Buttafuoco evokes Gabriele d’Annunzio and the ‘strength’ of Venice

Referring to the complete D’Annunzio text, Buttafuoco wanted to underline the relevance of a thought capable of spanning the centuries. In his speech, the president of the Biennale evoked the famous speech by Gabriele d’Annunzo, in which artists from every country were invited to gather in Venice to bear witness to “their dreams and their new efforts” in front of what the then most successful Italian poet in public opinion defined as an “eternal hearth of art”. On that occasion, the Pope of New Italy launched an appeal to artists to populate the nascent Venetian Biennale with their dreams: “come and recognize your woes under the splendor of this ancient and yet still new soul”.

The message, then as now, revolves around the relationship between Art and Life. Already at the end of the 19th century, D’Annunzio denounced a profound fracture between the two dimensions, urging artists – described as isolated figures, suspended between ideal aspirations and disillusions – to recognize their own anxieties and to rediscover a vital principle in art itself. A passage that seems to retain a surprising relevance. “Nowhere else – wrote d’Annunzio – could these guests feel more deeply the discord that exists today between Art and Life”. Words that resonate today in a global context marked by cultural crises and social transformations, in which the role of art returns to questioning its own function, also in the wake of the announced Russian pavilion at the 2026 Art Biennale and the intervention of the Ministry of Culture. The Art Biennale, Gabriele d’Annunzio hoped in 1895, manifested itself as a place where art could rediscover its “unquenchable flame” in dialogue with life.

In the other part of the Dannuzian oration referred to we read: “O solitary men – he wanted to say – who drew yourselves aside from the hostile crowd to adore a ghost that only lives in the mirror of your eyes; and you who created yourselves king of a palace without windows, where in vain you have waited for I know not what Visitation from time immemorial; and you who believed you were digging up the image of Beauty from beneath a ruin, and it was none other than a Corroded Sphinx that will torment you with its enigmas until death; and you who every evening stand on your thresholds to see the mysterious Stranger arrive with his cloak full of gifts, and palely place your ear against the earth to hear the step that seems to approach and then disappears; all of you who are sterilized by resigned mourning or devoured by desperate pride, all of you who harden a useless pertinacity or make continuous waiting sleepless; disappointed, come and recognize your woes under the splendor of this ancient and yet new soul. It will reveal to you the secret of its inextinguishable flame when it tells you that it was born from the most passionate union of Art with Life”.