The City Rises

In 1910, the Italian painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni completed his painting, The City Rises. A monumental work spanning almost ten feet across, it is a major statement of Italian Futurism and its main themes: technological progress, speed, energy, movement, violence, destruction and youth. Boccioni's city rises with the relentless drive for modernization that coloured the Futurist movement, its vision writ large across the smokestacks and construction scaffolding in the painting's background as, in the foreground, human (read as male) labour harness horses and machines towards their dream of industrial and technological development.

But it is the painting's light that catches my attention. Boccioni uses the technique of Divisionism which separates colour for optical interaction to achieve maximum luminosity. His rapid directional brushstrokes and the brilliant colours cast across the painting emphasize the power, dynamism and destructive promise of the rising city. But light also represents several beliefs held by Boccioni and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (who led the Futurist movement and authored its first manifesto). One of these was how, following “recent scientific and pseudoscientific theories of matter,” such as those by Gustave Le Bon's The Evolution of Matter (1905), a text well known to the Futurists, the structure of matter could “dissociate” into energy.