Venice is presented as a city whose established artistic and social rituals became the setting for a new political-cultural spectacle. At the 1924 International Art Exhibition, Margherita Sarfatti made her debut as an exhibitor, bringing the Novecento art movement into a gallery of its own. The exhibition’s carefully arranged canvases and modern classicism offered an image of order, while the ceremony around them revealed how closely cultural authority had become entangled with political power.

A familiar city and a new stage

The exhibition opened on April 1, 1924, as the first of the fascist era. Venice retained its customary pageant: decorated gondolas moved between San Giorgio and San Marco; artists met at Caffè Florian; guests gathered in palazzos along the Grand Canal. The book describes the city as a museum of itself, a setting whose inherited beauty seemed to promise continuity even as the political order changed around it.

That continuity was visible in the royal reception. Hierarchs in black shirts welcomed Vittorio Emanuele III in the garden of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, beneath the Lion of St. Mark. The exhibition therefore occupied two stages at once: the familiar civic and artistic life of Venice, and the newly formalized public presence of the regime. The city’s recognizable ceremonies did not disappear; they provided a setting in which the new order could display itself.

Sarfatti’s Venetian return

For Sarfatti, Venice was not merely a backdrop. She had been born there and, from childhood, had attended its exhibitions. Her father, Amedeo Grassini, was a prosperous Jewish merchant who helped found the first vaporetto company, backed a financial group intended to develop the Lido as a tourist destination, served as a city councilman, and moved from the ghetto to Palazzo Bembo. He took his daughter into social spaces where people tipped their hats to them. Her own return as an exhibitor thus carried the weight of a personal history of entry into the city’s cultural and social life.

Yet this appearance was also a test. Sarfatti presented the Novecento art movement in a gallery reserved for her painters, with canvases selected and spaced to make a composed whole. Her artistic program sought a new objectivity through a return to order: geometric composition, cohesive design, and harmony of color. Achilles Funi’s image of a young worker as a Renaissance Madonna condensed that program into a single subject, joining contemporary labor to a classical visual language.

The works stood alongside national pavilions and before international visitors arriving at the Riva degli Schiavoni. Sarfatti’s ambition extended beyond displaying paintings: she sought to establish artistic power as equal in status to political power, speaking a related language and helping form a new cultural order. The image of her among the artists also exposed the limits of that ambition. She was the only woman among six men in a cultural world described as dominated by men, and the exhibition placed her authority under scrutiny as both critic and cultural organizer.

Order, disruption, and an uneasy triumph

The exhibition itself went smoothly, and the Novecento works were judged proficient, well selected, and well displayed. But the opening ceremony briefly revived an older artistic antagonism. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti interrupted Giovanni Gentile with a protest against backward-looking Venice. The outburst was treated as a remnant of futurist disorder and as a protest by an artist who had not been invited; the king used the interruption as an occasion to leave the gallery early. In the book’s account, the new order proclaimed by Sarfatti and imposed by Benito Mussolini prevailed, but its victory was already compromised.

Sarfatti’s setbacks accumulated around the exhibition. Ubaldo Oppi, described as perhaps the group’s most representative painter, accepted Ugo Ojetti’s invitation to show separately. Giovanni Papini attacked the group’s art, and Anselmo Bucci later withdrew. These departures mattered because the exhibition’s coherence depended not just on the canvases but on Sarfatti’s ability to gather artists under a shared program. The carefully ordered display succeeded publicly while the group around it proved less secure.

Venice amid the politics of commemoration

The book sets this cultural pageant within a wider pattern in which political power was made visible through objects, ceremonies, and public spaces. In Rome, Gabriele D’Annunzio presented Giovanni Randaccio’s flag as a national symbol and called for flags to remain in mourning until Fiume and Dalmatia were returned to Italy. In another Roman ceremony, the burial of the Unknown Soldier became a collective memorial ritual; fascist leaders later knelt at the tomb. These scenes occur elsewhere, not in Venice, but they illuminate the political world in which the Biennale took place: national meaning was being staged through both artistic display and public remembrance.

The contrast extends to the funeral of Giacomo Matteotti in Fratta Polesine. His wife chose burial in his home region rather than a political funeral in Rome, and tens of thousands of workers gathered to mourn him and demand justice. Against such contested acts of remembrance, Venice’s exhibition presented a more composed vision: artistic order aligned with the regime’s cultural authority. Its significance lies in that conjunction, and in the tension beneath it. Venice offered an elegant stage for the new order, but Sarfatti’s personal and professional disappointments made clear that a polished display could not guarantee lasting consensus.