Prehistory on Display: Deep Time and the Ideological Making of Fascist Identity through Arts and Visual Culture

Valentina Bartalesi, Ph.D.

This study seeks to examine the mechanisms of reception and ideological resemantization of prehistoric art and material culture within the fascist context. The primary objective is to interrogate the implications of this reconfiguration by recomposing an initial corpus of images, exhibitions, and artistic experimantations capable of evidencing this history, which remains partly latent, while critically engaging with its underlying political and cultural substratum.

Recent scholarship on the historiography of prehistory from the Early Modern period to the contemporary era has demonstrated that deep time has been the object of an extraordinarily stratified narrative process, characterized by distinct cultural, political, and national imperatives, frequently imbued with nationalistic connotations, particularly within a Eurocentric framework.

The project draws upon established critical literature regarding the relationship between fascism and prehistory, with the aim of addressing a series of questions, including: According to which principles and canons were artifacts attributed to the so-called ‘prehistoric art’ selected and exhibited during the fascist period? In which contexts did these exhibitions take place? To what extent were they informed by contemporary nationalistic and pseudo-scientific theories regarding the alleged origins of the Italic race? What role did artists play within this framework of propagandistic narration, or, conversely, in processes of resistance to propaganda?

Employing a philological-documentary approach, attentive to the analytical tools offered by visual culture studies, the study seeks to reconstruct a history of images of this reconfiguration, emphasising its inter-disciplinary, and not exclusively art-historical dimension.