LIBERTY. – The artistic movement in Italy known as L. or “floral style,” which in France and 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 then gained prestige, especially in the field of architecture, due to the strongly felt need to break free from the stylistic imitations recommended by eclecticism, but its origins lay first in the field of decoration and to that field it returned in its final, weary expressions. Indeed, from its earliest manifestations this movement was characterized by the recurrence of naturalistic elements, derived from the veristic taste of the mid-century, but stylized with inflections that in England go back to the affectations of the Pre-Raphaelites. And in England this taste initially asserted itself in the decoration of fabrics, furniture, and furnishings produced by such gentlemen as Liberty, whose name lent itself, as is easily understood, in Italy as well, to ambiguous or at least inexact interpretations. L. was also called the Style without a style, allowing in the interpretation of plant motifs new freedoms of functional structures achieved by utilizing the possibilities offered by iron and other new building materials—freedoms, in truth, already realized by engineers.
Among the merits of L., however, must be placed in the foreground its attempt to orient taste toward the creation of unified environments, in which both the structures and the decorative elements and even the furnishings themselves responded to a single stylistic requirement. Thus it found its fullest expression, as well as in the truly notable works of Victor Horta, H. Van de Velde, and C. R. Mackintosh, in the creation and decoration of environments intended to convey a sense of original and sometimes lavish modernity. This was the case in the environments of the Paris Exposition of 1900 and that of Turin in 1902, where Raimondo d’Aronco worked extensively, employing L. for solutions that were by no means unpleasant, though always characterized by a sense of transience, like that of a fashion destined to quickly fade. Alongside the already mentioned Raimondo d’Aronco (1857–1932), Ernesto Basile (1857–1932), author of numerous constructions in Palermo and of the rear façade of the Parliament building in Rome, and Giuseppe Sommaruga (1867–1917), who built among other things the highly notable Palazzo Castiglioni in Milan, were in Italy the leading representatives of that architectural and decorative taste.