March 8, 1910, in the Theatre Chiarella, at Turin, before an audience of three thousand, the Futurist painters launched their first declaration of faith, “which contained,” to follow their own words, “all our profound disgusts and hatreds, our revolts against vulgarity, against academic and pedantic mediocrity, against the fanatic cult of what is antique.” [Illustration: MUNTER The Boat Ride] [Illustration: MUNTER The White Wall] 1. Our desire for the truth no longer contents itself with form and color as heretofore understood. 2. What we wish to reproduce on the canvas is not an instant or a moment of immobility of the universal force that surrounds us, but _the sensation of that force itself_. 3. As a matter of fact everything moves, everything runs, everything transforms rapidly. A profile is never immobile before us, but it appears and disappears without ceasing. Given the fact of the momentary persistence of the image on the retina, objects in movement multiply, change form and follow like vibrations in space. A running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular. 4. Nothing is absolute in painting. That which was a truth for the painters of yesterday, is a lie for those of today. We declare, for example, that a portrait should not resemble its sitter, and that the painter carries in his own imagination the landscape he wishes to place upon the canvas. [On this point the Futurists and Cubists agree.] 5. To paint the human figure it is not necessary to paint the _figure_ but simply to give its _envelopment_. Space does not exist. Millions of miles separate us from the sun, yet that is no reason why the house before us should not be encased in the solar disk. In our work we can secure effects similar to those of the X-ray. Opacity does not exist. They paint all sides of an object as if they saw through it. They will paint a platter on a table and the part of the table covered by the platter; they will paint the entire collar about the neck so that it is visible through the neck. They ignore not only the ordinary conceptions of space, but time does not exist for them. Where in ordinary painting the box of bonbons that is passed at a baptism may be painted closed on a table, the Futurist shows what is inside the box, also the people assembled to whom the bonbons are given, and the infant to be baptized, and perhaps the marriage of the father and mother, the carriages outside the church, etc., etc.[65] They illustrate further,