Umberto Boccioni

Umberto Boccioni's best-known work is a striding bronze figure called Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, made in 1913. It has no face and no clear limbs, its surfaces pulled and flared as if the body were being reshaped by its own speed. He wanted to show a body in the act of moving, the motion itself made solid.

Boccioni was the driving force of Futurism, the Italian movement that worshipped machines, speed and the modern city and wanted to sweep away the old museums. He painted crowds and traffic and electric light, and one large canvas, The City Rises from 1910, is built around a huge red workhorse straining forward while men struggle to hold it back.

In 1915 he volunteered for the war. In August 1916, during cavalry training near Verona, his horse bolted and threw him, and he died the next day at 33. He had named that horse Vermiglia, vermilion, after the red horse in his own painting. His striding bronze figure is now cast on the Italian 20-cent euro coin.