The commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the death of the sculptor Enrico Cagianelli, (born in Perugia on 11 March 1886 and died in Gubbio on 24 September 1938), who in recent years has received ever more attention from art historians, is the occasion to bring to light an unpublished work that widens the corpus of his artistic output, which began to be investigated as early as the late 1980s and is being enriched more and more with new works, thanks to recent research and discoveries. He trained at the Academy of Fine Arts of Perugia, under the guidance of Giuseppe Frenguelli, master of many generations of artists including Venusto Mignini, Bruno Arzilli, Tommaso Peccini, Aroldo Bellini and Gracco Mosci, who with their significant works marked an intense period, that between the two wars. Frenguelli, of a naturalist bent, at times influenced by Art Nouveau in certain soft touches and inclined to expressionisms, kept his distance from the languages of the avant-gardes, teachings that, however, did not satisfy the young Enrico Cagianelli in his search for something new. He soon became friends with a peer he met at the Academy, Gerardo Dottori, the master of Futurism who would involve him in the discussions for the renewal of art at the usual meeting place of the Umbrian Futurist group, the Caffè Mezzabestia in Perugia, in what is now Piazza Matteotti. Thus the first cover of the magazine of the young Umbrian artists, "Il Refrattario", in 1913, illustrated with a fine drawing by Cagianelli, sealed his membership and shared purpose with those innovators, though in a style still bent on the exaltation of the Art Nouveau line. Although Dottori soon embraced the precepts of Marinetti, Boccioni and Balla, in Cagianelli's case very few works show him close to the new avant-garde expression.

After the First World War the local artistic forces attentive to renewal and to the avant-gardes regrouped with the birth in 1919 of the Fascio artistico umbro, and the sculptor at once took part in its numerous activities, being one of its founders together with Dottori, Benvenuto Crispoldi and Presenzini Mattoli, with Armando Mercuri becoming president, with the aim of giving the opportunity of expression to all the "living" artists of Umbria, especially the young ones who had no chance to emerge. Here is the very precise manifesto: "We want to raise the intellectual level of the region, … We want to connect our beautiful region to the others of Italy where the awakening and creative force is greater" (Fascio artistico giovanile umbro, "L'Unione Liberale", year XXXVII, 12 September 1919). Many were the initiatives set in motion, from conferences to evenings enlivened by literature and music to various exhibitions, and the young artists made themselves known to a more varied public through small solo shows staged in the shop windows of the city's historic centre. It was thus that Enrico Cagianelli, on 26 January 1920, exhibited at the Farmacia Andreoli the sculpture La dominatrice, and the next day opened a solo show at the premises of the FAGU. Although independently, the artist nonetheless won appreciation by exhibiting, in March 1919, three "black and white" works at Ceccherini's shop. The year 1920 marks an important step in the sculptor's path, when he turned his attention to themes concerning the depiction of the dynamism of forms. The chronicle of the time recalls: "Cagianelli, who is undoubtedly a rich and vigorous artistic temperament, reveals in this 'Dominatrice' of his a great feeling for form and a profound sensibility as a modeller. The woman's body seems entirely run through by a contained rhythm of classical dance, while the face and the neck […] bear impressed on them the signs almost of a nervous sensual ecstasy." ("L'Unione Liberale", Enrico Cagianelli, year XXXVIII, no. 20, 1920)
In the spring he was able to meet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who came to visit his studio in April, when he reached Perugia to attend a performance of theatrical syntheses at the Teatro Pavone, describing Cagianelli as a "strong sculptor's temperament seeking his own Futurism without archaism", that is, without indulging that classical plasticity bent on realism. A month later the artist took part in the First Exhibition of Modern Art organised by the magazine "Griffa!", the periodical founded by Gerardo Dottori and the writer Alberto Presenzini Mattoli, created to freshen up the drowsy and stagnant provincial art scene. On 1 May of the same year, Dottori sketched his distinctive traits, stressing that the sculptor approached Futurism in a discontinuous way and that, impatient with rules, he preferred to be free to draw on the most disparate influences. In his engagement with the will to renewal he showed the ability to evolve his own language towards modern and up-to-date solutions, which from Art Nouveau would gradually take on that severity and synthetic quality of structure and modelling of the Art Deco taste. In this very article Dottori describes several works, ranging from the ironic to the Arcadian, to dwell on La dominatrice, of classical perfection presented at the May exhibition, and La danzatrice with its spiral construction.

This last work was found in the personal collection of Alberto Presenzini Mattoli, one of the leading figures of the Umbrian Futurist group, who wrote a fine review following that exhibition of modern art, which sought to point out a path for the young generations to pursue more current directions. Thus one of the very rare Futurist works by our sculptor is dated to 1920, a dating that can plausibly be established thanks also to the presence of the preparatory drawing of the head of the female figure, signed and dated, likewise in the same collection.

The subject depicts a woman moving in dance steps, which is why it is probably the "dancer" that Dottori saw in his atelier, though perhaps not shown at the Perugia exhibition, since in the catalogue that subject corresponds to a "chiaroscuro", that is a drawing. The study of the female face of this spiral sculpture, an ink drawing on card, as well as the female profile itself, restates the artist's other area of interest, namely that particular form of "primitivism" that underlines the archaic element that would be a constant, ever present, in the Umbrian sculptor. It is that fascination with the study of non-Western cultures, known since the end of the nineteenth century, which brought a breath of novelty and offered new sources to draw on for the artists who wished to go beyond the visions and schemes of classical realism. Evident in the setting of the face is a relationship with popular ethnic arts, an apparently naive language, capable of communicating, without interference, even the relationship with the supernatural. The primitivism of the face declares that fidelity to the real could no longer be considered a priori the measure of art, affirming, especially through the plastic arts, a liberation from the conformism of physiognomy faithfully reproduced. This very predilection for the synthetic line, evocative of other cultures, fosters in Cagianelli the expression of tensions and needs that readily enter into narrating myth and the sphere of utopia, political too, as for example in the decorative panels of the Aula Magna of the University for Foreigners of Perugia, of 1937, depicting I punti cardinali, one of his last works.

The early years of Enrico Cagianelli's artistic path, in search of a way of his own, thus see him drawn to the stylistic features of the Marinettian movement, as is also apparent in the drawing published in the catalogue as a copy from the archive of Tancredi Loreti (the main supporter of Gerardo Dottori in the 1960s and 1970s and a collector of accounts and documents) in 1986 on the occasion of the exhibition Futurismo in Umbria, the first survey that began to investigate the dynamics of the spread of the avant-garde movement in the region. The caption, however, was cut, and 1921, the proposed year of publication, is to be verified; indeed, at the bottom the title reads Marinetti contro la bufera antifascista and it is signed and dated at the top right in a barely legible way.

This work too should perhaps be dated to 1920, following the impressions of the meeting with Marinetti, and it can easily be set alongside the unpublished sculpture of La danzatrice, for the same way of rendering the torsions of the bodies. The plaster, "interesting for the sensual rapture of the vibrant forms and for that genuine sense of understanding of the fleeting act, in which the whole delightful figure seems to identify itself in a magnificent effort of harmonious will", as a chronicle by Bacili recalls, demonstrates the appeal of the avant-garde, where the tendency is to geometrise, even if it does not arrive at explicitly abstract forms, taking its place in the climate of the early twentieth century in which Italian sculpture senses the Cubist stimuli in a new and subversive European current. (L.O. Bacili, Gli artisti di avanguardia alla mostra di Perugia, "Il Tempo", 1920, from Marinetti's Libroni, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, online). Strong is the influence of Boccioni's Forme uniche nella continuità dello spazio, where to the schematisation is added the dynamic will that cleaves space, and movement is rendered through simultaneous views in which the figure shifts rapidly. The theme of movement, able also to combine psychic sensations, so important for Futurism, would later be taken up again by Enrico Cagianelli in a drawing published by the magazine "Oggi e Domani" in 1930, in which, once more, a dancing woman twisted in a spiral movement offers a simultaneity of action in the interpenetration of planes.

Antonella Pesola, a graduate in Art History from the University of Perugia, is a specialist in Art History from the University of Siena. She has published regularly since 1993 and also engages in militant criticism. She is a member of the Gerardo Dottori Archives. Among her latest publications: Gerardo Dottori al fronte: presenze ed esperienze del gruppo futurista di Perugia, in Perugia e la Grande Guerra, conference proceedings, Perugia 26-27 May 2016, edited by R. Ranieri, A. Stramaccioni, M. Tosti, Perugia 2017.