IMPRESSIONISM. – The term *impressionism* and its derived adjectives generally serve to indicate a painting done in patches, summary, rapid, intended to convey the momentary aspect or the fleeting sense of a form in movement through the vibrations of light emanating from colored things. A manner or pictorial technique possessing such qualities may, as is in fact the case, belong to all ages and all civilizations; one need only think of so many ancient paintings discovered at Pompeii, Herculaneum, or Rome, and of many others from the catacombs, or of certain medieval miniatures, or, in more recent times, of the pictorial technique followed by some artists of the 17th and 18th centuries: one may recall the canvases of a Magnasco or a Guardi and then of so many painters at the beginning of the 19th century, from Turner to Constable to Corot to Gigante. In a broader sense, the term *impressionism*, and naturally the adjective derived from it, also serves to indicate a technique in sculpture whereby, through sharp juxtapositions of fractured planes, deep incisions, or other such devices, the gradation of surfaces exposed to light is followed, with the aim of achieving effects analogous to those sought by Impressionist painting. In some respects, one may also speak of Impressionist architecture in considering certain particular characteristics derived by structures from the process of stylistic disintegration proper to the architectural language of the mid-19th century, and further in some attitudes of functional architecture that foreshadows the more modern.
Thus one may speak of Impressionist poetry and music. However, in the stricter and more proper sense, the term *impressionism* refers to the particular pictorial movement that originated in France around the mid-19th century, which received what may be considered its official consecration and baptism in an exhibition held in 1874 in Paris through the efforts of the *Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs*, and which is to be regarded as the foundation or at least a necessary intermediary for further developments in modern art.
Indeed, at that 1874 exhibition, a homogeneous group of artists presented to the public their paintings in which, precisely through a technique possessing the qualities mentioned above, and based on a veristic conception of art, a vision was rendered—not so much of reality itself as of the illusion or impression that reality offered them. A clear, patchy painting, with rapid and direct juxtapositions of pure colors, juxtaposed according to the laws of complementarity and intended above all to convey the effect of things seen outdoors according to the painter’s subjective intuition. Thus a deliberate representation not of the whole of reality, 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 exigencies of individual artists. The names of the painters featured in that famous show are C. Monet, A. Sisley, C. Pissarro, A. Renoir, E. Degas, B. Morisot, P. Cézanne. Édouard Manet was not then part of the group, though the Impressionists acknowledged him as their master; already in 1863, exhibiting at the *Salon des refusés* his *Déjeuner sur l’herbe*, he had provoked a violent reaction from the public for the decidedly anti-academic character of the composition, for the frank and bold technique, and for the direct juxtapositions of color with strongly contrasted lights and shadows. Nor was J. B. C. Corot part of the group, though in his plein-air studies, especially from his early maturity, he too had produced a painting that was entirely clear and transparent, with resounding timbres of boldly juxtaposed colors. It was the critic Louis Leroy who, taking his cue from the title of a painting by Monet, *Impression*, began to speak of these painters as Impressionists, giving the term, in his intentions, a pejorative meaning. The term, however, pleased the artists themselves, who three years later presented themselves again as a group under that very name to the judgment of the public.
The primary exigency from which the Impressionists started was that of realism, so much so that one of the essential aspects of their works consisted in being paintings “from life,” executed outdoors, *sur le motif*; yet even before 1880 one often senses how the Impressionists no longer tend merely to render the impression or sense of reality in dazzling color harmonies, but rather pursue the representation of something that lies beyond the appearances of reality itself. The subject becomes consciously a theme, a motif that the artist elaborates, and its value as a “subject” declines in the face of the importance assumed by the meaning derived from the harmony of lines, forms, and colors with which the artist expresses the inner lyricism of his own temperament. From an awareness of such a position clearly derives the absolute sense of freedom that led the artists, by logical necessity, even to deny the very evident aspect of things, whence *abstract art*.
Thus the Impressionist movement must above all be understood as one of the most evident and significant aspects of the process of disintegration of ancient stylistic languages proper to all 19th-century art.
Although, therefore, Impressionist painting 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 others that it attained, in conscious and organic manifestations, its greatest achievements. This was also because the personalities of the French artists who expressed themselves in the Impressionist style were particularly strong and gifted.
Around 1880, some Impressionist painters, first among them G. Seurat, felt the need to ground their empirical experience of nature in the laws of physics governing the division of colors, seeking in this way to achieve greater luminosity in their paintings (v. DIVISIONISM). The results were naturally not what Seurat himself had hoped for, though his works, for their inner expressive force, are truly admirable. The same may be said of the other stylistic formulas derived from art and based on particular attitudes of technique.
The distinctive methods of Impressionist painting appeared, albeit in an interpretation that can be described as dialectal and which shares both the strengths and weaknesses of dialect, in the second half of the 19th century in Italy, where, moreover, the *macchia* painting of the "unfinished finished" had long been applied for centuries. Indeed, many Italian painters between 1850 and 1880, in the thirty-year period of formation and peak of their art, went to Paris to see, study, and attempt to understand what was being done in the French capital, now also the center of the most modern artistic movements in Europe. From Giuseppe Palizzi to Domenico Morelli, from Altamura to De Tivoli, from Fontanesi to Avondo, from Carcano to Banti, from Signorini to Cabania, from Gordigiani to Bechi, from Ussi to Nino Costa, from Faruffini to Pagliano, from Mosè Bianchi to Adriano Cecioni, they all went to Paris, up to Zandomeneghi, De Nittis, Boldini, and Mancini, who, with varying success and different results, also settled and lived for a long time along the banks of the Seine. Thus, many of the greatest 19th-century Italian painters experienced Impressionist French painting firsthand at its most vital and significant moment, but very few—perhaps only Zandomeneghi—truly "saw" the essential qualities of this art and expressed their own pictorial ideas in that pure language. The others were more attracted by Corot, Courbet, Meissonier, the "landscape painters of the '80s," and more directly connected to the movement of the Tuscan *macchiaioli* (
V. MACCHIAIOLI)
See pl. CIV.Both in ancient Christian art and in Hellenistic-Roman art, occasional "anti-classical" reactions can be found, consisting of formal abbreviations that emphasize the impression produced by reality—and especially by the play of light upon it—rather than the organic coherence, linear clarity, and plasticity of forms. This "painterly" pursuit of fleeting light-and-dark relationships, after sporadic appearances in Alexandrian and Flavian art (first in sculpture), is noted repeatedly in Christian funerary painting: for example, in the Hypogeum of the Flavians (landscape motifs and a few small figures), in the so-called Chapels of the Sacraments in St. Callixtus, in certain frescoes of the Hypogeum of the Aureli on Viale Manzoni, and again in numerous paintings from the late 3rd century in the cemetery of SS. Peter and Marcellinus on the Via Labicana. Everywhere, broad brushstrokes of light and shadow are rapidly applied over vaguely defined silhouettes of a lighter tone.
In sculpture, especially in the second half of the 3rd century, the search for chiaroscural effects is most evident in hairstyles, the softer parts of flesh, and beards. Luciano De Bruyne