Macchiaioli

Three mounted shepherds with herd of bulls by Giovanni Fattori

Caffè Michelangiolo in Florence 1861 by Cecioni

Artist of the group of Macchiaioli in the Caffè Michelangiolo, between 1900 and 1903

The Macchiaioli are a group of Italian artists . You worked in Florence from 1855 to 1865 and campaigned against academism and for realism .

The term macchiaioli is derived from the Italian word macchia , which means something like spot (a second meaning is scrub, macchie ). The term was first used in 1862 in a discussion of the Gazzetta del Popolo exhibition . The term was meant derogatory, but was soon adopted by the criticized artists as a characterization of their group. The main members of the Macchiaioli are:

• Giuseppe Abbati
• Cristiano Banti
• Odoardo Borrani
• Stefano Bruzzi
• Ferdinando Buonamici
• Vincenzo Cabianca
• Niccolò Cannicci
• Adriano Cecioni
• Giovanni Costa
• Vito D'Ancona
• Serafino De Tivoli
• Giovanni Fattori
• Silvestro Lega
• Telemaco Signorini
• Raffaello Sernesi

The French painters of the Barbizon School , especially Gustave Courbet and Camille Corot , as well as the Dutch painters of the Hague School are considered role models. The Macchiaioli also often put simple, working people in the foreground. Characteristic were the patchy colored areas, a strong contrast between light and dark and the fact that all the pictures were open-air paintings in order to directly reproduce nature. Details have been reduced to the essentials, for example figures are shown schematically.

The group's meeting point was the Caffè Michelangiolo in Florence.

The group influenced the school of Resina in Naples (with Giuseppe de Nittis, among others ).

literature

• Silvestra Bietoletti: I macchiaioli: la storia, gli artisti, le opere . Giunti Editore, Florence 2001, ISBN 978-8809021457 .
• Norma Broude : The Macchiaioli: Italian Painters of the Nineteenth Century . Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. [u. a.] 1987, ISBN 0-300-03547-0 .
• Giuliani Matteucci: The Macchiaioli: Tuscan Painters of the Sunlight , exhibition catalog, March / April 1984, New York: Stair Sainty Matthiesen Gallery, in collaboration with Matthiesen, London.
• P. Bucarelli et al. a. Mostra dei Macchiaioli, exhibition catalog, Rome 1956

Web links

Commons : Macchiaioli  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Article Giovanni Fattori in Kindler's Malereilexikon