The Enigma of the Horse: The Image of the Monument as Fiction

Abstract

With the avant-gardes the idea of the monument acquires a new meaning. Until the twentieth century, monuments were related to memory, alluding in some way to the sacredness of the represented past and associated with funerary architecture; from the appearance of the first avant-gardes, however, their function ceased to so clear, becoming lost in a world of mechanical images. The De Chirico brothers—Giorgio and Alberto Savinio—represent a contrary vision of the monument. In the case of the former, the apogee of monuments had led to their de-signification. In Savinio, on the other hand—against the non-historical exteriority that monuments represented for his brother—they present an interiority from which a deep significance emanated; as if their presence had been reduced to the imagination. The work of these two Italians is a reflection on the abstraction of the instant, dramatized by the monument and its figuration.