Popular High Culture in Italian Media, 1950–1970

Mona Lisa Covergirl

Emma Barron

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319909639
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

When Mona Lisa smiled enigmatically from the cover of the Italian magazine Epoca in 1957, she gazed out at more than three million readers. As Emma Barron argues, her appearance on the cover is emblematic of the distinctive ways that high culture was integrated into Italy's mass culture boom in the 1950s and 1960s, a period when popular appropriations of literature, fine art and music became a part of the rapidly changing modern Italian identity. Popular magazines ran weekly illustrated adaptations of literary classics. Television brought opera from the opera house into the homes of millions. Readers wrote to intellectuals and artists such as Alberto Moravia, Thomas Mann and Salvatore Quasimodo by the thousands with questions about literature and self-education. Drawing upon new archival material on the demographics of television audiences and magazine readers, this book is an engaging account of how the Italian people took possession of high culture and transformed the modern Italian identity.

© The Author(s) 2018

Emma BarronPopular High Culture in Italian Media, 1950–1970Italian and Italian American Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90963-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Mona Lisa Covergirl

Emma Barron¹

(1)

Department of History, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Emma Barron

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

When Mona Lisa smiled her mysterious smile from the cover of the Italian magazine Epoca , she gazed out at more than three million readers. ¹ In the top corner, Epoca’s white-on-red block letter logo appeared, tucked in behind the Mona Lisa’s head, partially obscuring Leonardo’s artful rendering of sky and mountains. These two powerful icons exemplified modern Italy: one a mass culture symbol of Italy’s booming American-style magazine market, and the other, a high culture symbol of Italy’s cultural prestige and heritage. While one was mass-produced, disposable and all but worthless a week later, the other was unique, centuries old and priceless. Perhaps in acknowledgement of this, Mona Lisa’s cover respectfully omitted the usual headlines promoting exciting articles inside the edition. Advances in inexpensive full-colour print technology and Italy’s magazine boom allowed millions of readers to experience Mona Lisa’s mysterious face, the exquisitely rendered folds in the fabric of her clothes and the beauty of her soft hands (See Fig. 1.1). ² Epoca’s editor Enzo Biagi described the cover and explained the significance of the masterpiece to the magazine’s readers:

Fig. 1.1

The Mona Lisa covergirl, Epoca magazine, 28 July 1957 (Image used with permission of Arnoldo Mondadori Editore)

The Mona Lisa is the most popular and yet at the same time, the most controversial work of the great genius Leonardo da Vinci. Created during Leonardo’s prime, the work seems to reflect more than any other, the character, the restlessness, the personality of its author. Perhaps it is for this reason that the interpretation of the famous painting has always been exceedingly difficult and for a long time the critics have searched in vain for a precise definition of her smile, behind which is hidden, elusive symbols and allusions. ³

Epoca ’s logo and cover layout perfectly emulated the American illustrated news magazine Life . Like many of Italy’s popular illustrated news magazines, Epoca presented a modern mix of news, photojournalism, advertising and entertainment influenced by American culture, and yet, executed in a distinctive Italian style. Because of this, the Italian illustrated news magazines differed from Life in substantial ways, particularly in the emphasis its editors placed on Italian high art and cultural knowledge. In contrast, Life magazine rarely featured art on the cover, except perhaps for an occasional Christmas special, such as the 1957 cover of Michelangelo’s white sculpture of Madonna and Child. ⁴ Mona Lisa herself never made the cover of Life magazine, even when she toured to America in 1963, although she did secure a breathless five-page article, ‘The star had trouble getting here, but oh boy, what a smile! LISA OPENS IN D.C.’ largely an account of security arrangements and logistics. ⁵ Over the page, film star Susan Strasberg winks as she models celebrity hairdresser Michel Kazan’s Mona Lisa hairdo ‘the biggest thing since Cleopatra’. ⁶ Italian magazines, though, were proud to display and celebrate Italy’s cultural heritage, believing that it possessed both an educative appeal and entertainment for their readers.

In Italy, high culture icon Mona Lisa took her glittering place alongside popular Hollywood and Cinecittà stars. Unlike the other femme fatale covergirls—Sophia Loren, Grace Kelly and Brigitte Bardot, Mona Lisa’s private life and loves remained an enticing mystery, as she calmly returned the viewer’s gaze. Instead, readers were urged to buy the magazine and learn more about ‘LEONARDO’ in an article by art historian Professor Lionello Venturi, part of a multipaged, full-colour educational series on Italian masterpieces that could be pulled out and saved in a hardcover, also available for purchase from newsstands. ⁷

Mona Lisa’s value lay not in entertainment news or salacious rumour, but in her capacity to advance the cultural knowledge and aspirations of each reader. This star appearance of the Mona Lisa on the cover of Epoca encapsulates and symbolises the core contention of this book: that high culture was integrated in distinctive ways into the new modern Italian identity and into Italy’s associated mass culture boom. I examine the presence and purpose of high culture in Italian mass culture between 1950 and 1970, arguing that high culture formed an important part of everyday life and mass culture, creating in the process meaningful and valued cultural content.

The words used to describe culture and cultural hierarchies are laden with both historical and contextual meaning. They are almost always linked to class divisions or taste, highlighting a need to distinguish individual social positions. ⁸ In this book, I will use a range of terms to describe cultural hierarchies, terms that are in equal parts useful and limited. Useful because their meanings are familiar, limited because they come from a hierarchical judgement of ‘high culture ’, and ‘low culture’ or ‘elite culture’ and ‘mass culture’, where high culture and art are venerated and worthy, and mass produced or popular content has no artistic value. I will use the terms high and mass culture because they are broadly understood and not in order to make judgements on aesthetic or cultural value. High culture in this book refers to the art, music, theatre and literature that Italian, and indeed many international commercial and state cultural institutions—the galleries, theatres and publishing houses—deemed to be historically and artistically significant. There are ambiguities using the terms popular culture and middlebrow in an Italian context, neither of which are used in Italy in the same way as in the Anglo-American cultural context. The term ‘popular culture’ is used in Italy to describe folk culture rather than industrial culture, whereas in the Anglo-American culture it is used instead of, or interchangeably with ‘mass culture’. The description of a cultural consumer or a category of culture as highbrow, lowbrow and middlebrow is not often used in the Italian context. Middlebrow first emerged in Britain during the 1920s as a pejorative term for culture that is perceived to be a middle class, bland and suburban appropriation or more commonly, abbreviation, of elite culture. Although Umberto Eco adopted Dwight MacDonald’s term midcult in a discussion of the ‘levels’ of culture, the main focus in the Italian context remains on mass culture, which generally incorporates midcult. ⁹ I will use the term mass culture to describe the material produced by the cultural industry intended for mass audiences. When I use the words ‘popular’ and ‘popularised’ it will be to indicate culture that is well liked, in turn, ‘elite’ will indicate culture accessible to the educated few.

The massive transformation of class cultural practices is central to the book’s argument. Ways of describing socio-economic status and putting people into class categories are even more fraught than categorising types of culture into high and mass. The book examines shifts in cultural practice in the 1950s and 1960s through magazine reader and television audience surveys. These surveys use the terms Superiore, Media superiore, Media, Media inferiore and Inferiore. In the book, I will refer to class categories using these terms translated into English as upper, upper-middle, middle, lower-middle and lower class, with the knowledge that there are limitations to this hierarchy. I will use these terms as they reflect the language of the time and classifications of the surveys. Data including education, region and occupation will serve to complement these categories in useful ways. Additionally, I use the term working class to refer to those in industrial and unskilled services sectors (forming a subset of people with of the lower-middle and lower class).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: The Mona Lisa Covergirl
• 2. Italia domanda: A Question of Culture
• 3. Dear Intellectual: The Cultural Advice Columns
• 4. Lascia o raddoppia?: Contestants and the Classics
• 5. Lip-Syncing Rossini: The Highs and Lows of Italian Television Opera
• 6. Puccini, Botticelli and Celebrity Endorsements: The Art of Magazine Advertising
• 7. Reciting Shakespeare for Amaretto di Saronno: The Art of Carosello
• 8. The Classics and the Everyday: From I Promessi Sposi to I Promessi Paperi
• 9. Patrolling the Border: I Promessi Sposi on RAI Television
• 10. Conclusion: The Smile of Bergman, the Body of Rita and the Face of Mona Lisa
• Back Matter