Unique Forms, Umberto Boccioni

• Futurists


  • Wanted art to break from the Classical and Renaissance styles still dominant in Italy at the start of the Twentieth Century
• Unique Forms of Continuity in Space

  • Shows a figure striding into the future
  • Its undulating surfaces seem to transform before our eyes
• About fifty years after Charles Darwin introduced the theory of evolution


  Boccioni sculpted a future-man: muscular, dynamic and driven
• About thirty years after Nietzsche described his "super-man"


  Boccioni sculpted a future-man: muscular, dynamic and driven
• Auguste Rodin, The Walking Man


  • 1907, cast made by Fonderie Alexis Rudier in 1913, bronze, 213.5 x 71.7 x 156.5 cm (Musée Rodin, Paris)
• Unique Forms of Continuity in Space

  • The face of the sculpture is abstracted into a cross, suggesting a helmet
  • The figure doesn't appear to have arms, though wing-like forms seem to emerge the rippling back
  • The air displaced by the figure's movement is rendered in forms no different than those of the actual body
• Sculpting the environment around a figure

  • Expressed in Boccioni's "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture" (1912)
  • Shows the influence of the sculptor Medardo Rosso
• Medardo Rosso, Impressions of the Boulevard: Woman with a Veil


  • 1893
• Rodin's armless Walking Man


  • 1907
• Unique Forms of Continuity in Space

  • One of a series of sculptures of striding figures that Boccioni created in 1913
  • Continued the theme of human movement seen in his paintings such as Dynamism of a Soccer Player, 1913
• Movement


  • A key element for Boccioni and the other Futurists
  • The technology of transportation (cars, bicycles, and advanced trains) allowed people to experience ever greater speeds
  • The Futurist artists often depicted motorized vehicles and the perceptions they made possible—the blurry, fleeting, fragmentary sight created by this new velocity
• Unlike fellow Futurist Giacomo Balla, who used repeated forms to represent movement


  Boccioni synthesized different positions into one dynamic figure
• Unique Forms of Continuity in Space is the most famous Futurist sculpture
• Three years before he made this sculpture, Boccioni and the other Futurist artists had banned the painting of nudes for being hopelessly mired in tradition
• Unique Forms is a nude male, albeit one abstracted through exaggerated muscles and possibly shielding its head with a helmet
• Boccioni breaks rules from his "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture" where he declared that Futurist sculpture should be made of strong, straight lines
• Boccioni's manifesto also states that sculpture should not be made from a single material or from traditional materials such as marble or bronze
• Boccioni produced several mixed media sculptures and the original Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, was, like the majority of his sculptures, made of plaster
• The bronze versions we are so familiar with are casts made long after the artist's death in 1916
• The original white plaster sculpture, today in São Paulo, looks more transient and delicate than the later bronze casts