The Macchiaioli were a group of Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 painters

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

 active in Tuscany

Tuscany

Tuscany is a region in Italy. It has an area of about 23,000 square kilometres and a population of about 3.75 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence ....

 in the second half of the nineteenth century, who, breaking with the antiquated conventions taught by the Italian academies of art, did much of their painting outdoors in order to capture natural light, shade, and colour. This practice relates the Macchiaioli to the French Impressionist

Impressionism

Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...

s who came to prominence a few years later, although the Macchiaioli pursued somewhat different purposes. The most notable artists of this movement were Giovanni Fattori

Giovanni Fattori

Giovanni Fattori was an Italian artist, one of the leaders of the group known as the Macchiaioli. He was initially a painter of historical themes and military subjects. In his middle years, inspired by the Barbizon school, he became one of the leading Italian plein-airists, painting landscapes,...

, Silvestro Lega

Silvestro Lega

Silvestro Lega was an Italian realist painter. He was one of the leading artists of the Macchiaioli and was also involved with the Mazzini movement.-Biography:Lega was born in Modigliana, near Forlì, to an affluent family...

 and Telemaco Signorini

Telemaco Signorini

Telemaco Signorini was an Italian artist who belonged to the group known as the Macchiaioli.He was born in the Santa Croce quarter of Florence, and showed an early inclination toward the study of literature, but with the encouragement of his father, Giovanni Signorini, a court painter for the...

.

The movement

The movement grew from a small group of artists, many of whom had been revolutionaries in the uprisings of 1848

Revolutions of 1848 in the Italian states

The 1848 revolutions in the Italian states were organized revolts in the states of Italy led by intellectuals and agitators who desired a liberal government. As Italian nationalists they sought to eliminate reactionary Austrian control...

. In the late 1850s, the artists met regularly at the Caffè Michelangiolo in Florence to discuss art and politics. These idealistic young men, dissatisfied with the art of the academies, shared a wish to reinvigorate Italian art by emulating the bold tonal structure they admired in such old masters as Rembrandt, Caravaggio

Caravaggio

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was an Italian artist active in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily between 1593 and 1610. His paintings, which combine a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, had a formative influence on the Baroque...

 and Tintoretto

Tintoretto

Tintoretto , real name Jacopo Comin, was a Venetian painter and a notable exponent of the Renaissance school. For his phenomenal energy in painting he was termed Il Furioso...

. They also found inspiration in the paintings of their French contemporaries of the Barbizon school

Barbizon school

The Barbizon school of painters were part of a movement towards realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870...

.

They believed that areas of light and shadow, or "macchie" (literally patches or spots) were the chief components of a work of art. The word macchia was commonly used by Italian artists and critics in the nineteenth century to describe the sparkling quality of a drawing or painting, whether due to a sketchy and spontaneous execution or to the harmonious breadth of its overall effect.

In its early years the new movement was ridiculed. A hostile review published on November 3, 1862 in the journal Gazzetta del Popolo marks the first appearance in print of the term Macchiaioli. The term carried several connotations: it mockingly implied that the artists' finished works were no more than sketches, and recalled the phrase "darsi alla macchia", meaning, idiomatically, to hide in the bushes or scrubland. The artists did, in fact, paint much of their work in these wild areas. This sense of the name also identified the artists with outlaws, reflecting the tradition

Tradition

A tradition is a ritual, belief or object passed down within a society, still maintained in the present, with origins in the past. Common examples include holidays or impractical but socially meaningful clothes , but the idea has also been applied to social norms such as greetings...

alists' view that new school of artists was working outside the rules of art, according to the strict laws defining artistic expression at the time.

Although the Macchiaioli have often been compared to the Impressionists, they did not go as far as their younger French contemporaries in the pursuit of optical effects:

They declined to divide up their palette into the components of the colour-spectrum, and did not paint blue shadows. This is why their pictures lack the all-penetrating light that eclipses colours and contours and gives rise to the "vibrism" peculiar to Impressionist painting. The independent identity of the individual figures is unimpaired.

The Macchiaioli did not follow Monet's practice of finishing large paintings entirely en plein air

En plein air

En plein air is a French expression which means "in the open air", and is particularly used to describe the act of painting outdoors.Artists have long painted outdoors, but in the mid-19th century working in natural light became particularly important to the Barbizon school and Impressionism...

, but rather used small sketches painted out-of-doors as the basis for works finished in the studio.

Many of the artists of the Macchiaioli died in penury, only achieving fame towards the end of the 19th century. Today the work of the Macchiaioli is much better known in Italy than elsewhere; much of the work is held, outside the public record, in private collections there.

The Macchiaioli were the subject of an exhibition at the Chiostro del Bramante in Rome, October 11, 2007 – February 24, 2008, and also at the Villa Bardini in Florence, March 19 – June 22, 2008. Another exhibition of the Macchiaioli was held at the Terme Tamerici in Montecatini, Italy, August 12, 2009 – March 18, 2010.

Artists

Some of the most important artists of the Macchiaioli are:

• Giuseppe Abbati
  Giuseppe Abbati
  Giuseppe Abbati was an Italian artist who belonged to the group known as the Macchiaioli.Abbati was born in Naples and received early training in painting from his brother Vincenzo. He participated in Garibaldi's 1860 campaign, suffering the loss of his right eye at the Battle of Capua...
  
  
• Saverio Altamura
• Odoardo Borrani
  Odoardo Borrani
  Odoardo Borrani was an Italian painter.-Biography:The Borrani family moved from Pisa to Florence, where Odoardo enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1853. It was with his new friends Telemaco Signorini and Vincenzo Cabianca that he took up painting from life and came into contact with the...
  
  
• Vincenzo Cabianca
  Vincenzo Cabianca
  Vincenzo Cabianca was an Italian artist of the Macchiaioli group.He was born in Verona. He began his artistic training at the Verona Academy, and then studied at the Venice Academy from 1845–47. During the 1850s Cabianca became acquainted with the artists who frequented the Caffè Michelangiolo in...
  
  
• Adriano Cecioni
• Vito D'Ancona
  Vito D'Ancona
  Vito D'Ancona was an Italian artist of the Macchiaioli group.He was born in Pesaro to a wealthy Jewish family. He began his artistic training in Florence, and in 1844 was admitted to the Accademia di Belle Arti, where he studied under Giuseppe Bezzuoli. He became friends with Serafino De Tivoli,...
  
  
• Giovanni Fattori
  Giovanni Fattori
  Giovanni Fattori was an Italian artist, one of the leaders of the group known as the Macchiaioli. He was initially a painter of historical themes and military subjects. In his middle years, inspired by the Barbizon school, he became one of the leading Italian plein-airists, painting landscapes,...
  
  
• Silvestro Lega
  Silvestro Lega
  Silvestro Lega was an Italian realist painter. He was one of the leading artists of the Macchiaioli and was also involved with the Mazzini movement.-Biography:Lega was born in Modigliana, near Forlì, to an affluent family...
  
  
• Telemaco Signorini
  Telemaco Signorini
  Telemaco Signorini was an Italian artist who belonged to the group known as the Macchiaioli.He was born in the Santa Croce quarter of Florence, and showed an early inclination toward the study of literature, but with the encouragement of his father, Giovanni Signorini, a court painter for the...
  
  

Further reading

• Panconi, T. (1999). Antologia dei Macchiaioli, La trasformazione sociale e artica nella Toscana di metà 800. Pisa (Italy): Pacini Editore.
• Panconi, T. (2009). I Macchiaioli, Il Nuovo dopo la Macchia. Pisa (Italy): Pacini Editore. ISBN 978-88-6315-135-0
• Durbe, Dario (1978). I Macchiaioli. Rome: DeLuca Editore.