Benedetta Cappa Marinetti

Style: Futurism;

Place: Rome

Born: 1897

Death: 1977

Biography:

Benedetta Cappa Marinetti (14 August 1897 – 15 May 1977) was an Italian futurist artist who has had retrospectives at the Walker Art Center and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Her work fits within the second phase of Italian Futurism. Benedetta Cappa was born in Rome, the second of five children. Her mother, Amalia Cappa, was a numerologist and believed in the properties of alphabetic letters and gave her four sons names that begin with the letter A and her only daughter, Benedetta, a name that began with B. Her mother was a cultured woman and a Protestant. Her parents were rigid, but affectionate in her upbringing. Cappa’s father, Innocenzo Cappa, was an official of the Ministry of Railways and later an officer in the Italian army. He died after returning from World War I, a tragic event that impacted her so deeply that she described her emotional and psychological state as a ‘broken core’. Her brothers Alberto and Arturo, a historian and a journalist, also had ties to the military and Italian politics, bringing the family in close contact with the Socialist Party and eventually many Futurist thinkers.The Cappas were a middle-class family. Benedetta Cappa had access to an education that allowed her to nurture her strong vocation to painting and literature. As a child, Cappa wrote poetry and took painting and piano lessons. She attended Vittoria Columna high school in Rome and graduated in 1914. During World War I she worked at an after-school program for underprivileged children. Her interest in educational science led her to explore the pedagogy of Maria Montessori, whose ideas and concepts treat learning as a primarily sensory experience. Cappa’s interest in tactile exploration continued and would later be reconfigured in her version of Futurist ideology. She received a degree in elementary education from the 'Universita degli Studi di Roma' in 1917. Around 1917, Cappa’s brother’s activities with the Futurists and friendship with Futurist artist Růžena Zátková inspired her to leave teaching. She began her training as a painter in the studio of Giacomo Balla, an abstract artist who created pieces that captured movement and light. Cappa initially modeled her choices of theme and style after her mentor, depicting dynamic objects and the impact they have on their surroundings. Balla became an important mentor and a lifelong friend. Cappa began to meet avant-garde artists, poets and writers who gathered in the studio. In 1918, she met Filippo Tommaso Marinetti at Casa Balla. Their friendship was first based on intellectual pursuits and they began exchanging letters in 1918. Initially, these are written with a certain formality on both parts and deal with Futurist ideas and a discussion of their literary works. By 1920 Marinetti is addressing his correspondence to B. Cappa Marinetti. Cappa and Marinetti married three years later.