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Such weights evoke violent reactions. The futurists set out to create the image of an Italy that did not yet exist, a utopia of tension and transformation whose god was the machine. Its architecture would not be the old cellular stone hill town but the dream environment conjured up by Sant'Elia: all girders and concrete cliffs, with glass elevators zipping up the exterior walls. Its painting would try to encompass not just sight but noise, heat and smell; above all, it would depict movement. To fix this industrial mode in Italian (and European) culture, the pastoral mode had to be slaughtered. "Kill the moonlight!" one futurist manifesto exclaimed. Whatever lingered from the 1890s -- symbolism, impressionism, the cults of nuance and nostalgia, of the Arcadian countryside or the introverted personality -- was futurism's enemy.
Art is invention, but also remembering. It is never in a real artist's interest to "abolish" the past, which is impossible anyway. Boccioni, in particular, kept paying it homage: his striding bronze figure in space, included in the Venice show, alludes to the same Victory of Samothrace that Marinetti thought less beautiful than a car; the figures who scurry frantically about the two battling women in the Milan Galleria in his Riot at the Gallery, 1910, look like the ghostly crowds in the background of Tintorettos. What the futurists opposed was not so much the past itself as the mind-set they called passeism -- nostalgic or obsolete cultural attitudes.
Their problem was framing a pictorial language to describe rapid stimulus and movement. They came up with an amalgam of pointillism, cubism and photography. Picasso and Braque had built cubism on the scrutiny of a single object from multiple viewpoints: the table stood still, the eye moved. In futurism, the eye is fixed and the object moves, but it is still the basic vocabulary of cubism -- fragmented and overlapping planes -- that tells us so. Carra, Boccioni and, above all, Balla prized the photographs of sequential movement taken by Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne Jules Marey. Some of Balla's own paintings, like the famous Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912, are virtually straight renderings of multiple-exposure photographs. But in his series of paintings inspired by a Fiat speeding down the Via Veneto, the game gets more complex. Nearly all of this series is assembled at Palazzo Grassi, culminating in Balla's Abstract Speed, 1913, one of the few large futurist paintings that can be called a pictorial masterpiece, a thundering black Doppler-effect image in which the shapes of wheel, mudguard and driver dissolve in and out of the shuttling buildings.