Benedetta: Futurist Sacred Art 'in, of, and from the Feminine'.

This essay analyses the interwar painting of Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, student of Giacomo Balla and wife of Italian Futurist founder F. T. Marinetti. She was at the forefront of Futurism's turn toward arte sacra, or sacred art, and the most prominent woman artist of the movement, publishing three experimental verbo-visual novels, participating in five Venice Biennales, attending the First Futurist Congress of 1924, authoring a manifesto, and executing a major public works project for the Fascist regime. Her work is considered in the context of intersectional modernist discourses about European avant-garde abstraction, global occultism, and early Italian feminism, arguing that her illustrations and paintings should be read as a product of an alternative avant-garde impulse 'in, of, and from the feminine', to borrow Griselda Pollock's phrase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]