ABSTRACT
The following visual essay comprises eight paintings by three of the painters most central to the representation of the Italian American experience: Joseph Stella, Ralph Fasanella, and O. Louis Guglielmi. Italian American cultural creation has been inextricably bound up with the urban experience, and thus this chapter is concerned with city art and the representation of two scenes—the street feast and the Brooklyn Bridge—that are definitive of the Italian American urban imaginary. The festa is the primary scene through which Italian American spectacle culture has imprinted itself upon the American common consciousness. The most recognizable image to have been painted by an Italian American artist, Stella’s Brooklyn Bridge represents the bridge as a sacred object, the machine age’s equivalent of a gothic cathedral whose architecture of cables and coils vibrates like a musical instrument.
