Above It All

UTURISM, AS AN art movement, always had a romance with flight. As early as 1909, only six years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight, F.T. Marinetti wrote in Futurism’s founding manifesto of “the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.” That same year, at an air show in the northern Italian city of Brescia, the nationalistic poet and amateur military man Gabriele d’Annunzio, an inspiration for the Futurists, persuaded one of the pilots to take him up. After an extremely short spin in a plane that rose only a hundred