The return to religion: Italian modernism under the auspices of French Thomism (1924-1944)

© 2013 Dr. Justine GraceThis thesis investigates Jacques Maritain’s influence on the Italian cultural scene during the interwar period. Jacques Maritain was a French Thomist philosopher who published, in 1920, the influential aesthetic tract Art et Scholastique. The text called for a renewal of sacred art—a modern sacred art—and sought to reconcile the fields of religion and art. As this thesis demonstrates, Maritain’s Thomist philosophy had a significant impact on art and architecture in Italy during the interwar period in Italy, and in particular on modernism, leading to the emergence of a modern sacred art in that country. As modernism is conventionally defined in contradistinction to religion, the thesis puts forward a dialectical model that conceptualises modernist art in relation to the traits and concepts shared with its perceived others, namely religion and tradition. Two concepts are developed to approach the phenomenon of modern sacred art: spiritual formalism and Catholic avant-gardism. The former is used as a framework for understanding the way traditionally formalist concerns in Italy could also have religious significance. The latter concept is used to demonstrate that Church art and architecture of the 1930s intersected with many aims of the historical avant-garde. The results of the archival and primary research reveal a widespread interest in renewing the forms of sacred art in Italy. A survey of newspapers and journals and an examination of personal correspondence between the protagonists reveals that artists and architects were aware of and influenced by the ideas of Maritain. This is further demonstrated through visual analyses of the paintings, sculpture and architecture executed at the time. A principal finding of the research is that artists and groups united by their common source of inspiration⎯the ideas of Maritain—formed the basis of a Movimento d’Arte Sacra in Italy. The study provides a more nuanced understanding of interwar cultural aesthetics and demonstrates that religion and modernism are not diametically opposed