MACCHIAIOLI. – This designation refers to a group of painters active in Tuscany, especially in Florence, during the second half of the nineteenth century, whose work, while assuming and retaining particular and individual characteristics, forms part of the great movement tending toward the disintegration of the old pictorial languages, which culminated in the French Impressionist painting of that period (v. IMPRESSIONISMO).
These characteristics initially derived from the polemical attitude of the m. toward the prevailing purist academy and affected Raffaellism; consequently, on the one hand the m. turned directly to the study of fifteenth-century Tuscan painting, and on the other to the modes proper to the French landscape painters of the 1830s (the Fontainebleau and Barbizon schools), following whose example they
M. painted other frescoes in the hall of the Court of Cassation in the Palazzo di Giustizia in Rome and subsequently in the choir of the cathedral of Nardò in Calabria (1906–1908). His activity also extended to easel paintings and portraits, in which the acute veristic taste proper to his time, of which he is one of the foremost representatives, did not prevent him, as in the great fresco cycles, from achieving results of exceptional balance and harmony of form and colour.
persisted in studying and rendering reality, particularly landscapes and figures placed in full light, outdoors.
The results of the group’s actual activity in an anti-academic and veristic direction, carried out chiefly between 1855 and 1862 in the Florentine countryside, but also in Liguria and the Veneto, were exhibited by those young painters in Florence in 1862 at the « Società Promotrice ». They consisted for the most part of landscape studies, which their authors called « macchie ».
That term, which among older painters still means a rapid sketch, especially of a landscape made outdoors, initially gave rise to a misunderstanding when the critic of the Gazzetta del Popolo referred to the authors of those paintings by the designation m., assigning to the appellation essentially the meaning that a commoner might have given it, namely, reckless, unconventional, harebrained. The ten painters who had taken part in that exhibition were C. Banti of S. Croce sull’Arno, G. Fattori of Livorno, Vito d’Ancona of Pesaro, S. de Tivoli, likewise from Livorno, the Venetian G. Abbati, O. Borrani of Pisa, T. Signorini, R. Sernesi and A. Cecioni of Florence, and V. VERONICA. The group of m. was soon joined also by the Romagnol S. Lega and, for a brief period, by the Ferrarese G. Boldini and the Roman Nino Costa. The latter, owing to his extensive experience and knowledge of European painting, exercised a notable clarifying influence when he was in Florence between 1859 and 1861, helping the m. to overcome the merely technical phase of the « macchia ». The group of those young painters therefore immediately accepted the designation m., even though T. Signorini first and A. Cecioni later, but with greater critical experience, intervened to clarify the meaning they attributed to the term. « Many – writes Cecioni – believe that macchia means sketch... macchia is the foundation of the picture. Studies of form and investigations of detail serve to account for the parts ».
In other words, that of the m. is a way of painting in zones or patches of clear and pure colours placed directly alongside one another, sometimes emphasized at the contours by brown lines in order to define the planes and consequently the volumes of the composition with the utmost clarity, without this precluding—especially in a later phase of the m.’s activity—precise and pleasing observations of detail, both in landscape and interior painting (e.g., S. Lega, T. Signorini, V. Cabianca).
In any event, it is certain that the painting of the m., although connected, as has already been said, with that of the French painters of the 1830s and contemporary with the research of the Impressionist movement in the second half of the century, is in no way burdened by excessive imitative attitudes. Indeed, their direct acquaintance with French art—which Banti, Signorini, Cabianca and subsequently Cecioni also had the opportunity to acquire around 1870, when the Impressionist movement had assumed extraordinary importance—did not modify their pictorial attitude, which essentially tended toward a definition of the plastic mass and chromatic fields by means of an evident or implicit drawing, through the precise, sharp and stark juxtaposition of the « macchie » of colour. Accordingly, the Macchiaioli movement, although provincial in character and even connected with a distant tradition, may, in relation to the very different goals pursued by French Impressionist painting, possess a tone of forthright independence.
On the other hand, this observation—which implies no qualitative or precedence judgments—was implicitly made by Diego Martelli himself, the greatest Italian critic of modern painting produced by our nineteenth century, when, as R. Longhi recently recalled, he clarified that the nature of the research of the French Impressionists was essentially chromatic, while that of the m. was essentially chiaroscural.