The influence on Giacomo Balla of the experiments of Etienne-Jules Marey, of his studies on the movement of men and animals and their representation through chronophotography, is a still point of critical historiography on the great futurist. The same cannot be said of an artist who for Balla was a fraternal friend (even with family ties) and a companion of intellectual adventures: Duilio Cambellotti (1876-1860). In the wide literature on the polyhedric Roman artist, there is no clear and specific reference to how much of Marey’s research can be found in the works in which Cambellotti experiments with the representation of movement, especially in the first decade of the century. Yet the comparison between these works and some of the elaborate images of the French scientist is so close, in some cases at the limit of the quote, that you cannot disregard direct inspiration. Especially since the chronological data – the works of Cambellotti in which the reference to Marey is evident are at least of 1907 – exclude the possibility of an indirect derivation from the research on the photodynamism of the Bragaglia brothers, which will not appear before 1915, and from the first essays futurists of the same Balla, which date back to 1912. Between the latter and Cambellotti it is quite likely to imagine, given the intense personal relationship and at least a significant artistic trace, a usual exchange on the themes solicited by Marey’s research, which Balla certainly had present since the beginning of the century and therefore well before his meeting with futurism. But the first of the two to draw explicit and accomplished consequences on the artistic level was Cambellotti, who paradoxically to futurism has never joined, despite the pressing requests of Boccioni. The progressive-machinist emphasis of Marinetti’s followers was too far from the cultural universe of the Roman artist, who in the chronophotography had mainly found an instrument of interpretation of nature.
