The Macchiaioli: Effect and Expression in Nineteenth-Century Florentine Painting

* This article presents the substance of several chapters from a dissertation prepared in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, directed by Professor Theodore Reff, and undertaken with the assistance of a departmental Summer Travel Grant (1964) and a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship (1965–66).

Among those who assisted me during the course of my work, I should like to express my gratitude in particular to Signor Lamberto Vitali of Milan for facilitating my research by generously helping to make available to me several important collections of pictures and documents.

Abstract

In 1855, the Italian artists Domenico Morelli, Saverio Altamura, and Serafino De Tivoli visited Paris to see the World's Fair. They returned to Italy with descriptions of the “violent chiaroscuro” that they had seen and admired in the paintings of Decamps, Troyon, and Rosa Bonheur, and it was upon the basis of their reports that a number of their friends—the artists who gathered at the Caffè Michelangiolo in Florence—began to experiment and to evolve for themselves the aesthetic idea which they called the macchia.