Tampada Ad Arco

Katherine Curtis
10125258
ITAL10500 Reading Italy: From Medieval to Modern
How to read a still image

This is a painting entitled “Lampada ad arco”, painted in 1909 by Giacomo Balla, according to Balla the painting represented “how romantic moonlight had been surpassed by the light of the modern electric street light.” The painting is an example of art from the artistic Avant-Garde movement of Futurism which was founded in Italy in 1909, by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and ended in the late 1920s. One key feature of Futurism was that Futurists strongly rejected traditional forms of art, and were instead, fascinated and dedicated to everything they perceived as new and revolutionary. Futurists aimed to celebrate the future and were captivated by new, modern technology for example, the
Futurists were dismissive towards anything which celebrated the past and nature, as Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially traditional artistic and political ideals. Marinetti wrote that "We want no part of it, the past” as Futurists celebrated change and wanted to represent the all new “modern experience”, evoking through their art with the new sensations they hoped one would experience in the rising metropolis and cities; the artists wanted to recreate, through their art, the noise, heat, smell and the speed characterising the modern urban life. The main purpose of “Lampada ad arco” is to emphasise the Futurist belief that a natural provider of light being that of the moon was being outshone by an artificial, manmade provider (the streetlamp). To