Author(s): Elise Hatch
Mentor(s): Kenneth Hartvigsen
Institution BYU
Italian artist Corrado Cagli lived a life of nuanced complexity, making his personal politics confusing for historians wishing to cram his life into a clean, understandable historical narrative. Living in Fascist Italy at a time of imposed racial and sexual homogeny, Cagli was both proud of his Jewish ethnicity and openly gay. Given the emphasis on virility of the Fascist Party and the anti-Semetic sentiments central to the 1938 Italian Racial Laws, one would understandably suspect that Cagli was always critical of Fascism. However, forcing Cagli to be labeled as either completely anti-fascist or completely fascist ignores the reality of Corrado Cagli’s complicated persona. His paintings should never be described as individual, succinct points on a linear timeline but instead as microcosms of the complicated, overlapping cultural influences and identities. To insert his unique voice into a confusing atmosphere, Cagli looked to history and myth. In his 1936 The Battle of San Martino and his 1937 David and Goliath, Cagli reimagines the Risorgimento (the 19th century war of Italian independence), famous Italian artwork, and the David and Goliath story central to Italian folklore to show each as more chaotic than previously posited. Cagli alters the Italian collective memory of these stories and myths by alluding to homosexual culture, Jewish history, and influential artists. Doing so during the Ventennio, the period of the Fascist Regime, allowed Cagli to reveal the complexities of his own life in images with a distinctly Italian feel, demonstrating to viewers that history is never clearly cut between the Davids and Goliaths, the victorious and the losers, or the anti-Fascists and Fascists. To quote the artist himself, the “coexistence of more than one genre in the same poet,” is not only possible, but indeed expected in an artist as complicated as Cagli.