A political newspaper, a painting, and a film
The murder of Giacomo Matteotti, Secretary of the Socialist Unitary Party in Rome, on June 10, 1924, by order of Mussolini, is widely regarded as the watershed event that ushered in the Fascist dictatorship. Eleven days earlier, in a memorable speech in Parliament, he had alleged and denounced that the fascists had committed fraud and violence to gain votes in that year’s general election. The assassination initially threatened to bring about the downfall of Fascism, but instead ended up consolidating Mussolini’s dictatorship.
The opposition deputies — in protest to the murder and in an attempt to to overthrow Mussolini— withdrew from Parliament, in what is known as the Aventine Secession, to protest the murder and attempt to overthrow of Mussolini. Yet they ultimately failed to take decisive action against “Il Duce”. The consolidation of absolute power that Mussolini had gained rendered parliamentary opposition ineffective.
Carlo Rosselli, 1924 ca.
By 1926, Carlo Rosselli became acutely aware that to oppose the Regime effectively, a younger leadership and new strategies were necessary.
“Il Quarto Stato”
Rosselli joined forces with Pietro Nenni, despite their different political and cultural backgrounds. They both felt an urgent need for a renewal, in theory and practice, of Italian socialism. It was a question of political imagination. In March of that year, in Milan, they launched the weekly Il Quarto Stato (The Fourth Estate), a socialist newspaper defending freedom and democracy. The magazine ran from March 27 to October 30 (when it was forced to close) for a total of thirty issues, distributed in all major Italian cities.
The title Il Quarto Stato was chosen by Carlo Rosselli and deserves to be explained. It refers to a painting by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, depicting the working and peasant classes, asserting themselves as a new social and political force, in contrast to the traditional division into nobility, clergy, and bourgeoisie (the first three estates).
Il Quarto Stato resembled Gobetti’s (an opposition leader murdered that same year) Rivoluzione Liberale (Liberal Revolution), although in a more cautious key to avoid censorship. Rosselli and Nenni saw their weekly as a means to give life to new forms of struggle against fascism. They believed it was necessary to promote an anti-fascist bloc that would go from the maximalists to the bourgeois-democratic forces. The topics covered were many, as was the heterogeneous political background of the collaborators.
Pietro Nenni
The weekly and its authors immediately came under police scrutiny, so that as early as April 28, 1926, Police Commissioner Ettore Messana wrote in a report: “The Fourth Estate is the fulcrum of that clandestine press that is full of pamphlets, accusations, and news against the regime.” Mussolini himself confessed to his biographer Y. De Begnac that the threat posed by Nenni and Rosselli in the Socialist-Republican group was at the root of the leggi fascistissime (exceptional laws). In Vita di Carlo Rosselli, Aldo Garosci wrote: “When Rosselli and Nenni founded Il Quarto Stato, they shared the idea, or imagination, of a socialist party of the future, broad enough for the mass base to become the political backbone of the nation. A party that would be insurrectionary in politics and interventionist/reformist in economics, allied with the other anti-fascist parties. […] They conceived their newspaper as the first instrument of this party.”
Despite its brief existence, the newspaper played a crucial role in the anti-Fascist struggle. Its influence was far-reaching, paving the way for a multitude of clandestine publications and political actions that defined the fight against Fascism. Most importantly, here, the newspaper’s brief existence marked a crucial juncture in the broader historical and social transition. It bridged the gap between the initial phase of opposition to the regime and the subsequent, more clandestine and subversive phase, much like the painting that inspired its title, represented a new threshold in the 20th-century class struggle.
It all began with a painting. Il Quarto Stato is a large (293 x 545 cm) oil-on-canvas painting by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, created between 1898 and 1901. Pellizza, a pupil of Pio Sanquirico, adhered to the Italian Divisionist Movement. The technique of the Divisionists involved creating images by juxtaposing small dots of paint according to a specific color theory, a method that Pellizza mastered and used to great effect in his work.
Pellizza managed to see his artwork exhibited one last time, in 1907, in Rome at the Società promotrice di Belle Arti. However, the artist’s life was tragically cut short when he committed suicide on June 14 of the same year, not yet forty years old. His work achieved the deserved popular and critical acclaim posthumously, initially primarily through reproductions in socialist magazines.
Il Quarto Stato is considered his masterpiece and is widely regarded in Italy as one of the defining paintings of the early 20th century. It is a synthesis of 19th-century Italian realist painting and the more modern divisionist approach to color and form. Often misunderstood as a derivative of French Neo-Impressionism and Pointillism, Italian Divisionism developed in parallel with the French movement, yet with different motivations and results. The Divisionists sought to create a form of art that could bring about social change. After being largely ignored in the US, the first comprehensive exhibition on this Italian late 19th-century movement, “Radical Light – Italy’s Divisionist Painters 1891-1910,” was held in 2008 at the National Gallery in Washington.
The composition of the painting—which some say recalls Raphael’s School of Athens, and whose cartoon Pellizza studied—appears to be in part derived from John Ruskin’s Elements of Drawing and Painting (1898).
The painting began as a large drawing for which the artist used his family, neighbors, and fellow villagers as models. Once the composition was set, Pellizza transferred the drawing to a light-colored primer laid out on the canvas. He then applied touches of pure color, creating a dense network of stringy brushstrokes. The result plays dramatically on the overlapping of greens, reds, and blues, as dictated by divisionist technique.
The painting depicts a group of workers marching in protest towards an open space, perhaps a piazza. The march is not violent; it is slow and confident, suggesting an inevitable sense of victory. Pellizza intended to create “a mass of farmers and workers, who, intelligent, strong, robust, advance united like a river overwhelming every obstacle that stands in their way to reach the place where it finds balance.”
In the foreground, three figures stand: two men and a woman with a child in her arms. The woman is the artist’s wife, Teresa, barefoot, gesturing to follow her. To her right walks a “man of about 35, proud, intelligent, hardworking,” as Pellizza described him (Giovanni Zarri, a local carpenter). He walks with ease, one hand in his pocket and his jacket draped over his shoulder with the other. To his right is another man (Giacomo Bidone, another local carpenter) silently advancing, lost in thought, his jacket draped over his left shoulder. Behind them, a mass of people arranged horizontally, wrapped in a golden glow. Allegedly, the painter paid the villager 3 lira a day for posing.
While today Il Quarto Stato, in Italy, has become ubiquitous and iconic, often reproduced in history books as a symbol of workers’ pride and struggles at the beginning of the 20th century, its acceptance as a work of art has been uneven.
When first exhibited at the Turin Quadriennale in 1902, the Fourth Estate received no recognition, compounded by the disappointment of not being purchased by any public institution.
In 1921 (at the end of the biennio rosso, two years of intense revolutionary activity following the First World War), the painting was purchased—for fifty thousand Lira—by popular subscription with the decisive help of a group of Milanese stockbrokers and given as a gift to the Galleria d’Arte Moderna. It was prominently hung in the Sala della Balla of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. The work remained on display there until the 1930s, when it was removed for political reasons. It then resurfaced in the newly rebuilt Palazzo Marino in 1943, as Milan had again become the epicenter of workers’ strikes against the newly formed Italian Social Republic in Salò.
During its stay at Palazzo Marino, the reputation of Il Quarto Stato was enhanced by numerous critics, who emphasized its significance as a monument to the working class. Pelizza’s painting remained in Palazzo Marino until 1980, when it was returned to the Gallery of Modern Art, in a section dedicated to Divisionism. Finally, in 2010, it found its permanent home in the Museo del ‘900, in the first room, as a way of underlining its historical importance.
Today, 124 years after its completion, the painting has taken on layers of symbolic meaning. It not only represents a specific protest of the workers of the time, but also serves as a catalyst for change in the struggle for human rights and dignity. It encourages us to reflect on the inequalities in society and the transformative power of solidarity and collective action in addressing these injustices and creating positive transformation.
Il Quarto Stato has evolved into an iconic pictorial representation, widely replicated and celebrated in various forms. This striking image resonates deeply across the generations. Its reproduction can be found in a multitude of contexts, from postcards and posters to history books, political literature, and even advertisements.
The painting’s most enduring appearance in film must be credited to Bernardo Bertolucci, who, almost as an afterthought, featured it brilliantly in his 1976 film, Novecento.
Poster of “Novecento”
Upon the film’s release, Pellizza’s masterpiece became synonymous with film itself. And the broad success of Bertolucci’s film became a formidable promotional showcase for the painting and contributed to the revaluation of its author.
In the film, the painting appears in the opening credits, establishing its role as a powerful interpretative key. At first, we see a close shot of a man (in the painting) against a black backdrop. Then, as the camera zooms out and pans slowly across the canvas, we encounter a woman and an older man, and progressively, the crowd advances behind them.
Il Quarto Stato also appears in the poster to promote Novecento. Under the stylized faces of Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, and the other protagonists, we find the painting: a graphic solution that immediately establishes a link between the characters in the painting and the protagonists of the film. Novecento opens on a lush spring day in the green Po Valley countryside. The caption “April 25, 1945”, the day of the Liberation from Fascism, appears on the screen. However, the narrative arc of the film is an extended flashback that starts again in 1901.
Following this parenthesis, a lengthy flashback unfolds that spans almost the entire narrative. It is precisely in this past that the story of the two protagonists chronologically begins. The flashback starts again from 1901 (the year the painting was completed). In this way, Pellizza’s masterpiece functions as a watershed moment between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, marking the transition from an older sociopolitical reality to a new one.
According to his contemporaries, Pellizza was certain that Il Quarto Stato depicted a new social reality. But probably he could not have imagined the enduring, multifaceted impact that the image he created still has, over a century later.
Sources: Aldo Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, Vallecchi, Firenze, 1973. Mauro Canali, The Matteotti Murder and Mussolini: The Anatomy of a Fascist Crime. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024 Simonetta Fraquelli and others, Radical Light-Italy's Divisionist Painters 1891-1910, Yale University Press Cent'anni di Quarto Stato, brochure of the Centenary Events, Associazione Pellizza da Volpedo - Odv, Valpedo, 2001, La giustizia.net Wikipedia
