Boccioni and Mathematics

Umberto Boccioni, a giant of Italian Futurism and author of textbook masterpieces such as La città che sale, Materia, and Elasticità, ended up this year in high school classrooms — not as a subject of art history exams, but as the unexpected protagonist of the dreaded math test.  The third exercise in the exam given to students featured an image of another extraordinary work by Boccioni: the sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, created in 1913, which is now also widely recognized as the image engraved on the 20-cent coin. The function analysis assigned to the science-track students involved two key elements central to the artist’s work — time and space — and asked them to graph the concept of “continuity” that represents the very movement of a man following a trajectory.

Now, leaving calculations aside, there could hardly have been a better opportunity to show how disciplines intersect — how art can be a visual representation of life and its laws, an expression of physics translated into aesthetics: the shape of calculation and, more broadly, the shape of the nature of things. Already with Cézanne, the structure of reality — its construction before our very eyes, the invisible framework that holds the world together — was translated into painting through the decomposition of color, into a mesh traced across the canvas like a graph that mathematics itself could have adopted.

Boccioni inherited from the great Paul this esprit de géométrie — the ability to read into matter (precisely as the title of his 1912 painting Materia suggests) — to which he added the variable of movement, the famous dynamism to which he devoted countless pages and theories. This very idea takes shape in the sculpture featured in the final high school exam: the figure of a man walking along a path through the void, trailing behind him a wake of motion, with air displacement drawn into the lines of the form.

Returning to physics, Boccioni’s Unique Forms in fact embody the concept of acceleration — the relationship between speed and the passage of time — confirming the role of art as a mirror of existence.

And just between us: the Galleria Comunale of Cagliari holds, in the Ingrao collection, 31 works by Boccioni, including a precious sketch of Rissa in Galleria (Riot in the Gallery), where movement and light already explode into colorful shards across space. Centrifugal motion? That’s another exam altogether!