Romanticism in Italy. Origins, developments, themes, artists

The second decade of the19th century saw the birth of Romanticism, a movement, European in character, that arose in opposition to neoclassicism. To the abstraction and rationality of the latter, the Romantics opposed the force of passions and feeling. But there were many more characteristics common to the artists of Romanticism: it was in fact an international movement that nevertheless experienced different regional developments (precisely because the Romantics reevaluated folk and popular traditions), but with a shared basis, the main features of which can be identified in the return of man to nature (as opposed to neoclassicism, which instead put the study of nature before that of the ancient masters), a deep religiosity the centrality of the passions, the personal freedom of the artist against the constraints of the academies, the rediscovery ofirrationality and the importance given to the artist’s creative imagination, and the revaluation of the Middle Ages, seen not only as a period of profound religious spiritualism, but above all as the period in which the identities of peoples and the diversity of European nations had been formed. For this reason, too, the medieval era was contrasted with that of Napoleon ’s regime, which, in its aim to establish an empire, was seen as a system that sought to crush such diversity.

Romanticism, for all these characteristics, thus knew different declinations, often very different from each other, so that it is not possible to speak of a Romantic style, but rather we refer to Romanticism as a movement. In Italy it is customary to speak of historical Romanticism: the development of Romanticism in our country in fact coincided with the period of the Risorgimento, so one of the tendencies of Italian Romantic artists was to go “dredging up” episodes from the history of Italy (recourse to history is a typical feature of many trends in Romanticism) that could serve as comparisons with the Italian situation at the time. Art in this way was characterized by considerable political and civic engagement: this was especially the meaning that characterized Italian Romanticism.

Francesco Hayez

A key artist of Romanticism in Italy is considered to be Francesco Hayez (Venice, 1791 - Milan, 1882), who was trained on neoclassical schemes (which are also manifest in part of his early production), but who well lent himself to a strong Romantic poetics that found its greatest civic engagement especially in paintings with historical subjects, with episodes drawn from both recent and ancient history (mainly medieval history). With such paintings, Hayez aimed to spread those ideals of freedom and reaction tooppression that were particularly relevant at a moment in history when much of northern Italy was under the rule of Austria. The first of these paintings with a historical subject was the Pietro Rossi at Pontremoli, exhibited in Milan in 1820: the work caused a great stir because for the first time in Italy subjects drawn from classical antiquity were being abandoned in favor of subjects drawn from medieval history. However, Hayez did not engage in the “front line”; in fact, many of his works were liked by the Austrian Empire, so much so that he even received an invitation to Vienna, and this drew not a little criticism. However, while it is not possible to call Hayez a revolutionary artist, there is no doubt that his paintings became bearers of the profound patriotic ideals in which the artist believed. Hayez’s commitment should therefore be read in terms of an attempt to spread awareness of the state of oppression that Italy was experiencing at the time, rather than a commitment to “front-line” action.

Hayez soon became the most important Romantic artist in Italy: this Romantic poetics then reached deeply moving results in his more emotionally charged works (such as the various versions of the painting known as The Kiss, for example the one of 1859, Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera: read an in-depth discussion of the versions of the work here). Toward the end of his career, coinciding with the crisis of Risorgimento ideals, the painter produced intense allegorical female portraits, often with a mystical and religious flavor. Francesco Hayez was also a fine portraitist, capable of producing intense depictions of the characters portrayed, but he also knew how to decline with particularly sensual tones the genre of the female nude, with a veiled eroticism that harked back two centuries to the solutions of Guido Cagnacci(Ruth, 1835, Bologna, Collezioni Comunali). All skills that make Francesco Hayez one of the most complete artists of the Italian Romantic scene.

Other exponents of Romanticism in Italy

Soon, civically engaged painting spread throughout Italy. Among the Romantic artists, a leading role was played by Pelagio Palagi (Bologna, 1775 - Turin, 1860), an author of historical scenes in which the protagonists were mainly important figures from Italian history (Federico II, Gian Galeazzo Sforza, Christopher Columbus) and which denoted a taste for the description of architecture to be read in a neo-Gothic key (Palagi was in fact, in addition to being a painter, also an architect). Summing up these characteristics is Isaac Newton’s Discovery of the Refraction of Light (1827, Brescia, Brescia, Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo). The so-called Gothic revival was a definite trend in Romantic art (especially architecture), which spread particularly in England but found exponents elsewhere as well: given the importance Romantic artists attached to medieval civilization, their settings and scenes also had to be inspired by Gothic art seen as the highest and most interesting artistic expression produced during the Middle Ages.

A notable declination of Romanticism in Italy was that of the so-called romantic veduta, taken to its highest degrees by the School of Posillipo. In the seventeenth century, landscape and vedute painting had found its greatest exponent in Naples in Salvator Rosa, and since then this tradition had taken root in the Neapolitan city. During the nineteenth century a number of foreign artists sojourned in Naples, such as Joseph Mallord William Turner and Anton van Pitloo (the latter having settled permanently in Naples), who renewed local landscape painting in a Romantic sense, with a poetics based on immediate adherence to the truth (thanks to a faster painting than the traditional one, made up of quick brushstrokes that rendered the effects of light and color in an immediate way) and on evocative rendering (the colors with which the atmospheres were painted were intended to arouse feelings in the observers). The name “School of Posillipo” was given to this group of Neapolitan artists by their detractors, mainly artists from the Academies: landscape painters opposed to the constraints of academic painting, in fact, used to gather in the Neapolitan district of Posillipo.

Following the demise of Pitloo, who was one of the personalities who gave the greatest impetus to the school, the greatest representative of this group of artists was Giacinto Gigante (Naples, 1806 1876), who knew how to create landscapes characterized by a strong lyricism evoked through the skillful use of color(Marina di Posillipo, c. 1845, Rome, National Gallery of Modern Art). In addition, Gigante made his own the typically Romantic tendency to paint some of the most disturbing aspects of nature, which fully responded to the poetics of the sublime: this term indicates something that arouses in viewers, precisely, disquiet and even horror and fear. The concept of the sublime, theorized by English writer Edmund Burke, was opposed to the beautiful: for Burke, the sublime was represented, for example, by the ideas of emptiness, silence,infinity, and solitude. In Giacinto Gigante’s landscape painting, the taste for the sublime is evoked by wild nature, ominous cliffs, stormy skies, and the vastness of the sea lost in the horizon. However, the Neapolitan painter did not arrive at the degree of “terribleness” achieved by the landscape painting of many other Romantic artists, especially from northern Europe: rather, Giacinto Gigante’s art often offered reassuring landscapes but always connoted by a vivid lyricism.

Romanticism in Italy. Origins, developments, themes, artists

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