Rendering War focused on the Italian Novecento artist Antonio Giuseppe Santagata’s large-scale studies for mural paintings created in the 1920s and 1930s for buildings of the Association for Disabled and Invalid War Veterans (Case dei Mutilati). Chief among these are the artist’s studies for frescoes in the assembly hall and courtyard of the Casa Madre dei Mutilati (1928–1936), the national headquarters of the association, on the banks of the Tiber River in Rome.

Commemorating and celebrating Italian soldiers in the First World War, Santagata’s imposing renderings offered a counter-narrative to the devastating realities of Italy’s actual experience in the war. They not only expressed the heavily politicized aesthetic outlook of the Italian state, which promoted public art that would restore a sense of national pride and unity after the humiliations of the war, but also reflected the fierce debate taking place around the relationship between new architecture and visual culture.