Arts & Culture
When millions of machines roared
Published 30 August 2004
Photography - Lilian Pizzichini reveals how the photographic skill of a band of brothers managed to establish Italy's classic national image
The Alinari brothers may not be as famous as their contemporaries Henry Fox Talbot or Louis Dagu-erre, yet the three Florentines are pioneers of photography. From the 1850s to the 1930s the brothers, and later their sons, scoured the streets of their native city, and later their new nation state, armed with tripods, cameras and cumbersome flashes. Their images display a society in the grip of change and a photographic technology undergoing continuous evolution.
An early image in an exhibition at the Estorick Collection shows a view of the north door of Santa Maria del Fiore. Every knot of wood is made visible; the finesse of the carving sings. Leopoldo and his brothers knew how to use light. Their inventory of Florentine monuments brought them up against many difficulties - how to work in narrow streets, how to incorporate the whole object. Their solutions to the problems of vertiginous towers involved some trickery. The priest climbing the stairs of the tower of Palazzo Vecchio is a study in motion itself but as a bonus, in the background, the dome of the cathedral looms. Unexpected angles, dizzying perspectives and detailed close-ups give these early plates a still-resonant vibrancy. John Ruskin proposed that art students copy the Alinari brothers' work, praising their "precision and beauty".
Sixty years after the founding of their studio, the Alinari firm was tracing Italy's transition from a rural economy to an industrialised nation. In their 1910 manifesto, the futurists announced:
In the eyes of other countries Italy is still a land of the dead, a vast Pompeii, white with sepulchres. But Italy is being reborn . . . In the land inhabited by the illiterate peasant, schools will be set up; in the land where doing nothing in the sun was the only available profession, millions of machines are already roaring.
The Alinaris show this happening. Dolce Far Niente, taken in Naples, shows grimy street urchins lazing in a heap on the pavement under a harsh sun. They are slit-eyed and lazily menacing, like cats. Six years later, girls in aprons sit at a conveyor belt in a tobacco factory. Street scenes heaving with automobiles and watermelon vendors, crockery and rags, begin to replace the classic statuary. Purposeful activity is taking over.
The brothers maintained a doctrine of geometric exactness and factual conformity. Yet the characters who populate their streets refuse to correspond to the staginess of formal portraiture. A jug-seller in Messina, barefoot and bedraggled, his dark face peeking through terracotta urns looped around his body, gazes quizzically at the camera. A veiled woman rushes past, adding a note of Middle Eastern exoticism. Giuseppe Garibaldi carries on the eastern theme, swathed in the stripy poncho adopted by the fishermen of his native Sardinia. Next to him, a portly His Majesty Victor Emmanuel II, King of Italy is stuffed into a military uniform, the monarch's pomposity betrayed by the shifty nervousness in his eyes.
The Alinaris took their inspiration from the painter Jean-Francois Millet: "Nothing is beautiful apart from truth." And truth, for them, was science. So it is little wonder that in the first decades of the 20th century, their (by now) army of photographers should delight in images of machinery. The lovingly detailed close-up of an engine being made at the Fabbrica Automobili Florentia is every bit as reverential as the attention paid to the antique door of Santa Maria del Fiore. The shopfront of the Farmacia Roberts, taken in 1907, is as imposing as the facade of Orvieto Cathedral of 1856.
Ultimately, the Alinari dynasty was fundamental in establishing a national identity - not just with its documentation of art history but also with its portraits of politicians and the new royal family. The brothers' images of modern Italy - the hot-air balloon floating above a factory chimney is particularly celebratory - are crucial social documents.
Significantly, Leopoldo's firm finally fizzled out in the 1930s. The last images are of fascist architecture. And here the coldness of the artist's gaze and the stark reliance on perspective (always perfectly centred on an axis, or with a 45-degree perspective to show both facade and side) are the perfect means of expressing its brute monumentality. Yet, for all that, the impressive scale and precision of Rome's Foro Mussolini or Florence's new railway station come across with the flourish of a triumphantly modern Italy.
"Fratelli Alinari: a photographic tradition - the changing face of Italy (1855-1935)" is at the Estorick Collection, Canonbury Square, London N1 (020 7704 9522) until 19 September
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