The Macchiaioli as “Proto-Impressionists”: Realism, Popular Science and the Re-shaping of Macchia Romanticism, 1862–1886

Abstract

In the current literature of nineteenth-century Italian painting, the Tuscan Macchiaioli are frequently described as “proto-Impression-ists,” as an early group of plein air painters, who, though less daring and unquestionably less brilliant than their better-known and somewhat younger contemporaries, the French Impressionists, followed nevertheless a line of inquiry which surely anticipated theirs.¹