LIBERTY. — The artistic movement in Italy known by the name of L. or “floral style,” called in France and many other European countries Art nouveau, and in Germany Jugendstil, characterized the most modern aspects of European art between 1890 and the early years of the twentieth century.
It acquired prestige at that time, above all in the architectural field, because of the strongly felt need to free itself from the stylistic imitations advocated by eclecticism; but it originated in the field of decoration and returned to take refuge there in its final, fatigued expressions. Indeed, from its earliest manifestations this movement was characterized by the recurrence of naturalistic elements, derived from the realist taste of the middle of the century but stylized with inflections which in England can be traced back to the affectations of the Pre-Raphaelites. And in England this taste initially asserted itself in the decoration of fabrics, furniture, and furnishing objects produced by such gentlemen as Lieberty, whose name, as is easy to understand, also lent itself in Italy to equivocal or at least inaccurate interpretations. L. was also called Style sans style, since the interpretation of vegetal motifs permitted new freedoms in functional structures, realized through the use of the possibilities offered by iron and other new building materials—freedoms, in truth, which engineers had already achieved independently.
Among the merits of L., in any event, the foremost was its attempt to direct taste toward the creation of unified environments, in which the structures, the decorative elements, and the furnishings themselves would respond to the same stylistic requirement. Accordingly, it found its highest expression not only in the truly noteworthy works of Victor Horta, H. Van de Velde, and C. R. Mackintosh, but also in the creation and decoration of interiors intended to convey a sense of original and sometimes sumptuous modernity. Such were the interiors of the Paris Exhibition of 1900 and of the Turin Exhibition of 1902, in which Raimondo d'Aronco worked extensively, employing L. for solutions that were far from disagreeable, although always marked by a sense of impermanence, like that of a fashion destined soon to run its course. In Italy, 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 building in Rome, and Giuseppe Sommaruga (1867–1917), who among other works built the remarkable Palazzo Castiglioni in Milan, were the principal representatives of that architectural and decorative taste.