Ducked into the Metropolitan Museum of Art to visit one of my favorite sculptures on Valentine’s Day: a vaguely human-shaped slab of bronze that staggers into a ferocious wind, its body on fire as it lunges into the future, sheared and massive.

In 1909, a manifesto appeared in a French newspaper:

We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents—

This purple writing tinted my thoughts as I circled Boccioni’s figure. A body warped and wefted like a terrible dream dredged from the sea. Its face is an anvil. Or a crucifix. The end of religion.

The Futurists believed museums were cemeteries yet here’s this statue a century later, captive and displayed beneath timid gallery spotlights. Sheared planes and a knight’s helmet, frozen in its final crusade.