Three of the best…galleries to discover Italian
Ottocento art
Mar 05th, 2009
Words by Carla Passino
Italy lost its leading artistic role during the 19th century, and artwork from the period
remains relatively unknown outside the national confines. But paintings by Macchiaioli,
Scapigliati and Divisionist artists are definitely worth seeing. We bring you a guide to the
three best museums where you can get an overview of 19th century Italian art.
Giotto’s hieratic Madonnas, the flowing tresses of Botticelli’s Venus, Titian’s sensual
Danae, the angst of Jusepe de Ribera’s dark saints, the serene calm of Canaletto’s Venice.
The world’s collective imagination is full of Italian art from the Middle Ages to the 18th
century—but after that, there’s a hundred years of black hole.
Italy lost its artistic pre-eminence to France in the 19th century so local painters never
acquired a reputation outside the national boundaries. Even today names like Giovanni
Fattori, Tranquillo Cremona or Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo remain unknown beyond
the small circle of art professionals and a handful of international collectors.
Which is a shame because the Italian Ottocento was a time of extraordinary cultural
fervour. It saw Italy’s fight against foreign rule, its birth as an independent country, the
golden age of opera, and the flourishing of at least three great artistic movements—the
Macchiaioli, the Scapigliatura, and Divisionism.
The century opened under the sign of Antonio Canova, the new Phidias, who sculpted
beauty out of marble in the graceful, perfectly proportioned style of the ancient classics.
He turned Napoleon’s sister, Pauline, into an eternal Venus, while one of his
contemporaries, painter Andrea Appiani, captured Napoleon’s Roman nose and rising
grandeur in a decidedly imperial portrait.
As the Restoration swept through the peninsula, it sowed the seeds of revolution,
inspiring Francesco Hayez’s allegories of Italy bent under the Austrian joke. Works such
as the grandiose Profughi di Parga shows the dark sadness of Greek exiles fleeing
Turkish rule as a mirror of Italy’s own suffering.
In 1861, independence sparked freedom but also social
problems, both of which gave birth to new artistic impulses. Many of Tuscany’s
Macchiaioli, for example, had taken part in the liberation uprisings and brought the same
rebellious spirit to their art. They discarded what they saw as the strictures of the art
establishment, choosing instead to depict the world through blotches of colour, and
emphasizing the contrast between light and shadow. Giovanni Fattori’s seaside-lounging
ladies—undefined patches of white, black and red sheltered under a cream marquee
against a vividly azure sea—are emblematic of this style.
Derided at the time—even the name Macchiaioli was a contemptuous take on their
blotchy style, as macchia means stain in Italian—these painters are now considered the
forerunners of modern art in the country.
The same revolutionary approach inspired the
Scapigliatura, a literary and artistic movement from the north of the country. Many of the
Scapigliati (Italian for dishevelled) had taken part or had supported Garibaldi’s efforts to
free Italy, but had then felt betrayed by the newborn Italian government, which they
perceived as too conservative. Inspired by the French bohème, they attacked bourgeois
values and embraced the intense, anti-conformist, all-consuming life of the poètes
maudits, the accursed poets of the French tradition.
Their literature, which has strong anti-clerical, dark, sometimes
sexual elements, scandalised the country. Their art privileged light over detail—their
contours were soft, the chiaroscuro strong, and they employed tonal colours to convey
atmosphere. In Tranquillo Cremona’s The Ivy, for example, two figures are caught in a
disturbing embrace—a seated one, dark-haired and clad in black, tries to cling to a
standing one, blonde and dressed in white, who would seemingly like to pull back. The
strong contrast of colours evokes their different wants, while their shapes merge into a
taupe, indistinct background.
The Scapigliati poets, writers and artists, who were the inspiration for Puccini’s opera, La
Boheme, influenced the early stages of Divisionism, which is perhaps Italy’s best known
Ottocento school.
The Divisionists’ vision of art was, in the words of painter
Giovanni Segantini, “the investigation of colour in light.” As a result, their technique was
to break, or “divide” their paintings into individual brushstrokes of unmixed pigment,
which, once seen together, combined into bright, luminous scenes.
The concept is similar to that of French Pointillism, but Divisionists preferred to employ
longer strokes, which sometimes overlapped, rather than restrict themselves to precisely
juxtaposed dots. And although they shared the Pointillists’ interest for landscapes, they
also branched out into depictions of everyday life that often had political connotations—
particularly with Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, whose Quarto Stato (painted in 1901)
portrays a strike, with the common people leaving darkness behind them to advance
towards light.
But 19th century Italy also had some extraordinary painters
who, although formed in the country, later embraced the Parisian school. Giovanni
Boldini is perhaps the best known among them—a friend of Edgar Degas, he was as
influenced by Impressionism as by the Macchiaioli, and developed an elegant, fluid style
and interesting use of colour that made him a popular artist. Time magazine called him “a
society portraitist as artificial as any who ever stretched a lady’s fingers to tickle her
vanity” in a 1933 article, explaining that “he was preeminently the artist of the Edwardian
era, of the pompadour, the champagne supper and the ribbon-trimmed chemise.” Indeed,
his best works are a celebration of society ladies, black haired flowers wrapped in
billowing, cloud-like dresses, but they have such a delicate gracefulness that saves them
from being merely an exercise in self-serving flattery.
Giuseppe De Nittis and Federico Zandomeneghi also adopted the French style, the former
becoming a society darling, the latter tempering Impressionism with his Macchiaiolo
background to capture scenes of bohemian life in Montmartre and celebrate feminine
beauty engaged in everyday rituals.
But the most fascinating of all the French-influenced
artists was perhaps the sculptor Medardo Rosso. A Scapigliato in his youth, he remained
a rebel at heart throughout his life—he even called his own son Rebel—rejecting
academic constraints and importing Impressionist techniques into sculpture. Obsessed by
light, he tried to capture it in wax, bronze and terracotta, manipulating materials to create
an illusion of colour. But much like the Scapigliati, the details of his work are not
defined—indeed, his sculptures look always unfinished, almost merging with their
surroundings.
Because the Italian Ottocento is little represented outside Italy, the easiest way to explore
its vast, wide-ranging heritage is to visit Italian museums. We have chosen three that
showcase 19th century art at its best.
Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan
Plagued by a chronic shortage of space, Milan’s Modern
Art Gallery is slowly relinquishing its 20th century pieces to other museums to become a
genuine collection of Ottocento works. It is fitting because the building itself is a
celebration of early 19th century art. Built in NeoClassic style between 1790 and 1796, it
was home to Joachim Murat and his wife, Caroline Bonaparte, and later to Eugène
Beauharnais and his wife Pricess Augusta Amalia of Bavaria. They commissioned
Andrea Appiani to paint a fresco of Mount Parnassus in the villa, which is one of the
museum’s highlights.
The permanent collection, however, matches these exalted surroundings. The ground
floor is home to NeoClassic works from the late 18th and early 19th century, with
Appiani’s paintings and statues by Canova and Pompeo Marchesi, and the first Romantic
pieces, with early paintings by Hayez and Massimo d’Azeglio’s dark, gloomy La
Vendetta.
The second floor is a cavalcade through the rest of the century, with a good selection of
Hayez’s work, the grand, official paintings of the independence years, Piccio’s intense
portraits, the strong visual contrasts of the Scapigliati movement, the exquisite elegance
of Boldini, De Nittis and Zandomeneghi’s pieces and what is perhaps Italy’s best
collection of Divisionist art, including Segantini’s Le Due Madri.
The tour ends, visually, as well as chronologically, with Pellizza da Volpedo’s
revolutionary Quarto Stato. But wait! There is more on the second floor, which houses
the Raccolta Grassi, a collection of international works from the Middle Ages to the 20th
century, with a particularly good selection of Macchiaioli and some interesting pieces by
Zandomeneghi, De Nittis and Boldini.
Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Villa Reale, Via Palestro 16, Milan. Open Tuesday to Sunday
9am to 1pm and 2pm to 5.30pm. Free admission (http://www.gam-milano.com/).
Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Roma
The origins of Rome’s modern and contemporary art
museum hark back to the days when Fattori, Segantini and Boldini were painting their
masterpieces, some of which, like Fattori’s La Battaglia di Custoza, were acquired at the
time. Founded in 1883, the Gallery initially concentrated on verist, simbolist and
decadent art. Later, it expanded its selection with more pieces by the Macchiaioli, the
Divisionists and Medardo Rosso.
Today, the 19th century rooms house NeoClassic works by the likes of Appiani and
Canova, and grand Romantic paintings—including Hayez’s Vespri Siciliani, a
celebration of the Sicilian rebellion against Angevin rule which took place in the Middle
Ages—followed by the everyday scenes of the Macchiaioli, the intense chiaroscuro of the
Scapigliati and De Nittis’ elegant society vignettes.
But perhaps the most interesting pieces are those by Southern Italian painters, whose
work is hard to find elsewhere in the country. The gallery has a large collection of
paintings by Filippo Palizzi, an Abruzzo artist with a penchant for depicting farmers,
animals and shepherds, Domenico Morelli, who excelled in the historic genre, and
Gaetano Previati, who brought divisionism techniques into the 20th century.
Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Viale delle Belle Arti 131, Rome.
Open Tuesday to Sunday 8.30am to 7.30pm. Admissions €10, concessions €8
(www.gnam.arti.beniculturali.it).
Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAM), Turin
The squat, late-1950s building that houses Turin’s modern
and contemporary art collections belies the museum’s ancient origins. GAM was founded
in 1863 as Italy’s very first civic gallery devoted to modern art.
A troubled history saw it move several times, then close for many years to allow a
complete restoration. But now the museum has one of the most extensive collections of
Northern Italian Ottocento art, with some interesting examples from further afield.
The tour opens with Canova’s Sappho and some early 19th century paintings from
Piedmont, but NeoClassicism soon gives way to the strong emotions of Romanticism,
with Hayez’s melancholic Carolina Zucchi and Massimo d’Azeglio’s historic landscapes.
The gallery’s highlights, however, are Antonio Fontanesi’s exquisite landscapes, caught
between the attempt to depict nature and the knowledge that you can only capture
fragments of it—the light playing on water in Bagliori sulla Palude is in itself worth a
visit.
GAM also has some interesting paintings by the Scapigliati (including Cremona’s The
Ivy) and the Macchiaioli, as well as Boldini’s lovely Portrait of a Lady.
GAM, via Magenta 31, Turin. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 6pm. Admissions
€7.50, concessions €6 (www.gamtorino.it).
Location: Lazio, Lombardy, Milano Province, Piedmont, Roma Province, Torino
Province | Topic: Arts and Culture, Travel