Title:

Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy

Author/ Editor:

Claudia Lazzaro, Rodger J. Crum

Publisher:

Cornell University Press

Year:

2004

This ambitious collection treating the Italian Fascists' appropriation of the past for political purposes focuses on the role of the visual in the aim of fusing the past and the modern world in Mussolini's Italy. With contributions by art historians and classicists, literary and intellectual historians, Donatello among the Blackshirts demonstrates that the Fascist regime appropriated not only Italy's ancient Roman past but also the medieval, Renaissance, and even baroque eras, as well as its own recent history, in constructing a new myth of the nation.