Liberty

LIBERTY. - The artistic movement that in Italy goes by the name of L. or "floral style," which in France and in many other European countries is called Art nouveau and in Germany Jugendstil, characterized the most modern aspects of European art between 1890 and the early years of the 20th century.

It acquired prestige at that time, especially in the field of architecture, owing to the strongly felt need to break free from the stylistic imitations recommended by eclecticism, but it had its origin first in the field of decoration, and to that field it retreated again in its last and weary expressions. Indeed, from its earliest testimonies, that movement had as its characteristic the recurrence of naturalistic elements, derived from the verist taste of the mid-century, but stylized with inflections that in England go back to the affectations of the Pre-Raphaelites. And in England that taste initially established itself in the decoration of fabrics, furniture, and furnishing objects produced by those Messrs. Liberty, whose name also lent itself, as is easy to understand, in Italy, to equivocal or at least inaccurate interpretations. The L. was also called Style sans style, allowing in the interpretation of plant motifs new freedoms of functional structures, achieved by exploiting the possibilities offered by iron and other new building materials — freedoms, in truth, already realized on their own account by engineers.

Among the merits of the L., in any case, first place must be given to that of having attempted to orient taste toward the creation of unified environments, where structures, decorative elements, and the furnishings themselves all responded to the same stylistic requirement. Accordingly, it found its greatest expression, beyond the truly remarkable works of Victor Horta, of H. Van de Velde and of C. R. Mackintosh, in the creation and decoration of environments in which a sense of original and sometimes sumptuous modernity was meant to be manifested. Thus in the settings of the Paris Exposition of 1900 and of that of Turin in 1902, where Raimondo d'Aronco worked very extensively, using the L. for solutions that were anything but displeasing, though always characterized by a sense of provisionality, like that of a fashion destined soon to exhaust itself. Besides the aforementioned Raimondo d'Aronco (1857-1932), Ernesto Basile (1857-1932), author of numerous buildings in the Palermo area and of the rear façade of the Parliament in Rome, and Giuseppe Sommaruga (1867-1917), who built among other things the highly remarkable Palazzo Castiglioni in Milan, were in Italy the major representatives of that architectural and decorative taste.

Emilio Lavagnino