The Futurist Manifesto Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published on the front page of Le Figaro on 20 February 1909 counts as a first in art history: the movement was declared in text before any work was made. It exalts speed, the automobile, the factory and youth, likens museums to cemeteries and calls for their destruction. That the same passage defines war as 'the world's only hygiene' marks the movement's later trajectory from the outset.

Umberto Boccioni turned the programme into a visual problem: how is movement shown in a static object? He took cubism's fractured volume and opened it along the axis of time. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) presents a striding figure together with the trace its movement leaves in the air, as a single mass; the legs stream backwards like flame and the torso is shaped by the pressure of its own speed. The sculpture has no face — the subject is not identity but motion itself.

Futurism carried art beyond painting and sculpture as well: manifestos were issued on music, theatre, typography in poetry, architecture and even cooking, and later avant-gardes learned the practice of the manifesto here. The Russian futurists and constructivists tied that energy to a revolutionary programme. The Italian wing went otherwise: Marinetti joined the fascist movement and the movement became associated with Mussolini's regime. Boccioni died in 1916 in a riding accident during the war he had volunteered for, aged thirty-three. That the work now appears on the Italian 20-cent coin shows how tightly the piece and its history are bound together.