One of the most unsettling images in the enormous exhibition of Futurist art now showing in Venice is Giacomo Balla’s The Mad Woman (1905). The woman stands full length, framed by a doorway, her hair mussed and gnarled. The yellow springtime light shatters on the broad field behind her. Her body is a coil of wrecked nerves, her long form one pulled or stretched contortion, from her flyaway curls to the tensed flex of her foot. She waves a finger in front of her face at the world outside her disordered mind, in a gesture of negation or chastisement, as if to scold or correct us, while her other arm hangs stiffly at her side, hand cocked at an odd angle. In its present setting—in a show called “Futurism and Futurisms,” which contains hundreds of paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, books, documents, and assorted paraphernalia from the Futurist movements in several countries—Balla’s picture has two quite different effects.¹ Placed in the rooms designated “Towards Futurism,” it helps to establish the formal matrix out of which the language of Futurist art was to evolve: the detonated coloring of Impressionism, the phosphorescences of Pointillism, and the tension between documentary fidelity to subject and the irresolutely colored images characteristic of the macchiaioliin the second half of the nineteenth century. But the young woman’s look of bewildered chastisement also seems directed at the other pieces in the show, as if she were registering real dismay at the carefully scripted derangements soon to