Impressionism

IMPRESSIONISM. - The term I. and the adjectives derived from it generally serve to indicate a painting in patches, summary, rapid, intended to render the momentary aspect or the fleeting sense of form in movement by means of the vibrations of light that are released from colored things. A manner or pictorial technique having such requisites can be, as in fact it is, of all times and all civilizations; suffice it to think of the many pictorial works of the ancients found at Pompeii, at Herculaneum or at 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 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: let us recall the canvases of a Magnasco or a Guardi and then of so very many painters of the early 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 indicate a technique of sculpture by which, through sharp juxtapositions of broken planes, of deep incisions or other particular devices, the gradation of surfaces exposed to light is followed, in order to obtain effects analogous to those pursued by Impressionist painting. In certain respects it is also legitimate to speak of an Impressionist architecture when considering certain particular characteristics deriving to structures from the process of stylistic disintegration proper to the architectural language of the mid-nineteenth century, and more so in certain attitudes of functional architecture that preludes the more modern one. Thus one will speak of an Impressionist poetry and music. However, in a more proper and restricted sense, the term I. indicates the particular pictorial movement that had its origins in France around the middle of the last century, which received what may be considered its official consecration or its baptism in an exhibition held in 1874 in Paris through the efforts of the "Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs," and which stands as a foundation or at least a necessary conduit to further developments of modern art.

In fact, in that exhibition of 1874 a homogeneous group of artists presented to the public's judgment their pictorial works in which, precisely by means of a technique having the requisites mentioned above, founding on a veristic conception of art, there was rendered a vision, more than of reality, of the illusion or impression that reality itself offered them. A clear painting, in patches, with 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. Hence a deliberate representation not of all reality, according to the convictions and rules defined over centuries and 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 who appeared in that famous show are C. Monet, A. Sisley, C. Pissarro, A. Renoir, E. Degas, B. Morisot, P. Cézanne. Édouard Manet did not then appear in the group, although the Impressionists recognized him as their master and who, already in 1863, exhibiting at the "Salon des refusés" his Déjeuner sur l'herbe, had aroused a violent reaction on the part of the public because of the decidedly anti-academic character of the composition, because of the frank and sharp technique and because of the direct juxtapositions of color strongly contrasted with shadows and lights; nor did G. B. C. Corot appear there, who in his studies from life, especially from the time of his first maturity, had also made a painting altogether clear and transparent with ringing timbres 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, giving the term, in his intentions, a pejorative meaning. The term, on the other hand, pleased the artists themselves, who three years later presented themselves again as a group and under that appellation to the public's judgment.

The first exigency from which the Impressionists had started was that of realism, so much so that one of the essential aspects of their works consisted in their being paintings "from life" executed in the open air, painted sur le motif; but already before 1880 one often senses how the Impressionists no longer tend only to render the impression or the sense of reality in dazzling harmonies of color, but that they pursue the representation of something that is beyond the appearances of reality itself. The subject consciously becomes a theme, a motif that the artist elaborates, and its value, that of "subject," declines before the importance that comes to be assumed by the meaning deriving from the harmony of lines, forms and colors with which the artist expresses the intimate lyricism of his own temperament. From the awareness of such a position clearly derives the absolute sense of freedom that has led artists, by logical connections, to the point of denying the very evident aspect of things, whence "abstract art."

Therefore pictorial I. is above all to 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 therefore Impressionist painting cannot be said either to have been invented in France, nor to be an exclusive manifestation of French art, in France, in Paris, and through the work of the painters mentioned above and of still others, it attained, in conscious and organic manifestations, its greatest results. This also because the personalities of the French artists who expressed themselves according to Impressionist taste were particularly strong and gifted.

Around 1880 some Impressionist painters, first among them G. Seurat, felt the need to base their empirical experience of nature on the laws of physics that govern the division of colors, seeking in this way to obtain a greater luminosity in their paintings (v. DIVISIONISMO). The results naturally were not what Seurat himself had hoped, although his works, because of the intimate force of expression, are truly valuable. The same may be said of the other stylistic formulas deriving from I. and based on particular attitudes of technique.

The modes proper to Impressionist painting appeared, albeit in an interpretation that may be defined as dialectal and that has the merits and defects of dialect, in the second half of the nineteenth century also in Italy where, on the other hand, the painting in patches of the "finished non-finished," as has been mentioned, had for centuries often been applied. Indeed, many were the Italian painters who between 1850 and 1880, that is, in the thirty-year period of the formation and greatest splendor of I., were in Paris to see, to study, to try to understand what was being done in the French capital, by then become also the capital of the most modern European artistic manifestations. From Giuseppe Palizzi to Domenico Morelli, from Altamura to De Tivoli, from Fontanesi to Avondo, to Carcano, to Banti, to Signorini, to Cabianca, to Gordigiani, to Bechi, to Ussi, to Nino Costa, to Faruffini, to Pagliano, to Mosè Bianchi, to Adriano Cecioni, they all went to Paris, down to Zandomeneghi, to De Nittis, to Boldini and to Mancini, who, with varying fortune and different results, also settled and lived for a long time on the banks of the Seine. Thus they were many and among the greatest Italian painters of the nineteenth century knew French Impressionist painting through direct vision and at its most vivid and pregnant moment, but there were also very few, perhaps only Zandomeneghi, who knew how to "see" the true essential qualities of Impressionism and to express their own pictorial ideas in that pure language. The others, more than by the Impressionists, were attracted by Corot, by Courbet, by Meissonier, by the "landscape painters of the '30s" to whom the movement of the Tuscan "Macchiaioli" is more directly linked (v. MACCHIAIOLI). - See plate 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 said modern school and probably already designated by the ancients themselves (Pliny, Petronius) with the word "pictura compendiaria". The appellation was then extended also to works of sculpture.

Both in ancient Christian art and in Hellenistic-Roman art there are found from time to time "anti-classical" reactions consisting of formal abbreviations that insist more on the impression produced by reality, and above all by the play of light upon it, than on the organic connection, the linear clarity and the plasticity of forms. This "painterly" search for the fleeting relationships of light and dark, after sporadic appearances in Alexandrian and Flavian art (first of all in sculpture), is noted repeatedly in Christian cemetery painting: for example, in the hypogeum of the Flavii (landscape motifs and some small figures), in the so-called chapels of the Sacraments at St. Callixtus, in some frescoes of the hypogeum of the Aurelii on Viale Manzoni, and still in not a few paintings of the end of the 3rd century in the cemetery of Sts. Peter and Marcellinus on the Via Labicana. Everywhere broad strokes of light and dark rapidly laid over ill-defined silhouettes of a lighter tone.

In sculpture, especially of the second half of the 3rd century, the search for chiaroscuro effects is noted more easily in the hair, in the softer parts of the flesh and in the beards.

Luciano De Bruyne