The art of united Italy
In the new kingdom the Macchiaioli painted light and everyday life, the Divisionists broke colour apart and the cities raised monuments to the nation.
When Italy was unified in 1861, a new nation had to be built, in art as elsewhere. Florence, Rome, Milan, Turin, Naples and Venice each had their own traditions, and these lived on. In Florence a group of young painters, the Macchiaioli or “patch painters”, had already begun in the 1850s to paint with strong patches of light and shadow, often out of doors. They painted soldiers, peasants, women in gardens and the Tuscan landscape with a simplicity and honesty that were new.
Several Italian artists made their way to Paris, which was now the capital of art. Giuseppe De Nittis, Giovanni Boldini and Federico Zandomeneghi became part of Parisian artistic life, and Zandomeneghi and De Nittis exhibited with the Impressionists. The sculptor Medardo Rosso modelled fleeting faces in wax that seem to dissolve in the light. At home in Italy, realists and verists depicted the lives of workers, fishermen and the rural poor. Others stayed at home and developed their own regional schools.
Towards the end of the century painters in Milan and Piedmont developed Divisionism, in which colours were applied in small separate strokes that blend in the eye. Giovanni Segantini painted the Swiss Alps in sharp mountain light, and Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo painted The Fourth Estate, a picture of workers on the march. At the same time arcades, monuments and exhibition palaces were built, and the first Venice Biennale in 1895 made Italy a meeting place for contemporary art. Art was on its way towards the modern.