IMPRESSIONISM. — The term i. and the adjectives derived from it generally serve to designate a painting in patches, summary and rapid, intended to render the momentary appearance or the fleeting sense of form in movement by means of the vibrations of light emanating from colored things. A pictorial manner or technique possessing such requirements may be, as in fact it is, found in all periods and civilizations; suffice it to think of so many ancient paintings discovered at Pompeii, Herculaneum or Rome, and of so many others in the catacombs, or of certain medieval miniatures, or, in more recent times, of the pictorial technique followed by certain artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: one may recall the canvases of a Magnasco or a Guardi and then of so many painters of the beginnings of the nineteenth century, from Turner to Constable to Corot to Gigante. In a broader sense the term i., and naturally the adjective derived from it, also serves to designate a technique of sculpture whereby, through sharp juxtapositions of broken planes, deep incisions or other particular devices, the gradation of surfaces exposed to light is followed, with the aim of obtaining effects analogous to those pursued by Impressionist painting. In certain respects it is also legitimate to speak of Impressionist architecture when considering certain particular characteristics imparted to structures by the process of stylistic disintegration proper to the architectural language of the mid-nineteenth century, and even more in certain attitudes of functional architecture that foreshadow the more modern kind. Thus one may speak of Impressionist poetry and music. In a more proper and restricted sense, however, the term i. designates the particular pictorial movement that originated in France around the middle of the last century, received what may be considered its official consecration, or its baptism, at an exhibition held in Paris in 1874 through the efforts of the «Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs», and constituted a foundation, or at least a necessary intermediary, for the further development of modern art.
Indeed, at that exhibition of 1874 a homogeneous group of artists presented their pictorial works to the judgment of the public; in them, precisely by means of a technique possessing the requirements mentioned above and founded upon a realistic conception of art, there was rendered not so much a vision of reality as of the illusion or impression that reality itself offered them. A clear, patch-like painting, consisting of rapid and direct juxtapositions of pure colors, placed side by side according to the laws of complementarity and intended above all to render the effect of things seen in the open air according to the painter’s subjective intuition. Thus it was a deliberate representation not of reality in its entirety, according to the convictions and rules defined over centuries of pictorial civilization from Giotto onward, but of a selection of the constituent elements of that reality, a selection determined by the particular requirements of the individual artists. The names of the painters who appeared in that famous exhibition were C. Monet, A. Sisley, C. Pissarro, A. Renoir, E. Degas, B. Morisot, P. Cézanne. Edoardo Manet was not then included in the group, although the Impressionists recognized him as their master and although, as early as 1863, by exhibiting his Déjeuner sur l'herbe at the «Salon des refusés», he had provoked a violent reaction from the public because of the composition’s decidedly anti-academic character, its frank and firm technique, and its direct juxtapositions of strongly contrasting colors, marked by shadows and lights. Nor was G. B. C. Corot included, although in his studies from life, especially those of his early maturity, he too had produced an entirely clear and transparent painting, with ringing tones of boldly juxtaposed colors. It was the critic Louis Leroy who, taking his cue from the title of a painting by Monet, Impression, soleil levant, spoke of those painters as Impressionists, intending the term in a pejorative sense. The artists themselves, however, liked the term and three years later again appeared as a group, under that appellation, before the judgment of the public.
The primary demand from which the Impressionists had set out was that of realism, to such an extent that one essential aspect of their works was that they were paintings « dal vero », executed in the open air, painted sur le motif; but even before 1880 it could often be felt that the Impressionists no longer sought merely to render the impression or sense of reality in dazzling harmonies of color, but that they pursued the representation of something beyond the appearances of reality itself. The subject consciously became a theme, a motif elaborated by the artist, and its value as «soggetto» declined before the importance assumed by the meaning arising from the harmony of lines, forms and colors through which the artist expressed the intimate lyricism of his temperament. From awareness of such a position there clearly arose the absolute sense of freedom that led the artists, through logical connections, even to deny the evident appearance of things itself, hence «abstract art».
Consequently, pictorial i. should above all be understood as one of the most evident and significant aspects of the process of disintegration of the ancient stylistic languages proper to all nineteenth-century art.
Although Impressionist painting thus cannot be said to have been invented in France, nor to be an exclusive manifestation of French art, it was in France, in Paris, and through the work of the painters mentioned above and of others as well, that it achieved its greatest results in conscious and organic manifestations. This was also because the personalities of the French artists who expressed themselves according to the Impressionist taste were particularly strong and gifted.
Around 1880 certain Impressionist painters, foremost among them G. Seurat, felt the need to support their empirical experience of nature upon the laws of physics governing the division of colors, seeking in this way to obtain greater luminosity in their paintings (v. DIVISIONISMO). The results naturally were not what Seurat himself had hoped, although his works, because of the inner strength of their expression, are truly valuable. The same may be said of the other stylistic formulas deriving from i. and based on particular technical approaches.
The characteristic modes of Impressionist painting appeared, albeit in an interpretation that may be defined as dialectal and that possesses the merits and defects of a dialect, in Italy as well during the second half of the nineteenth century, where, on the other hand, the patch painting of the «finito non-finito», as has been mentioned, had often been practiced for centuries. Indeed, many Italian painters were in Paris between 1850 and 1880—that is, during the thirty-year period of the formation and greatest splendor of i.—to see, study and attempt to understand what was being done in the French capital, by then also the capital of the most modern manifestations of European art. From Giuseppe Palizzi to Domenico Morelli, from Altamura to De Tivoli, from Fontanesi to Avondo, Carcano, Banti, Signorini, Cabianca, Gordigiani, Bechi, Ussi, Nino Costa, Faruffini, Pagliano, Mosè Bianchi and Adriano Cecioni, they were all in Paris, down to Zandomeneghi, De Nittis, Boldini and Mancini, who, with varying fortunes and differing results, also settled and lived for a long time on the banks of the Seine. Thus, they were...
There were therefore many, and among the foremost, Italian painters of the nineteenth century who came to know French Impressionist painting through direct experience, at its most vital and significant moment; but there were also very few—perhaps only Zandomeneghi—who were able to “see” the true essential qualities of i. and express their own pictorial ideas in that pure language. The others, more than by the Impressionists, were attracted by Corot, Courbet, Meissonier, and the “landscape painters of the ’30s,” to whom the movement of the Tuscan “macchiaioli” is more directly connected (
V. MACCHIAIOLI)
Vedi tav. CIV.Emilio Lavagnino
I. IN ANCIENT CHRISTIAN ART
The term i. has also been applied by art criticism to certain ancient paintings that reveal a technique more or less corresponding to that of the aforementioned modern school and probably already designated by the ancients themselves (Pliny, Petronius) by the term « pictura compendiaria ». The designation was subsequently extended to works of sculpture as well.In both ancient Christian and Hellenistic-Roman art, one occasionally finds “anticlassical” reactions consisting in formal abbreviations that focus more on the impression produced by reality, and especially by the play of light upon it, than on the organic connectedness, linear clarity, and plasticity of forms. This “pictorial” search for fleeting relationships of light and shade, after sporadic appearances in Alexandrian and Flavian art (above all in sculpture), is observed repeatedly in Christian cemetery painting: for example, in the hypogeum of the Flavii (landscape motifs and a few small figures), in the so-called chapels of the Sacraments at S. Callisto, in certain frescoes of the hypogeum of the Aurelii on Viale Manzoni, and again in quite a few paintings from the end of the 3rd century in the cemetery of SS. Pietro e Marcellino on the Via Labicana. Everywhere, broad strokes of light and shade are rapidly applied over poorly defined silhouettes in a lighter tone.
In sculpture, especially from the second half of the 3rd century, the search for chiaroscuro effects is more readily observed in the hair, the softer parts of the flesh, and the beards.
Luciano De Bruyne