The industrial advances that did occur appeared intrusive against Italian life, yet due to Italy's isolation from the Industrial revolution it allowed the machine to be romanticised. By 1900 the society, hundreds of years old, was changing daily. Marinetti who at the time was Paris welcomed this. The French literary circles surrounding him affected his future ideas. They were the origin of his devotion to aggression; the group also had a love of violence and belief in the virtue of destruction. Tailhade once wrote, after violence sweep the capital, "What do the victims matter, if the gesture be beautiful" (Tisdall, 1996, p. 18). Another writer that influenced Marinetti was Georges Sorel. Sorel believed that class struggle contributed to the health of society and that only violence could produce the freedom of self-improvement. The Philosopher Henri Bergson introduced to ideas of dynamism and intuition which were adopted by the Artists of Futurism to portray Marinetti's ideas visually. The impact of modern literature as a foundation of Futurism was prominent yet the Futurists would rather acknowledge Italian painters. The French art movements corresponding with futurism were Fauvism and Cubism. Many links have been made between the visual components of Futurism and the French. Apollinaire suggested, "Futurism, in my opinion is an Italian imitation of the two schools of French painting fauvism and cubism" (Perloff, 1986, p. 52). Futurism was a product of industrialisation and urbanisation in the north of Italy but Marinetti's French experiences brought in an international dimension.
Boccioni.
The most prominent artists that responded to Marinetti's call were Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini and Umberto Boccioni. Boccioni was the most articulate and gifted, as a painter and sculptor, of the group (Honour, & Fleming, 1999). Boccioni was ambitious in his hopes for Futurism and was responsible for manifestos on sculpture and painting between 1910 and 1914.
