Abstract
This paper investigates the peculiar multiplicity of aspects of Italian fascist culture. Both Giuseppe Bottai, the official in charge of fascist cultural politics, and Lionello Venturi, an art historian of the University of Turin, had important roles in determining the tendency of art, however the two proposed two opposite strategies. While Bottai tried to improve the “bad taste” of fascist art by reorganizing the art exhibition and artist association systems on the basis of the idea of “corporativismo,” Venturi, as an anti-fascist professor, insisted that even modern artworks bring religious revelation to their spectators, a position which implied the cult of Mussolini. This paradoxical crossover of their views presupposes a complex and aporetical relationship between modernism and fascism.
