Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,
in full Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti (b. Dec. 22, 1876,
Alexandria—d. Dec. 2, 1944, Bellagio, Italy), Italian-French
prose writer, novelist, poet, and dramatist, the ideological
founder of Futurism, an early 20th-century literary,
artistic, and political movement.
Marinetti was educated in
Egypt, France, Italy, and Switzerland and began his literary
career working for an Italian–French magazine in Milan.
During most of his life his base was in France, though he
made frequent trips to Italy and wrote in the languages of
both countries. Such early poetry as the French Destruction
(1904) showed the vigour and anarchic experimentation with
form characteristic of his later work.
Futurism had its official
beginning with the publication of Marinetti’s “Manifeste de
Futurisme” in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro (Feb. 20, 1909;
see the Manifesto of Futurism). His ideas were quickly
adopted in Italy, where the writers Aldo Palazzeschi,
Corrado Govoni, and Ardengo Soffici were among his most
important disciples.
Marinetti’s manifesto was
also endorsed by Futurist painters, who published a
manifesto of their own in 1910. Such painters and sculptors
as Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini
carried out Marinetti’s ideas.
Marinetti’s later works
reiterated the themes introduced in his 1909 manifesto. In
1910 he published a chaotic novel (entitled Mafarka le
Futuriste in France and Mafarka il futurista in Italy),
which illustrated and elaborated on his theory. He also
applied Futurism to drama in such plays as the French Le Roi
bombance (performed 1909; “The Feasting King”) and the
Italian Anti-neutralitą (1912; “Anti-Neutrality”) and summed
up his dramatic theory in a prose work, Teatro sintetico
futurista (1916; “Synthetic Futurist Theatre”).
In a volume of poems,
Guerra sola igiene del mundo (1915; “War the Only Hygiene of
the World”), Marinetti exulted over the outbreak of World
War I and urged that Italy be involved. He became an active
Fascist, an enthusiastic backer of Mussolini, and argued in
Futurismo e Fascismo (1924), that Fascism was the natural
extension of Futurism. Although his views helped temporarily
to ignite Italian patriotism, Marinetti lost most of his
following by the second decade of the 20th century.
