Mario Palanti (1885 1979), Sarcofago dei martiri
bronze, cm 42x37,5x16,5, Signed, bottom right: MARIO PALANTI. Inscribed and dated: DETAIL OF HAT FOR FASCISTI FASCISTI PALAZZO DEL LITTORIO ROMA ANNO. XII. E.F., Mario Palanti was one of the finalist architects of the 1934 competition for the Palazzo del Littorio, destined to Via dell'Impero, today of the Imperial Forums, but never built. The report that accompanied the project, together with the 40 plates and 6 sketches that illustrated it, was published by Palanti himself (copy of the volume at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Vittorio Emanuele II, Rome). The architect had returned to Italy to take part in the competition after years of successful career in Argentina and Uruguay, where he had translated his visionary ideas into buildings of bold eclecticism (Gutierrez 1997, pp.61-62). Under the motto of "navigating necessities", the building was designed in the shape of a ship's hull, a "clearly Roman" concept according to its author, capable of dialoguing scenographically with the grandeur of the architectural evidence of the ancient city (Colosseum and Basilica of Maxentius) and modern (Victorian and Piazza Venezia) that the factory would face. The comparison with the past suggested the cubes, the perspective axis hinged on a grandiose tower adorned with bas-reliefs and the materials, the granite, the blocks of sawn travertine, the Roman brick. In the extraordinary tables of the project, where the amplification of the masses and the rapid perspective flight of the lines evoked the drama of Piranesi's engravings, Palanti proposed, however, the need for a modern language of architecture: "a Roman architecture of our time" capable of reconciling tradition, futurist dynamism and an architectural rationalism based on the dominion of the architraved line. "The monumental mass will have to shine with all the flames of a decidedly rational stylistic orientation of architecture. This orientation must correspond to the basic criteria [...] of a Futurism understood and expressed as effective dynamism, i.e. a realistic and ideal, actual and potential correspondence with the new high tension of the Italian spirit" (Palanti 1934, pp.9-10; on the Oppo competition 1936; for the critical debate Barocchi 1990, pp.260-269). Inside the building, which was to house representative rooms, the Permanent Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution and the headquarters of institutions such as the Coni, the announcement of the competition also provided for the construction of a Chapel of the Fallen. Palanti described the room he had emblematically envisaged within the bow of the ship in this way: "This design is severe and mystical in character, but of absolute decorous simplicity, of semi-circular structure, illuminated from above by a veil of natural light. This veil, making centre of gravity in the central compartment of the Chapel, would illuminate the main motif consisting of a large sarcophagus, on the cover of which, falling transversally, the dead body of a Fascist Martyr symbolizes the transcendence of the love of the Fatherland, the ardor of Faith, the light of the Sacrifice" (Ibidem, pp.27-28). Compared to the larger sarcophagus of which Palanti published a sketch in plaster (table XXXIX), the bronze exhibited here presents only the section below the body of the hero. The ethical significance of the work and its dramatic message are entrusted to the iconic synthesis of the figurative elements: the tomb and the nude with its expressionistically excavated and chiaroscuro anatomy. Stefano Grandesso