founded in Milan in 1922 by Anselmo Bucci (1887–1955), Leonardo Dudreville, Achille Funi, Gian Emilio Malerba, Piero Marussig, Ubaldo Oppi and Mario Sironi. Motivated by a post-war “call to order”, they were brought together by Lino Pesaro, a gallery owner interested in modern art, and Margherita Sarfatti, a writer and art critic who worked on Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia. Sarfatti was also Mussolini’s mistress. The movement was officially launched in 1923 at an exhibition in Milan, with Mussolini as one of the speakers. After being represented at the Venice Biennale of 1924, the group split and was reformed. The new Novecento Italiano staged its first group exhibition in Milan in 1926. Several of the artists were war veterans; Sarfatti had lost a son in the war. The group wished to take on the Italian establishment and create an art associated with the rhetoric of Fascism. The artists supported the Fascist regime and their work became associated with the state propaganda department, although Mussolini reprimanded Sarfatti for using his name and the name of Fascism to promote Novecento. The name of the movement (which means 1900s) was a deliberate reference to Italian art in the 15th and 16th centuries. The group rejected European avant garde art and wished to revive the tradition of large format history painting in the classical manner. It lacked a precise artistic programme and included artists of different styles and temperament, for example, Carrà and Marini. It aimed to promote a renewed yet traditional Italian art. Sironi said, “if we look at the painters of the second half of the 19th century, we find that only the revolutionary were great and that the greatest were the most revolutionary”; the artists of Novecento Italiano “would not imitate the world created by God but would be inspired by it”. Metaphysical art Metaphysical art () is the name of an Italian art movement, created by Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. Their dream-like paintings of squares typical of idealized Italian cities, as well as apparently casual juxtapositions of objects, represented a visionary world which engaged most immediately with the unconscious mind, beyond physical reality, hence the name. The metaphysical movement provided significant impetus for the development of Dada and Surrealism. Classical modernism of the 20th century At the beginning of the 20th century, Italian sculptors and painters joined the rest of Western Europe in the revitalization