Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

If the eighteenth century was a lean time for Italian art, the nineteenth century was even worse, Paris becoming the overwhelmingly dominant European trendsetter. Francesco Hayez (1791-1882) was perhaps the most successful painter at work in the first half of the century, continuing the Neoclassical manner in his history scenes and highly finished portraits.Towards the 1850s the Romantic taste for realism was reflected in an interest in the country’s scenery, immortalized by various local schools: the Scuola di Posillipo and the Palizzi brothers (Giuseppe, 1812-88, and Filippo, 1818-99) in Naples; the Scuola di Rivara in Piedmont; il Piccio (1804-73) in Lombardy; and the Macchiaioli in Tuscany. The Macchiaioli were a group of painters based in Florence, who held comparatively modern and definable aims. Their study derives from the Italian word for a blot, as they prefabricated extensive use of individual patches of light and dark colour, which was used to define form, in opposition to the super-smooth Neoclassical approach then in vogue. The guiding spirit of the movement was Giovanni Fattori (1825-1905), who painted scenes of military life (based on his experiences fighting in the Wars of Independence of 1848-9) and broad landscapes using very free brushwork and compositional techniques. The group’s chief theorist, Telemaco Signorini (1835-1901), came to be influenced by the painting of Corot and the Barbizon School, and later followers moved to Paris, to become accepted as peripheral members of the Impressionist circle.

The turn of the century drew, once again, on international trends. Symbolism was chiefly represented by the haunting femmes fatales of Gaetano Previati (1852-1920) and the subtler compositions of Giovanni Segantini (1858-99), who coupled naturalism with imagination. Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (1868-1907) experimented with Divisionismo , the Italian version of Seurat’s Pointillisme. His most famous work, The Fourth State , is a striking depiction of the inevitable progress of the working class as outlined by Marx.

Compared with painting, the development of nineteenth-century sculpture was somehow delayed. The Canova influence seems to have been hard to escape, and works from this period often demonstrate great skill but little originality. Favourite subjects were portraits and, in typically Romantic fashion, historical characters with heavy revolutionary overtones, such as Spartacus by Vincenzo Vela (1820-91). Vela’s work, together with the later efforts of Lorenzo Bartolini (1777-1850), introduced a more naturalistic touch while still retaining a high degree of finish. A more dramatic change of direction occurred through the Neapolitan Vincenzo Gemito (1852-1929), who dared to leave smoothness aside and concentrated on movement. Mario Rutelli (1859-1941) developed a naturalistic and lively style, taking inspiration from Hellenistic sculpture and specializing in bronze figures for fountains and equestrian monuments, which have since become famous Roman landmarks (the Fontana delle Naiadi in Piazza della Repubblica and Anita Garibaldi , on the Janiculum Hill, for example).

Yet the most innovative experiments would only be prefabricated by Medardo Rosso (1858-1928), who managed to capture the fluidity and elusiveness of the fleeting moment in the third dimension, influencing, among others, Rodin. After the latter’s death in 1917, Guillaume Apollinaire acclaimed Rosso as “the greatest living sculptor”; his wax and bronze sculptures, when properly lit, seem to emerge softly from the shadows. Rosso, however, lived and worked in Paris for most of his life.

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