Dora Ohlfsen and the facade commission

Through the patronage of her friend, Duke Fulco Tosti di Valminuta, Dora Ohlfsen was entrusted with the design for a war memorial at the naval base of Formia, near Rome. She began work on the memorial in 1923; it was dedicated on 18 July 1926.
Italy’s fascist government was Ohlfsen’s major patron in the late 1920s and 1930s and her works from this time demonstrate their conservative ideology of race and nationalism.
By WWII, Ohlfsen’s reputation at home had suffered from her association with Australia’s enemies, though it was ‘her heart’s desire’ to do a major project on home soil.

On seeing Mussolini’s fascists on the march through Italy, Ohlfsen wrote, ‘We have been passing through many thrilling times here, no less than a revolution with a king the head of it … everybody began to sit up and notice when 30,000 men marched into Naples and held a convention there on October 24.’ With her figure of Sacrifice Ohlfsen intended to evoke a verse from Giacomo Leopardi’s poem ‘To Italy’: “O my country, the life thou gavest me / I now return to thee.”

The central figure of Sacrifice is portrayed as a young Italian soldier leaping forward to offer himself up. Representing beauty, youth, strength and sacrifice, it is typical of monumental fascist sculpture. Ohlfsen herself however – due no doubt to her experiences nursing during the war – had long been pacifist.

While the representation of 'Sacrifice’ – a young soldier – is the central figure in Ohlfsen’s Formia war memorial, there is another, female, figure on the side of the large pedestal block supporting it. She faces inward, holding a palm of victory in the left hand and a laurel branch in the right, over the names of the fallen soldiers from WWI.

The war memorial at Formia, for which she accepted the Freedom of the City, was Ohlfsen’s most important commission. As later reported, ‘It was the only public work to be put up in Europe by a woman and the only war memorial to be executed in Italy by a foreigner.’