Lombard Scapigliatura. Developments, styles, themes of the nonconformist painters.

Scapigliatura was a cultural, literary and artistic movement that arose in Milan from the 1860s until the late 1870s, bringing together Lombard and Piedmontese artists in a break with the tradition and customs of the bourgeois society of the time, proclaiming alternative values in art and living. An urban artistic phenomenon, with social and political implications as well, whose most significant expressions came alive thanks to the exchange of experiences that was created in the Lombard area during and after the Risorgimento.

In line with the scapigliati writers, the visual artists carried on, especially in painting, a technical, narrative and moral revolution that evoked the free personal and melancholy expression of the Romantic painters and was at the same time influenced by the beginnings of Realism, in their preference for real subjects and verisimilar representation. United by an aversion to the dominant taste and a desire to experience art as a spontaneous mode of expression of interiority, the Scapigliati painters advocated a change in the style and preordained themes of the academic painting of the time. They abandoned the use of drawing and historical subjects in favor of sfumato without sharp outlines, producing mainly portraits and some landscapes. Advocates of effect and atmospheric painting, they devoted themselves to suggestive renderings of light in settings. In fact, with the Scapigliatura, and the dematerialization of the solid image, a very important path of the study of light began, which would later lead to the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century.

The artists of that Milanese period were young nonconformists, suffering from the failure of the democratic ideals of the Risorgimento after the struggles for independence and unification of Italy (March 17, 1861) and suffering, as for many dissident intellectuals of the time, a social and economic downgrading, a situation of discomfort and rejection of current events. Their attitude was avowedly ambivalent: on the one hand a drive toward lofty and noble ideals and mystical beauty, on the other a complacency with the more degraded aspects of civilized life.

As with the French bohemians, writers, artists, musicians, and actors who chose an unconventional lifestyle of extravagance, marginality, and impoverishment, a feeling of youthful rebellion and radical disdain for current moral norms and convictions spread among artists in major European cities, as in Milan, leading the protagonists of Scapigliatura to an irregular and dissolute life. It was a vital response to the harsh rationality of economic laws and industrialization in the second half of the 19th century, a protest paid for, however, by precarious living conditions and states of mind, illness or even suicide.

Without grafting itself deeply into the history of Italian culture and moral life, Scapigliatura represented a transitional experience, at the turn of the Romantic period toward greater adherence to aspects of contemporary reality, at the ’crossroads of foreign literary and visual currents that contributed to the deprovincialization of the Italian cultural climate. The Scapigliati artists did not constitute themselves as a school or in an organized movement; theirs was a sum of individual experiences, spanning little more than a decade, all unanimous in their desire to defend theautonomy of art, inspiration and expression in a more intimate contact with life.

Origins and development of Scapigliatura

Romanticism in Italy was identified with the Risorgimento, the movement of patriots fighting for the formation of a unified state independent of foreign domination. This circumstance coincided in the figurative arts especially with the establishment of history painting, which, moreover, was already widely recognized as a dominant genre with Neoclassicism. Romantic painters, however, changed their source of inspiration, replacing the ancient history of Rome with medieval history, the episodes of which could offer stimulating allegories of the Risorgimento struggle for freedom; the Middle Ages, moreover, were understood as the glorious age of religiosity and the affirmation of a national consciousness. On the stylistic front, the painters of Italian Romanticism presented themselves as continuers of Neoclassicism, and drawing predominated in their painting, whereby the completeness and smoothness of forms were considered fundamental requirements.

Scapigliatura went on to unhinge the previous Romantic period, as having exhausted the ideals of the Risorgimento, social problems and economic imbalances derived from the country’s transformation from agricultural to industrial emerged, which artists absorbed and wanted to interpret. Painters renounced the use of drawing and began to blur forms into bright patches of color impasto. This off-beat technique gave the idea of the “unfinished” and uncertain, given the sketchy stroke common to many of them, which seemed to represent the distrust and uncertainty they were experiencing.

Forerunner and inspirer, in this climate, had been Giovanni Carnovali known as il Piccio (Luino, 1804 - Cremona, 1873), who as early as the 1850s began to fray the figure, introducing a sense of sfumato, for figures and nature, with loose brushwork, in touches and spots, with color combinations that recreated luminous atmospheres.

Although the artists had all been students at the Academies of Fine Arts, in Brera, Venice or the Albertina in Turin, they manifested a rejection of academic rules, in conflict with art society.The main exponents, close to Piccio and Federico Faruffini, Filippo Carcano and others, were Tranquillo Cremona (Pavia, 1837 - Milan, 1878) and Daniele Ranzoni (Intra, Verbania, 1843 - 1889), who professed: “There is no thing that is as uncertain as art, as painting,” it is necessary to “paint with breath,” wrote Ranzoni, that is, with extreme lightness, almost spiritually, since “in nature and in art there is no such thing as line, there are only the effects of light.”Indeed, the two artists chose vaporous modes and colors for their paintings, to make the relationship and certainty of forms suspended. Meanwhile, Milan was growing as an economic capital and a large city.

The term "scapigliatura" was first proposed by writer Cletto Arrighi, a stage name from the anagram of Carlo Righetti (Milan, 1828-1906) in his novel La scapigliatura e il 6 febbraio, published in 1862.Already implicit in the definition was the break with tradition and in customs: “scapigliato” is one who wears his hair in disarray, disheveled, disheveled; he is the one, therefore, who does not care for the outward appearance so important in the eyes of bourgeois society. The state of mind of the Ã?scapigliati,Ã? common to intellectuals in other European countries as we have already seen with regard to France, will lead them to the renunciation of drawn form, chiaroscuro and composure and to the choice of employing sfumato to render the plastic sense of the figures, fused with the atmosphere of their surroundings.

Christened as \“Milanese Scapigliatura\” it also involved sculptors, such as Giuseppe Grandi (Ganna, Varese, 1843 - 1894), who brought into three dimensions the mobility, light effects and attitudes of the figures of the two greatest painters(Il paggio di Lara, 1872). Inasmuch as, in addition to the anti-academic polemic and taste for nuance, the Scapigliatura pursued the attempt to unify all artistic expressions with a "theory of the three arts" that overcame the rigid scholastic classifications between painting, sculpture and music. The spokesmen were the novelists Giuseppe Rovani and Emilia Praga. Other members were the poets Arrigo Boito, also a musician remembered today mainly as the librettist of Giuseppe Verdi, and Igino Ugo Tarchetti, along with Alberto Carlo Felice Pisani-Dossi, Antonio Ghislanzoni, and Giovanni Camerana, among others.

From 1873 within the Scapigliatura was born the Famiglia Artistica Milanese, a still-existing association founded by the painter Vespasiano Bignami (Cremona, 1841 - Milan, 1929), which functioned as a representative body of Milanese artists in relation to the official institutions of the period, particularly the Brera Academy. In 1881, on the occasion of the Esposizione nazionale italiana or also Esposizione industriale italiana, Bignami captained a scapigliata counter-exhibition with a goliardic taste called l\’Indisposizione di Belle Arti. The aim was to create a parody of the more serious national exposition, an exhibition of paintings and sculptures in which encounters and what we now call “performances” happened, which enhanced the rebellious and anarchic character of the scapigliati artists.

The style of the painters exponents of the Scapigliatura movement.

The revolutionary pictorial key of the Scapigliati was the search for indeterminacy of forms and contours, chromatics and light effects.The Scapigliati challenged eighteenth-century classicism and Italian Romantic painting, represented above all by the work of the Milanese academic Francesco Hayez (Venice, 1791 - Milan, 1882) known for themes drawn from Italian history and subjects from the past with a’high patriotic value and bright colors, so they turned conversely to subjects from everyday life and a more liquid and rarefied brushstroke, although they did take up some of the themes of the late Romantic period such as the transience and precariousness of human feelings and happiness.

The unity of ideas and technique of Tranquillo Cremona(L’edera, 1878) and Daniele Ranzoni(Al balcone. Le curiose, c. 1874) demonstrates their mutual influence, however much Cremona’s painting was more evanescent and symbolic and Ranzoni’s more concrete. The focus of both turned to portraits and thepsychological investigation of subjects through the depiction of expressions and gestures.

Cremona devoted himself to portraying youth(First Love, 1872-1874) and reached his highest expression with ’watercolor, a technique that compared to oil painting proved better suited to his quick strokes, short brushstrokes with pure colors, moving shapes and play of light(Curious Page, 1878). He did not respect the natural datum but shaped color on luminous and symbolic valences, also producing miniatures and drawings. Ranzoni excelled in oil portraits, evoking rather than describing the characters, thanks to the colors that created a soft, suffused luminosity around them. Female, child and family portraits(The Children of the Princes Troubetzkoi, 1873-1874; The Three Friends, portrait of Mary Frances and Ralph Plantagenet, 1878) contributed decisively to the evolution of Lombard painting.

Lombard Scapigliatura. Developments, styles, themes of the nonconformist painters.

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