Next Saturday is the feast day of St Frances of Rome, patron saint of motorists, an occasion also celebrated in Italy as National Car Blessing Day. This week’s picture, chosen in anticipation of the event, is an early visual document of Italian autophilia: Speeding Motorcar (Study of Speed) by Giacomo Balla, done in oil paint on a piece of card and dated 1913. It is to be found in the Gallery of Modern Art in Milan.

Balla, who was in his early forties when he created the image, was one of the originators of a movement known as “Futurism”: the first twentieth-century “ism” invented and patented by Italians. As their rousingly vague nom de guerre suggests, the Futurists were united by a fervent collective belief in a thrilling but imperfectly defined idea of “the future”. Their first article of faith was that the new technology of the Machine Age was an unqualified good (a notion still just tenable in 1913, before the Lee Enfield rifle had helped to cut down some ten million young men on the battlefields of the First World War); their second, that the past in all its forms represented a dead weight from which they, the apostles of a new world, must at all costs escape. They dreamed of burning down every museum in Italy and of razing ancient towns and cities to the ground. Nothing that smacked of tradition escaped their iconoclastic attentions. Pasta was declared passe by the Futurists, who publicly abstained from eating spaghetti; even natural light was to be avoided, on the basis that it was insufficiently “new” a phenomenon. Balla painted a series of pictures inspired by streetlamps instead, and coined the phrase “Let’s kill moonlight.”

One of the principal problems for a would-be Futurist painter was that of the fusty...

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