Research Catalog

Title

Foro Italico / photographs by George Mott ; essays by Giorgio Armani, Michelangelo Sabatino, Luigi Ballerini.

Author

Mott, George

Publication

New York : PowerHouse Books, 2003.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• Ballerini, Luigi
• Sabatino, Michelangelo
• Armani, Giorgio

Description

1 v. (unpaged) : ill. (some col.); 36 cm.

Summary

Boasting to everyone that his forum would be grander than the Colosseum, Mussolini created the Stadio dei Marmi, or Stadium of Statues, an arena built outside Rome for the 1944 Olympic Games that were postponed by World War II. Believing a fascist state required the top level of physical fitness, Il Duce provided inspiration for his nation in the form of monumental art, commissioning sculptors from all over the country to create sixty Herculean statues of white marble to be put atop six-foot pedestals surrounding the stadium. The statues, based on figures from Italian war memorials, embodied the glorification of the athlete and the mannered heroism of the soldier. Startlingly erotic and poetic, each statue stands twelve feet tall, nude but for the occasional headband or sandals. So blatant was their sexual presence that the statues later provoked furtive attempts at "decency" involving fig leaves and loincloths. Once relegated to the category of political kitsch, these statues have, in recent times, been re-evaluated and are being recognized as objects of beauty and merit. "The Foro Italico ... sustains a guileless, perhaps unique, male eroticism which is at odds with the grandiloquent intentions of its planner and creators in Mussolini's fascist regime," explains George Mott, who first glimpsed the statues in 1962 and photographed them twenty years later. -- publisher's statement

Subject

• Mott, George
• Foro Italico (Rome, Italy) > Pictorial works
• Photography of sculpture > Italy > Rome

Genre/Form

• Pictorial works
• Books.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

ISBN

157687169X

LCCN

^^2002193025

OCLC

• 51095715
• SCSB-10253756

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library