16 January – 14 March, 2010
The Macchiaioli, an important nineteenth-century Italian art movement, centered on a group of young artists who gathered in the 1850s and 1860s at the Caffè Michelangelo in Florence to work out a new style. Rejecting the Academic style that dominated conventional art training, Giovanni Fattori, Telemaco Signorini, Silvestro Lega, and the other artists who came to be known as the Macchiaioli developed a style characterized by deft brushwork using macchia, dots of color, to achieve the desired effect. Passionate supporters of the Risorgimento movement, which sought to reunite Italy, they defined their mission, as modern artists, as depicting the times in which they themselves lived with unvarnished honesty. Using the new expressive techniques they were developing, they vividly and vigorously depicted the rich natural beauty of Tuscany, the simple lives of the people, and historic events in the movement to reunify Italy.
Recent years have seen a critical reevaluation, mainly in Italy, of the achievements of the Macchiaoli, revealing the movement’s originality, its influences on later artists, and its pathbreaking rendering of light, anticipating the Impressionists in France.
This exhibition was a rare opportunity to experience a comprehensive view of the activities of the Macchiaioli’s achievements through a group of 63 works.