Ardengo Soffici
Ardengo Soffici was an influential Italian novelist and art critic, born on April 7, 1879, in Bombone, Italy. He experienced a significant shift in his family's fortunes after his father's death, leading them to move to Florence, where Soffici pursued studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. His artistic development was shaped by his encounters with the Macchiaioli and his exposure to classic Italian literature, as well as his time in Paris, where he engaged with French impressionism and avant-garde movements. Soffici became part of the Futurist movement and contributed to the journal La Voce, advocating for a modernization of Italian culture.
His distinctive writing style, known as frammentismo, involved creating fragmented narratives that reflected contemporary experiences rather than traditional realism. However, only a limited number of his works were published during his lifetime; notable among them was "Lemmonio Boreò," which drew inspiration from "Don Quixote." Soffici's later writings combined autobiographical elements with critical reflections on art and society, particularly influenced by his experiences as a lieutenant during World War I. He continued to write until his death on August 19, 1964, leaving behind a legacy of thought-provoking literature that offers insights into the cultural movements of his time.
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Subject Terms
Ardengo Soffici
Writer
- Born: April 7, 1879
- Birthplace: Bombone, near Rignano sull'Arno, Italy
- Died: August 19, 1964
- Place of death: Forte dei Marmi, Tuscany, Italy
Biography
Ardengo Soffici was born on April 7, 1879, in the village of Bombone, near Rignano Sull’Arno, Italy, to wealthy landowners Giovanni and Egle Turcini Soffici. When their finances began to suffer, Soffici’s family moved to Prato. After his father died in 1898, they moved to Florence. There Soffici studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and worked in a legal office.
Two influences on his work came into play: He met the Macchiaioli, the Italian impressionists at the academy; and he began reading the classic works of Italian authors such as Gabriele D’Annunzio, Giosué Carducci, and Ugo Foscolo. These informed and shaped what would become his literary styles, both traditional and experimental.
For a short time, Soffici would forgo the traditional forms he was trained in while he studied in Paris, France, from 1900 to 1907, under private tutor Giovanni Fattori. During this time, he also began meeting the French impressionists, the fauvists, and was reading the work of poets Gillaume Apollinaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine, all of whose works inspired his decision that Italian culture “needed to be modernized.” This new attitude prompted Soffici to write articles on Parisian art. He would send these pieces to the Florentine journal Il Leonardo for publication.
Part of the avant-garde Futurist movement now, Soffici returned to Italy, where he was solicited by Giuseppe Prezzolini, editor and founder of La Voce. Prezzolini asked him for literary contributions that would enhance the goals of the new journal: “to expand the literary and artistic horizons of Italy to embrace the avant-garde” and to help “restore authenticity and sincerity” over the ensuing artifice. For the next seven to eight years, Soffici would work developing a distinctive and distinguished style now known as frammentismo, the art of writing in fragments. At the same time, bringing his fascination with the experimental style, he would begin his work on novel writing—now also influenced by the Futurists who painted and wrote poetry in the early part of the century.
Also at this time, Soffici, disagreeing with La Voce writers, left the journal and went to work writing for Giovanni Papini’s Lacerba. He began the narrative projects, written between 1908 and 1910, that would become one of his first major publications: the novel L’uva e la croce: Infanzia (the grapes and the cross), published much later, in 1951. While this novel was published, many other works belonging to Soffici went unpublished until after his death. According to literary scholars, of those few published while he was alive only one, Lemmonio Boreò, (the executor monk), written between 1910 and 1911 and published in 1912, can be considered Soffici’s only true novel. This work was modeled after Don Quixote and features a disenfranchised protagonist.
Soffici continued to contribute to Lacerba and write more prose. These pieces, published in 1914 and 1915, contain the elements of the novel but are not quite novels, instead being fragmented and journalistic. In the tone one would find in a journal or diary, Soffici lays bare his impressions of art, literature, and the time’s literary movement, and expresses his preferences for autobiography over “the crisis of realism” in the novel.
As a lieutenant in the Italian military from 1915 to 1918, Soffici was prompted by editor Attilio Vallecchi to write some autobiographical accounts. These were published in 1918, 1919, and in a 1960 collection. Soffici’s intuition about the novel’s trend toward realism makes a place for the realism of his own impressions, concerns, and criticisms, which he wrote from 1951 to 1955 in journalistic, autobiographical form. He meditated on events of the war and on cultural movements, using a combination of narrative, documentary, critical, anecdotal, and poetic stylistic forms. Ardengo Soffici died quietly in his home in Forte dei Marmi, Tuscany, Italy, on August 19, 1964.