Between the years of 1932 and 1945, modern Italian muralism, otherwise known as l'arte murale, made its debut in the Italian art world, bringing with it disputes and problems related to the discourse surrounding the endeavor, the materials that would make up these works, and the iconography and subject matter of the images. The muralists of modern Italy primarily depended on funding from the Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party or PNF) to make public murals for schools, post offices, train stations, fascist administrative buildings, and temporary exhibition spaces, complicating their works and raising the stakes of the modern practice of muralism. This dissertation considers the understudied history of modern Italian muralism in the ventennio, or twenty years of fascism and its relationship to the building of the Italian fascist empire under Benito Mussolini. Focusing on such artists as Mario Sironi, Massimo Campigli, Gino Severini, and Enrico Prampolini, each of the four chapters largely considers the language used to describe modern Italian muralism by practitioners, architects, critics, and fascist bureaucrats. As a secondary goal of each of the four chapters makes claims about the iconography related to imperialism and the experiments in modern and ancient materials. By focusing on these aspects, this dissertation demonstrates how modern muralism shifts throughout the 1930s and 1940s in Italy and how those alterations relate to political, social, imperialistic, and artistic issues and debates. While the existing scholarship has paid abundant attention to the art of Italian fascist culture, there is a major gap in the literature regarding Italian muralism during the ventennio and its effect on Italian artists, viewers, administrators, and future trajectories of Italian art. According to some of the primary literature and the secondary scholarship, modern Italian muralism was seen as a regression in art, returning to a more traditional or conservative position at a time when European modernism and the avant-garde laid a foundation for radical experimentation and a reshaping of human existence. However, the work of the Italian muralists, and the discourse surrounding it, demonstrate a serious desire and initiative to explore the social, political, and visual effects of modern materials within their murals. While some of the modern Italian murals may superficially appear conventional or predictable, this dissertation proves otherwise. Unlike mural practices occurring simultaneously in France, Germany, Mexico, the United States, and the Soviet Union, Italy's modern muralism carried the weight of mural traditions that extend back to antiquity. Italy's rich past is something that modern Italian muralists grappled with when creating their own murals under fascism. With experiments in fresco, mosaic, the plastica murale (plastic mural), and the fotomosaico (photomosaic), the modern Italian muralists transformed the tradition of Italian muralism into something unique and modern, and these examples are deserving of a rigorous analysis.
