ABSTRACT
Umberto Boccioni's reconstruction of the universe was a reconstruction of art. He constructs an ethical edifice for an aesthetic telos. Boccioni's telos was moral — art was endowed with historical responsibility. He systematically re-constructed the perfect antinomy between past and future; a state of mind whose plasticism was intended to supersede the formalist priority of academic classicism and substitute it with a formal awareness of linee-forza in the perception of nature and reality. The Marinetti-Boccioni antinomy characterized futurism with a diaphanous distinction between an aesthetic ideology and a reactionary myth. Carlo Carra regarded his six-year adherence to the futurist movement as 'a period of intense experiences of work and battles'. Boccioni's futurism rejected the idea of an a priori reality: 'this is what divides us from the Cubists and places us Futurists on the extreme fringe of the painting world'.
