Fortunato Depero - Lantern

The work is a beautiful example of Futurist art, whose aesthetic concerns are also reflected in the choice of subject matter. Born and developed in Italy in the early decades of the 20th century and inspired by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's manifesto, Futurism extolled progress, technology, the speed of machines, and the dynamism of cities. These programmatic lines, in addition to shaping the Futurists' artistic language, also absolutely determined their themes. Recurring subjects of Futurist art are machines, emphasizing their speed, or the frenetic pace of modern, industrial cities. Simply put, everything related to technological and mechanical progress was of interest to the Futurists and reflected their celebration of modernity and progress.

While Futurist art adhered to very specific programmatic guidelines, it can be said with certainty that each representative of the group had his own distinctive language. This is particularly true for Fortunato Depero, who distinguished himself from other Futurists by his own penchant for mechanomorphism. Indeed, where in other Futurists, such as Balla or Boccioni, the exaltation of dynamism led to a total abstraction of subjects, in Depero, as we see in this "Lantern," we find the static heaviness of the mechanical object exalted in its strongly geometric structure. The discourse pursued by Depero within Futurism is analogous to the research conducted by artists such as Gris and Leger within Cubism: a departure from two-dimensional synthesis for an exaltation of geometric form, viewed from various angles and perspectives. This is precisely what we see in Depero's lantern, where the forced, perfectly central perspective highlights the object's parallelepiped structure, with its angles and edges. Furthermore, the entire space surrounding the object is conceived according to a rigid, rational geometry. Thus, the beams of light, both inside and outside the lantern, are delineated as perfect curves endowed with their own plastic concreteness.

Fortunato Depero was born in Fondo in 1892. In 1913, he moved to Rovereto, where he spent much of his artistic career. He was one of the leading exponents of Italian Futurism, and his research encompassed all fields of the visual arts, from painting to sculpture, from design to advertising graphics, from set design to costume design. His activity was concentrated in the "Casa d'Arte" that he opened in Rovereto in 1919, where he produced applied art objects, fabric inlays, and collages. During the same period, he also created interior decorations and furnishings, such as the Devil's Cabaret, for which he also created the wall decorations. Fortunato Depero died in 1960 in Rovereto, a year after founding the first Italian Futurist Museum.

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