Engraving the Revolution: Carlo Abate and the Art of the Cronaca Sovversiva, 1903–19

The world of Italian radicalism that existed during the early years of the twentieth century is often thought of as a place of bomb plots, protests and class war; yet, it was also a place of artists and journalists who labored to produced a rich and vibrant transnational print culture. This was also a time in which artisanal processes of printing images, such as wood-engraving, were competing with the emerging technology of photo-mechanical reproduction. In this paper, I look at the Italian language anarchist periodical the Cronaca Sovversiva (1903-1919) that circulated throughout the Atlantic world and played a vital role in the construction of a transnational social movement across the widespread Italian emigrant labor diaspora. An examination of this newspaper reveals the propaganda tactics of the newspaper’s principle creator, Luigi Galleani, and the artistic choices of the newspaper’s primary printmaker, Carlo Abate.

My paper focuses on how Abate’s prints, in particular his portraiture, was used to create a transnational revolutionary hagiography on the pages of the Cronaca Sovversiva. I also examine how Abate’s images were engaged in larger debates around the presence of the human hand in print-art. In a manner consistent with the artisanal working-class values of Italian anarchists, Abate’s visual rhetoric stresses the hand of the artist and the labor of production through the use of lines, shading, and composition. Abate’s work thus provides a noteworthy example of how the transnational circulation of anarchist print culture contributed simultaneously to the formation of a diasporic revolutionary identity and to transnational debates about the role of the artist in an age of mechanical reproduction.