Mario Sironi (1885–1961) was an Italian painter whose austere, monumental style became closely bound to the political and cultural upheavals of twentieth-century Italy. Born in Sassari and raised in Rome in a cultivated family, he abandoned engineering studies after a nervous breakdown and turned to art, training under Giacomo Balla and befriending Futurists such as Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini. His early work reflected Divisionism and Futurism, but Sironi soon moved toward a more static, architectonic vision of the modern city, marked by heavy forms, muted color, and a pervasive sense of solitude. After the First World War he settled in Milan, where industrial landscapes and urban peripheries fed his imagery. In the 1920s he became a leading figure of Novecento Italiano, advocating a “return to order” rooted in classical tradition and national identity. His drive toward monumentality led naturally to mural painting, and under Mussolini he became one of Fascism’s principal visual interpreters, producing major decorative cycles and thousands of political cartoons. The collapse of Fascism brought isolation and poverty, intensified by personal tragedy. His late work turned increasingly fragmentary and quasi-abstract. Long marginalized for his politics, Sironi is now viewed as a central yet deeply ambivalent figure in Italian modernism.