Page 1 - Technical Manifesto of Futurist

Technical Manifesto of Futurist

Sculpture

The sculpture that we can see in the monuments and exhibitions of Europe affords us so

lamentable a spectacle of barbarism and lumpishness that my Futurist eye withdraws from it in
horror and disgust. We see almost everywhere the blind and clumsy imitation of all the formulae

inherited from the past: an imitation which the cowardice of tradition and the listlessness of
facility have systematically encouraged. Sculptural art in Latin countries is perishing under

the ignominious yoke of Greece and of Michelangelo, a yoke carried with the ease of skill in France
and Belgium, but with the most dreary stupefaction in Italy. We find in Germanic countries a

ridiculous obsession with a hellenized Gothic style that is industrialized in Berlin and
enervated in Munich by heavy-handed professors. Slavic countries, on the other hand, are
distinguished by a chaotic mixture of Greek archaisms, demons conceived by Nordic literature,

and monsters born of oriental imagination. It is a tangle of influence ranging from the sibylline

and excessive detail of the Asiatic spirit to the puerile and grotesque ingenuity of Laplanders
and Eskimos.

In all these manifestations of sculpture, from the most mechanical to those moved by innovating

currents, there persists the same error: the artist copies live models and studies classical
statues with the artless conviction that he can find a style corresponding to modern feeling,

without giving up the traditional concept of sculptural form. One must add also that this
concept, with its age-old ideal of beauty, never gets away from the period of Phidias and the

artistic decadence which followed it.

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