During the first decade of the twentieth century, a group of young Italian painters united together, under the influence of poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Before creating their new style, these painters embraced the ideas of Marinetti’s The Foundation and Manisfesto of Futurism which appeared in the newspaper Le Figaro on February 20, 1909 (Tisdall 7). His manifesto of futurism was primarily concerned with peotry, but artists such as Boccioni, Balla, and Severini used his ideas and applied them to painting and sculpture.The Museum of Modern Art holds Umberto Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Soccer Player, 1913, a fine example of the Futurist vision. In his Futurist Painting: A Technical Manifesto, Boccioni tells us that the “growing need of truth is no longer satisfied with Form and Colour as they have been understood hitherto. The gesture which we would reproduce on canvas shall no longer be a fixed moment in universal dynamism. It shall be the “dynamic sensation itself” (Apollonio 27). This goal of creating the dynamic sensation itself, rather than simply a fixed moment within a dynamic action is exemplified, among other ideas of the Futurist movement in Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Soccer Player. Before going further however, it is necessary to discuss some of the principles of Futurism as created by Marinetti.Marinetti’s The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism is a work which begins like a work of poetry, and deals with the celebration with the technology, the future, and the machine, while rejecting the natural world and the past. Marinetti despises the sounds created by canals “muttering feeble prayers”, and “the creaking bones of sickly palaces,” while he embraces the “famished roar of automobiles” (Apollonio 19-20). He orders us to “shake the gates of life”, and instead, “test the bolts and hinges” (Apollonio 20). To Marinetti, ...
