: Galilée, 1995) trad. it. Mal d’archivio. Un’impressione freudiana (Napoli: Filema, 1996).
- 74.
Laura, Immagine del fascismo, p. 11.
- 75.
Micol Schiona, L’archivio fotografico, p. 18.
- 76.
LUCE (L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa), in effect the visual expression of Mussolini’s government communication, had its origins in a private film company created in 1923 known as the Sindacato di Istruzione Cinematografica, which the government began to subsidise almost immediately. In 1924, the Sindacato was transformed into the Istituto LUCE, and the next year it was made a state agency, in Philip V. Cannistraro, Historical Dictionary of Fascist Italy (London: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 313.
- 77.
Gabriele D’Autilia, “Il fascismo senza passione. L’Istituto Luce” in L’Italia del Novecento, p. 92 and p. 103.
- 78.
Image search engine and database are still largely text driven. In the future, however, it is likely image-based search engines will become more commonly available, TinEye, for example, is an online search engine dedicated to searching the Web by image that finds out provenance, use, post-editing process, in Sunil Manghani, Image Studies: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 55.
- 79.
Rose, Visual Methodologies, pp. 257–262.
- 80.
See a list of questions useful as a starting point for studying specific images in Rose, Visual Methodologies, pp. 258–259.
- 81.
A candid photograph is when captured without creating a posed appearance.
- 82.
Rose, Visual Methodologies, p. 260.
- 83.
Burke, Eyewitnessing, p. 13.
- 84.
Ibid., p. 13.
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Antola Swan, A. (2020). The Photograph as a Source and Agent of History. In: Photographing Mussolini. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56506-0_2
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