Organicity, abstraction, and the invention of socialist antiquity

This article examines Organicità e astrazione (1956), the most polemical book by Italian Marxist archaeologist Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, as an intervention in postwar debates about socialist aesthetics within the Italian Communist Party. Written in the aftermath of Khrushchev's Secret Speech and amid the growing visibility of American abstract expressionism in Italy, Bianchi Bandinelli attempted to displace both the neoclassical tradition, from Winckelmann to fascist romanità, and the formalist relativism of Alois Riegl and Wilhelm Worringer, by developing a historicist account of organic realism in Greek and Roman art. Arguing that ancient Greek art emerged from a rational, democratic society, Bianchi Bandinelli critiqued abstraction—from Neolithic geometry to Mondrian—as evidence of irrationalism and political decline. The article traces the book's intellectual genealogy across Gramsci, Lukács, and Hauser, and argues that Organicità e astrazione is best understood not as a resolved theoretical statement but as a transitional text—one that attempts to invent the aesthetics of a socialist antiquity while remaining indebted to the idealist frameworks it sought to overcome. Bianchi Bandinelli would retrospectively disavow his book as a maledetto libriccino because of the criticism he received ‘from all sides.’ Nevertheless Organicità e astrazione marks a breakaway from fascism's legacy towards an alternative and emancipatory historiography of the ancient world.