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I Macchiaioli

In the second half of 1800's, it takes place in Florence the most important artistic movement of that Century: I MACCHIAIOLI. This movement is born thanks to the several meetings of a group of young artists particularly active and creative around 1850 in Florence's "Caffè Michelangelo" (Michelngiolo) in Via Larga (actually Via Cavour) who, coming up all over Italy, testifies a deep sense of uneasiness which identified political and social rebellion spirit with an active and strong will of improvment and reform in "european" terms about pictorial and artistic genres affirmed as Historical Romanticism.

The term "Macchiaioli" in fact, was created in 1862 by an anonymous reviewer of the magazine/newspaper "La Gazzetta del Popolo" ("People's Gazzette") that with negative connotation, defined this painters who proposed an anti-accademic way of paint with the purpose of reproduce the impression of the real, addressed to thing's appereance sense, using the direct and short technique of the "MACCHIA" (spots of colours). The year 1856 was a crucial year for that innovators: it was born the SPOT PEINTURE, "LA MACCHIA".

In this new way of painting, the object's evidence of the figure, of the atmosphere and mood themselves are obtained not by drawing, the "sail", plastic "chiaroscuro", but by precise colours' touches used in contrast between dark and light and viceversa; the volumes and the shadows are given only by the colours, while the prospective and the spaces by graduated light-tones, technique which allows to catch thing's breezeand sense, before their appareance.

I MACCHIAIOLI finally abolished "chiaroscuro" for painting with colours shadow and colours-light matching, having effects of shining brillance and suggestive atmosphere, simplyfing the location until its basic structure and elements. THE MACCHIA is also daughter of a new french tecnique called Ton Gris: that is a way of drawing the real nature reflecing on a dark mirror in which filtered clearly the contrasts of "chiaroscuro". Introduced by "the europeized" Saverio Altamura, this style improved the innovative will of this young artists stimulating the contact with nature.

In fact, painting en plein air is another keyword, with a kind of representation of reality for underlining all-day and authentic aspects of life, in opposition to rethoric and accademic "genre" painting. Castiglioncello has been the most connotative place after "I Caffé", which has improved and raised Macchiaioli painters' creativity. This place was discovered by Diego Martelli. In the great quantity of properties he inherited in 1861 after his father's death, there was a great real estate property located at Castiglioncello: over 800 hectares that extended from Castglioncello Gulf to hills near Nibbiaia.
The tender hospitality of Diego allowed that Castiglioncello became center of a vivid and vital artistic coterie. This place became easily the perfect and ideal home for discussing and thinking about this new pictorical conception thank to the panorama revealed as a show of pure nature: the trend of going to seaside for holidays wasn't so widespread and also for that reason many current buildings lacked, exalting its purity along the shores.

MACCHIAIOLI artists contribuited, everyone listening to his nature and mood, to make this figurative experience determinative for starting their personal research to a lyrical and evocative transposition about nature. Here their conception of Nature and paintings en plein air has reached its maximum experience. The Art of thi painters, as it was defined by Adriano Cecioni theorist and critic of the Macchiaioli movement, with Diego Martelli, consisted in: "make the impression they received from the real using chiaroscuro colours' spots". Diego Martelli himself, after he came back from Paris, during an important conference about Impressionist artists made at Livorno in 1879, talked about "Caffé Michelangelo" describing it as a place rich of discussion about art problems and about how the figurative culture were diffused, overcoming the bounds of the florentine province getting international. From that theory it takes place the French Impressionism movement elaborated and born several years later Macchiaioli and it has been undergone by their influence.

The main artists of the MACCHAIOLI movement are: Serafino De Tivoli, Vincenzo Cabianca, Cristiano Banti, Nino Costa, Vito d'Ancona, Odoardo Borrani, Giuseppe Abbati, Raffaello Sernesi, Giovanni Boldini, Giuseppe De Nittis, Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, Telemaco Signorini, for the peinture. Theorist of the movement are instead, (as told before) Diego Martelli, art critic of the movement and Adriano Cecioni who listed the main rules and precepts of this new "style". The MACCHIAIOLI movement affirmed itself at The National Exposition of Florence in 1865 and its proposal was to renew the national pictorical culture. The MACCHIAIOLI poetry is verist in opposition to Romanticism, Neoclassicism and Academic Purism and it asserts that the image of real is a contrast of colours'spots and "chiaroscuro": THE MACCHIA.