The Romantic Artist & Society: Romanticism & Realism in the 19th Century. 8

Realism in Italy: The Art of the Macchiaioli in Risorgimentio Italy.

Usually, when one considers the development of European painting after romanticism, one turns to the realism pioneered by artists in France like Courbet, and his associates; but, by way of a change, let us think about the group of Italian artists – mainly from Florence- who formed a lesser-known movement, known as the Macchiaioli.¹ The name refers to the aesthetic effect of the sketch; though unlike the French who anatomised the preliminary drawing into strict categories, the Italian “macchia” was preserved in the final paintings themselves, not the sketch: the “macchia” comprised “the light effect, the colour, the verve, and in some cases even the movement of the brush corresponding to the first impression of a scene in nature or an idea in the imagination.”² This description sounds like the objectives of French Impressionism- with whom the Macchiaioli have been frequently compared- but the Italian movement was founded at least ten years before Monet and his friends in the early 1860s. Also, the realism of the Italian group took birth amidst a distinctly political terrain: the movement known as the Risorgimento, another name for the nationalism in nineteenth-century Italy, provided an ideological backdrop for the creation of the group. Formed by a group of predominantly middle-class artists- with the odd member of the nobility- trained as history painters, the Macchiaioli were overtly anti-classical; they rejected the teaching of the Florentine Academy and opted to paint scenes of naturalism centred on the Tuscan countryside, though they exchanged veduta (view painting) for the macchia effect. Though this was a form of “primitivism” aspiring to recapture in art the true agricultural life, without the new farm machinery, landscapes peopled by peasants with their work animals; though it represented a different kind of yearning to that of other bucolically directed movements, e.g. the Nazarenes who based their art on the Bible and mediaeval themes, and had no political motivation. Most of the Macchiaioli began painting in a historical tradition; but they abdicated the Academy in favour of landscape painting, portraits of individuals either in the countryside, or in domestic life with the Tuscan landscape in evidence (above); these artworks were inspired by political writings on individuals like Pierre Joseph Proudhon who defined liberty in terms of anarchy;³ the macchia effect was the aesthetic equivalent of that wish for political freedom. Though the Macchiaioli have been termed realist painters, their association with Italian architects of social and intellectual freedom like Giuseppe Mazzini, painted matter-of-factly by Lega in a death-bed scene, equally justifies labelling them as late romantics.

1The best introduction to the Macchiaioli is Albert Boime, The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento: Representing Culture and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Italy (University of Chicago Press, 1993).

2Ibid, 12.

3On Proudhon and the Macchiaioli, ibid, 99f.