MACCHIAIOLI. - This name designates a group of painters active in Tuscany, and above all in Florence, in the second half of the 19th century, whose activity forms part of the great movement tending toward the disintegration of the old pictorial languages, which culminated in the French Impressionist painting of that age (v. IMPRESSIONISM), even while it assumed and maintained particular and individual characteristics.
These characteristics initially derive from the polemical attitude of the Macchiaioli toward the dominant purist academy and the affected Raphaelism; for this reason the Macchiaioli referred on the one hand directly to the study of 15th-century Tuscan painting, and on the other to the manners proper to the French landscape painters of the 1830s (the schools of Fontainebleau and Barbizon), following whose example they
Other frescoes M. painted in the hall of the Court of Cassation in the Palace of Justice in Rome and then in the choir of the cathedral of Nardò in Calabria (1906-1908). His activity also turned to easel paintings and portraits, in which the acute veristic taste proper to his time, of which he is among the major representatives, did not prevent him, as in the great fresco cycles, from attaining results of remarkable balance and harmony of form and color.
insisted on the study and rendering of the truth, particularly of landscapes and figures placed in full light, out of doors.
The results of the actual activity in an anti-academic and veristic sense, carried on essentially between 1855 and 1862 in the Florentine countryside, but also in Liguria and the Veneto, were exhibited by that group of young painters in Florence precisely in 1862 at the « Società Promotrice ». They were for the most part studies of landscape, defined by their authors as « macchie ».
That term, which among the old painters even today means a rapid sketch, above all of landscape out of doors, initially gave rise to a misunderstanding, when the critic of the Gazzetta del Popolo called the authors of those paintings by the name of Macchiaioli, but assigning to the appellation essentially the value that a common man might have given it, that is, of a hothead, an unprincipled person, a troublemaker. 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 also of Livorno, G. Abbati of Venice, O. Borrani of Pisa, T. Signorini, R. Sernesi and A. Cecioni of Florence, V. Cabianca of Verona. To the group of the Macchiaioli there soon joined also S. Lega of Romagna and, for a brief period, also G. Boldini of Ferrara and Nino Costa of Rome. The latter, because of his wide experience and knowledge of European painting, when he was in Florence between 1859 and 1861, exercised a notable clarifying influence, helping the Macchiaioli to overcome the merely technical phase of the « macchia ». The group of those young painters therefore immediately accepted the name of Macchiaioli, even though T. Signorini first and A. Cecioni afterward, but with greater critical experience, intervened to clarify the value they attributed to the term. « Many - writes Cecioni - believe that macchia means sketch... the macchia is the basis of the painting. The studies of form and the researches of detail have the office of rendering an account of the parts ».
In other words, that of the Macchiaioli is a way of painting in zones or patches of limpid and frank colors directly placed side by side, sometimes underlined at the contours by brown lines in order to define with extreme clarity the planes and therefore the volumes of the composition, without this preventing, especially in a later phase of the Macchiaioli's activity, precise and pleasing notations of details, whether in landscape or interior painting (e.g., S. Lega, T. Signorini, V. Cabianca).
It is certain in any case that the painting of the Macchiaioli, even if connected, as has already been said, to that of the French painters of the 1830s and contemporary with the researches of the Impressionist movement of the second half of the century, is not at all weighed down by excessive imitative attitudes. Indeed, the very direct knowledge of French art, which Banti, Signorini, Cabianca, and then Cecioni also had occasion to acquire around 1870, when the Impressionist movement had assumed an extraordinary importance, did not modify their pictorial attitude, tending essentially to a definition of plastic masses and chromatic fields by means of an evident or implied drawing, through the precise, clean, crude juxtaposition of the « macchie » of color. Therefore the Macchiaioli research, although provincial in nature and connected even to a distant tradition, can assume, in relation to the quite different goals pursued by French Impressionist painting, its own tone of frank independence.
On the other hand, this observation, which does not imply qualitative judgments or judgments of precedence, was implicitly made by Diego Martelli himself, the greatest Italian critic of modern painting that our 19th century had, when, as R. Longhi recently recalled, he clarified that the nature of the research of the French Impressionists was essentially chromatic and that of the Macchiaioli essentially chiaroscural.
Bibliography2 works
Emilio Lavagnino