Il Selvaggio 1926–1942: Architectural Polemics and Invective Imagery

Within the framework of a special collection dedicated to the study of image-word relations in the press and their impact upon the dissemination of architecture within the public realm, the story of Il Selvaggio, the magazine published from July 13, 1924, until five weeks before the fall of Mussolini in 1943, assumes a significant relevance. Since its inception, and increasingly from 1926, Il Selvaggio hosts, alongside articles and polemic essays, a varied range of graphic materials in different genres and forms of artistic expression. This heterogeneous visual catalogue, an expression of the versatile and eclectic culture of its founder, the artist, writer and illustrator Mino Maccari, includes an equally varied ensemble of literary registers ranging from rhymes and aphorisms to brief polemic writings, ironic manipulation of proverbs, word plays and puns.

The interest of a study about the representations of architecture within Il Selvaggio lies in the nonspecialist nature of a periodical whose cultural stances were predominantly elaborated outside the professional circles of the architectural work and its well-known authors. This article examines the rhetorical strategies and linguistic devices of the magazine, where caricatures and landscape scenes, still lives and urban views, photographs and mottoes, are intertwined in a set of varying relationships. It also elucidates the historical context in which the contemporary architectural debate unfolds and which constitutes the constant reference for Maccari and his collaborators, providing the source materials for the journal’s polemics.

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