Novecento

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

Novecento (Italian for "twentieth century") is an art movement born in Milan in 1922 which, after the ruptures of the avant-gardes and Futurism, proposed a "return to order": solid, clear forms, references to the classical tradition and the Italian Renaissance, an art that was modern but rooted in history. The movement involved painting, sculpture, architecture and the decorative arts, and profoundly influenced Italian taste between the wars.

The painters and Margherita Sarfatti

The group was formed in 1922 around seven painters, Anselmo Bucci, Leonardo Dudreville, Achille Funi, Gian Emilio Malerba, Piero Marussig, Ubaldo Oppi and Mario Sironi, brought together by the gallery owner Lino Pesaro and the art critic Margherita Sarfatti, who wrote for Il Popolo d'Italia and was very close to Mussolini. The first official exhibition was held in Milan in 1923, with Mussolini himself among the speakers. After some splits, in 1926 the group was re-formed as Novecento Italiano, open to many other artists. Its ties to Fascism were strong, but the movement never became a true state art, and very different personalities coexisted within it.

The architecture of Milanese Novecento

In architecture, Novecento found its manifesto in Giovanni Muzio's Ca' Brutta, the large apartment building on Via Moscova in Milan completed in 1922. Its nickname, "ugly house", reflects the astonishment of the Milanese at a façade that mixed arches, windows, columns and coloured bands in a new way, classical elements reduced to pure pattern. Around Muzio worked architects such as Gio Ponti, Emilio Lancia, Tomaso Buzzi, Ottavio Cabiati and Alberto Alpago Novello, who together designed Milan's Monument to the Fallen in 1928. Muzio would also design the Palazzo dell'Arte (1931–1933), home of the Triennale.

The decorative arts and Gio Ponti

Novecento was decisive for the decorative arts. In 1923 Gio Ponti became artistic director of the porcelain manufacturer Richard-Ginori and completely renewed its output, with vases, bowls and plates decorated with classical figures, architecture and allegories, elegant and witty. His ceramics were shown at the first Monza Biennial of Decorative Arts (1923) and at the 1925 International Exhibition in Paris, the one that gave its name to Art Deco. In 1928 Ponti founded the magazine Domus, which would become one of the most important voices in architecture and design worldwide. In those years an idea of refined, cultured Italian interior design took shape, combining high-quality craftsmanship with modern taste.

The clash with Rationalism

From the late 1920s Novecento clashed with the Rationalism of the young architects of Gruppo 7, who looked to Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus and rejected any reference to the past. The debate between the two tendencies ran through all of Italian architecture in the 1930s. Yet Novecento remains an important chapter: it taught many designers, starting with Ponti, that one can be modern without giving up history, a lesson that would return in post-war Italian design and, much later, in Postmodernism.