SYNTHESIS OF HUMAN DYNAMISM
Sculpted in 1913, final exhibition in 1924, Galleria Bottega di Poesia, Milan, destroyed in 1927 in Acquabella, Milan.
Rare photos to the rescue
Synthesis of Human Dynamism (1) was the first of Boccioni’s striding sculptures and marks the beginning of his exploration of movement in three dimensions. Aside from Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, it is the most thoroughly documented of all his sculptural works.
The sculpture appears in 14 historical photographs, eight of which capture it from different angles that, when arranged together, provide nearly complete 360-degree visual coverage (2).
Due to its structural complexity, this piece proved to be the most technically demanding and time-consuming to reconstruct. Two rarely published photographs from the 1916–17 Boccioni retrospective in Milan were especially valuable, offering crucial visual information about the back and lower sections of the legs. Additionally, the way the sculpture integrates with and is penetrated by vertical and perpendicular elements of its surrounding framework — particularly in the upper body “scaffolding” — made spatial alignment in the 3D modeling process significantly more manageable.
Visible seams in the original plaster suggest that Boccioni constructed the sculpture in at least five separate parts. These division lines, however, were not reproduced in the reconstruction (3).
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