Luigi Russolo, Futurist

by Luciano Chessa

  In confirmation, Winternitz cited two passages from Leonardo’s writings. One is from the Codex Atlanticus: “Why the short mortar makes a louder explosion when fired than a long one, as one hears it in drawing the breech[es] of the small cannon.”81 The other passage is from the Codex Trivulzianus:

  THE NATURE OF THE EFFECT OF THE ROAR OF THE MORTAR [BOMBARDA]

  The rumbling [romore] of the mortar is caused by the impetuous fury of the flame beaten back by the resisting air, and that quantity of the powder causes this effect because it finds itself ignited within the body of the mortar; and not perceiving itself in a place that has capacity for it to increase, nature guides it to search with fury a place suitable for its increase, and breaking or driving before it the weaker obstacle it wins its way into spacious air; and this not being capable of escaping with the speed with which it is attacked, because the fire is more volatile than the air, it follows that as the air is not equally volatile with the fire it cannot make way for it with that velocity and swiftness with which the fire assails it, and therefore it happens that there is resistance, and the resistance is the cause of the great roar and rumbling of the mortars [grande strepido delle bombarde].

  But if the mortar were to be moved against the oncoming of an impetuous wind it would be the occasion of a greater roar [magiore tronito] made by reason of the greater resistance of the air against the flame, and so would make less rumbling [minore romore] when moved in the line of the wind because there would be less resistance. In marshy places or another wide tracts of air the mortar will make a louder report [magiore romore] close at hand.82

  This passage, so impersonal and detached, can be compared to any number of passages from the chapter on war noises in L’arte dei rumori. Showcasing the pedantic analysis of the sound of exploding bombs on the battlefield, Russolo wrote:

  The characteristics of the shell’s whistling in the air are easily explained by the fact that the velocity of the shell, greatest at the beginning, gradually diminished. Hence, the vibrations of the air—produced by successive impulses of condensation of the air in front of the projectile and consequent rarefaction behind it—follow each other with decreasing frequency and, communicating this way vibrations to the air that are slower and slower, we obtain a gradual lowering of the pitch.83

  If Leonardo’s use of the term strepido is charged with militaristic overtones his humorous romore described a sustained, albeit bizarre, sound:

  DEL ROMORE

  If you take a little vessel or another resonant receptacle and cover it with soaked calfskin, and if it is later equipped with a small waxed cord, and if you pull it with a glove coated with a little tar, it will produce a strange romore.84

  Leonardo’s romori would not, on the face of it, seem to have had much musical promise, and this may very well be the point at which Russolo’s and Leonardo’s sound sensibilities diverge. However, the term romore in Leonardo’s definition is connected with music making, and weird romori even had a place in some of Leonardo’s stage productions.

  Leonardo designed and used many instruments (among them friction drums like the one described in the extract above) that produced romori for the masked balls and theatrical performances he directed while in the service of the Sforzas. The best documented of these is an entertainment called Paradiso, featuring audacious theatrical machines designed by Leonardo, and produced in honor of the Duchess of Milan, on June 13, 1490, at Sforza Castle.85

  Even after the Sforzas were dethroned, Leonardo found a way to put his skills at the service of his new, foreign patron. This is confirmed by the sketches for a staging of Poliziano’s Orfeo, produced for the benefit of the French governor of Milan, Charles d’Amboise. In these sketches, contained in Arundel 263 and dated 1506–08 by Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo requested the use of friction drums to evoke the terrifying noises of twelve devils guarding the gates of hell.86

  This suggestive use of noise and its association with the demonic are topoi that were to recur in later times. Winternitz describes a 1511 rant by Sebastian Virdung against the effect of kettledrums at church, where, he complains, the “horrible noise of these drums [. . .] disturb[s] the pious old people, the sick and the devout in the cloisters who are trying to read, to study and to pray”; in short, they are “an invention of the devil in their suppression of every sweet melody.”87 But a friction drum, with its bizarre, low sound, must have resonated with greater humor than the diabolical seriousness of the timpani.

  Winternitz claimed that the Neapolitan caccavella may have been Leonardo’s source for this bizarre friction drum. The noisemakers from Neapolitan folklore may seem light years removed from Russolo’s intonarumori, but the principle of the friction drum—a drumskin that amplifies the noise produced by a string attached on one end—was one of the main features in Russolo’s intonarumori, starting with his first patent of January 11, 1914.

  The caccavella, heard each September in the procession of the Madonna di Piedigrotta, is one of the many Neapolitan noisemakers glorified by the futurist poet Francesco Cangiullo in his epic poem Piedigrotta (1913), possibly the most brilliant example of futurist sound-and-visual poetry. Marinetti and other futurists participated in the first live performance of this poem on March 29, 1914, at the Salone dell’Esposizione Futurista Permanente on the Via del Tritone, executing the noisy accompaniment with instruments used during the Neapolitan procession; Cangiullo and Marinetti declaimed the text, with Sprovieri on the tofa, Balla on the putipù, Radiante on the triccaballacche, Depero on the scetavaiasse, and Sironi on the fischiatore.88 Russolo must have known of this performance, not only because it featured a number of his close associates but also because it took place in the same venue where three months earlier the intonarumori had made their Roman debut.89

  If Russolo likely did not superimpose the memory of the enharmonic instruments he found in Leonardo’s projects to their more primitive versions from Neapolitan folklore, it is at least safe to assert that the noisy world created by the “dynamic and synoptic declamation” of Piedigrotta was an expression of the same aesthetic needs shared by many of the futurists of the time: these needs found their full spiritual realization in Russolo’s art of noises.

  LEONARDO THE GURU

  Russolo’s debt to Leonardo thus appears to be more profound and encompassing than would at first have been supposed. In Leonardo’s work, Russolo saw the potent spiritual energy that inspired devotion, and he soon came to regard Leonardo as his spiritual guide. This might strike some as a curious proposition, given that Russolo is so closely associated with the iconoclastic futurist fury of the early twentieth century, whereas Leonardo embodies the iconic, fully canonized concept of the Renaissance man. Moreover since neither Leonardo’s rigorous scientific research nor Russolo’s aggressive futurist aesthetic is traditionally associated with spirituality, it is curious that the connection between the two could have occurred on the plane of common spiritual interest.

  Buzzi saw in the eclecticism of these two figures a connection of the spirit that bound their minds together: their encyclopedic, comparativist approach and their flirting with the occult theory of correspondences. Russolo’s landscape of interests, like that of Leonardo’s, included painting, music, acoustics, metaphysics, astronomy, and the builder’s crafts; the two artists also shared a concern for the instruments of war, clockworks, and biomechanic creation.90

  Leonardine spiritual influence runs like a road map through Russolo’s entire career, from the infatuation of his early Milanese years to the veneration for the Renaissance master that is evident in his last writings, prevailing even during the raging futurist attacks against achievements of the past. The evidence of Russolo’s occult interests strengthens the connection between Russolo and Leonardo. Yet to fully contextualize Russolo’s Leonardine devotion we need to consider Leonardo’s spiritual reputation in the years before futurism was founded—a reputation in high bloom in the symbolist milieu that Russolo joined upon his arrival in Milan.

 
; CHAPTER 10

  Controversial Leonardo

  The futurists took a rather contradictory attitude toward Leonardo, which can only be explained if one separates his work from its canonization. Futurist public attacks on Leonardo centered not on his work but on what he represented of the past. Typically, futurist rage toward the past has been explained through a hermeneutical script by Marinetti, according to which the obsessive shadow of the cultural saints of the past and the adoration of their works—especially in a country with a rich history, such as Italy—were an unbearable weight slowing futurism’s dynamic aims.

  Marinetti’s carefully orchestrated act of turning one’s back on the past to deliver oneself from its encumbrances soon became understood (and misunderstood) by the critics as the essence of the futurist movement. Whether consciously or not, he was at least in part responsible for the critical misconstructions; and in regard to futurism’s spirituality, this eventually backfired. For many years, his writing, by its very force, dictated in many circumstances the words to his critics, and they believed in his manipulation. Sometimes it is best if authors are not allowed to have the last word on the meaning of their work, for they are often their own worst advocates. Critics of futurism fell under the spell of the propagandistic and rhetorical force of Marinetti’s voice, to the point that they believed him blindly and all too frequently read the entire movement through the guidelines that he had established.

  Marinetti’s smokescreen prevented the critics from applying their hermeneutics to the work itself and caused them instead to divert this hermeneutics onto the rhetoric surrounding the work. This kept them from seeing the contradictions of the movement, instead encouraging the image of a unified front. As a matter of fact, not all futurists hated the past; the more Marinetti proclaimed hatred of the past, the more this proclamation concealed a complex web of psychological conundrums—Marinetti’s own insecurity, for one thing, and that of his followers. He feared that his “frail courage” would fail and be defeated at the hands of the past. “Do you want then to waste all your best strengths, in this eternal and useless admiration of the past,” he asked in the last section of the founding manifesto of futurism, “from which you come out fatally exhausted, diminished and trampled?”1 Four years later, in Lacerba, Boccioni reasoned likewise, suggesting a process of self-imposed amnesia: “We deny the past because we want to forget, and to forget in art means to renew oneself.”2

  Marinetti acknowledged that if the past is not ignored, forgotten, or destroyed, it can ultimately be kept at bay by paying homage to it, as if it were an insatiable Minotaur: “Museums: cemeteries! . . . Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to one another. [. . .] That one should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the graveyard on All Souls’ Day—that I will grant you. That once a year one should leave a floral tribute beneath the Gioconda, I grant you that.” Marinetti’s fear of the past surfaces here: in his representation of the Mona Lisa—one of the few artworks he cited in his 1909 manifesto—as the most authoritative symbol of the art of the past, a terrible deity that needs appeasing, once a year, with flowers.

  Modernists attacked the Mona Lisa because of the place it holds in the canon: consider Duchamp’s suggestive moustaches (every parody, they say, hides admiration).3 Certainly that painting was an easy target. Ardengo Soffici, in his Lacerba column “Giornale di bordo,” wrote in the July 15, 1913, issue: “In the tram.—I see written on a wall in big white letters on a blue background: ‘GIOCONDA’ ITALIAN PURGATIVE WATER. And further down the stupid face of Mona Lisa. Finally! Finally we too are beginning to do good art criticism.”4

  A few months later, on December 15, 1913, in the same column, Soffici returned to the subject with a little acerbic poem on the infamous theft and subsequent retrieval of the painting:

  DECEMBER 13.

  30,000 people passed before the Mona Lisa with hat in hand.

  —The press.

  They have found it again, the old daub.

  The mirror of all the artistic Philistinism.

  The touchstone of aesthetic fetishism.

  The treasure of literatures.

  The magnet of snobbishnesses.

  The icon of past-worshipers.

  The paradigm of the commonplace.

  The sewer of international imbecility.

  They have found again the mediocre image of the saccharine-sweet fat lady.

  They have found again the Mona Lisa.

  Also on this page was the following unsigned declaration:

  WE FUTURISTS

  reunited in extraordinary assembly deplore profoundly the retrieval of the “Mona Lisa” thanks to the double imbecilic act of the passatista [passéist] housepainter and we demand for the infamous little painting the prompt reburial in the cemetery like Louvre Museum.

  Soffici’s good friend Carrà echoed his anti-academicism in his 1913 manifesto “Pittura dei suoni, rumori e odori,” where he calls the use of perspectival illusion a “little game worthy at most of an academician like Leonardo.”5 The Mona Lisa was the preferred target but not the only one. Attacks on Leonardo reached the mainstream audience with the publication of The Study and Criticism of Italian Art by Bernard Berenson. In a tour de force of negative criticism, Berenson vehemently attacked The Last Supper, declaring it nothing less than repulsive. The Times of London, scandalized, launched a Futuristengefahr (Futurist danger) alarm, suggesting that Berenson was coming dangerously close to the positions of the artistic avant-garde.6

  LEONARDO THE PROTOFUTURIST

  Despite these anti-academic attacks, Leonardo’s works were held in high regard by the futurists. When the mask of Marinettian propaganda was dropped, in the intimacy of letters and diaries, and, above all, in the creative and spiritual genesis of the futurists’ works, the centrality of Leonardo’s influence is undeniable. Calvesi pointed to Leonardo’s inspirational role among all futurists:

  [Leonardo] remains the one who, before the modern age, occupied himself with vibrations and motions; his “universal dynamism” animates the molecules but sometimes becomes a giant vortex. Not by chance is Leonardo the observer of the flight of birds and prophet of aviation [. . .].

  Bergson himself, whose writings are considered one of the main sources for futurist theories, will be the modern thinker most in keeping with Leonardo. [Like Bergson,] Leonardo considered “motion the cause of every form of life” and called “spiritual virtues” the physical and dynamic forces of which life was for him the most glorious, immense manifestation.7

  Giacomo Balla was frequently inspired by Leonardo. He told his mother in a letter that while sketching the first of his alchemically influenced Composizioni iridescenti, he “held before him a book on Leonardo, like a talisman.”8 Balla even claimed in his diary to be Leonardo reincarnated: “In 1500, they called me Leonardo. [. . .] after 4 centuries of artistic decadence, I reappeared in 1900 to shout to my plagiarizers that it is time to end it because times have changed. They called me crazy: poor blockheads!!!!!!!!! I have already created a new sensitivity in art that is expression of future ages that will be colorradioiridesplendorideal luminosisssssssssimiiiiii.”9 This quote is even more significant when one considers that Leonardo was credited with being the first scientist to formulate a wave theory of light.10 Balla also echoes Leonardo in his studies on the flight of swallows and in his Vortice of 1911, which can be considered a futurist transcription of Leonardo’s projects for flying machines.11 Lista maintains that Étienne-Jules Marey drew inspiration from Leonardo: similarly, Balla’s interest in chronophotography could be understood as indirectly Leonardine.12

  Furthermore, Leonardo’s name is often encountered in Marinetti’s personal diaries. In the posthumously published La grande Milano tradizionale e futurista, Marinetti characterized the statue of Leonardo in the Piazza della Scala as an authoritative witness smiling over futurist brawls like a benevolent father: “[The statue of] Leonardo da Vinci, boiling in concentric circles around hi
s disciples made of stone, admires it [the revolutionary cyclone] from his privileged place as a genius of simultaneities.”13

  Just as futurists believe that Leonardo’s statue magnanimously approved their fight from on high, so too did they consider him a sort of protecting idol for their intellectual movement. Marinetti, again in La grande Milano, describes the Milanese cultural environment as being “diplomatic par excellence, because it combines at the table of the attorney Mazza the opposed talents of Don Galbiati, director of the Ambrosiana and Latinist authority, Marinetti, and the futurists Buzzi [and] Masnata; and all that under the [protective] light of Leonardo da Vinci.”14 Marinetti’s Leonardine reverence culminated in the pages of yet another of his posthumous memoires, Una sensibilità italiana nata in Egitto, where he considers Leonardo a futurist ad honorem, a protofuturist: “They are all deliciously convinced that through a reckless Italian courage which reaches the poetic apex in the midst of dangers, the typically futurist innovative genius of Leonardo da Vinci, Umberto Boccioni, Antonio Sant’Elia, and Marinetti creates a marvelous poetry capable of synthesizing simultaneously the universe.”15

  Marinetti, in placing alongside the names of exponents of the futurist movement the name of Leonardo—a figure that connects spirituality with science and technology—implicitly provided both scientific and a spiritual endorsement to the ambitious futurist goal of (artistic) creation as also being simultaneous synthesis of the universe. In his ability to connect the scientific and the spiritual by means of the technological, Leonardo could not have been a better source of inspiration for the futurists. An indirect acknowledgement of Leonardine devotion in these terms can be found in the article “Futurism, Magic and Life,” which Wyndham Lewis wrote in 1914 for the first issue of BLAST. Though technically speaking a vorticist text, “Futurism, Magic and Life” is imbued with the spirit of Italian futurism—though without Marinetti’s rhetoric. This may be the one instance where the futurist worship of Leonardo leaks into a text published before World War I: