At Palazzo Antinori, the exhibition on the image of Florence according to Giovanni and Telemaco Signorini, two generations of great artists

The discovery in 2008 of an important correspondence between Telemaco Signorini (Florence, 1835 - 1901), one of the leading painters of the second half of the 19th century and a leading name in the Macchiaioli movement, and his father Giovanni (Florence, 1810 - 1862), a leading artist of the Lorraine court just before the Unification of Italy and a vedutista (and more) capable of satisfying a demanding international clientele, is the basis of the fine exhibition La Firenze di Giovanni e Telemaco Signorini, the first ever organized in the spaces of Palazzo Antinori, in the Tuscan capital: the main floor of the building that, for five centuries, has belonged to the marquises now famous everywhere for their wine production, opens to the public for the first time. The review, curated by Elisabetta Matteucci and Silvio Balloni, comes ten years after the last exhibition occasion that concerned Telemaco Signorini (the great exhibition at Palazzo Zabarella in Padua: held in 2009, it gave the opportunity to retrace the entire career of the Florentine painter with such thoroughness and depth that Signorini, since that date, has had no more exhibitions dedicated to him), and it comes with two substantial novelties, not yet investigated with such meticulousness: the first is the relationship between father and son, and the second is their bond with Florence, for both of them indissoluble (even for Telemaco, despite his open-minded and cosmopolitan mentality, his propensity to travel, and his repeated sojourns in Italy and abroad).

It could be said that the city rises to the role of protagonist of the exhibition, along with the two painters: with the paintings that follow one another in the eight sections of the exhibition (and arranged with a singularly intimate layout, which favors a close-up view, on three rooms on the piano nobile of Palazzo Antinori), almost seventy years of its history are retraced, around the crucial transition from center of the Grand Duchy of Lorraine to capital, from 1865 and for six years until 1871, of the newly proclaimed Kingdom of Italy. The constant between two such different epochs is Florence’s openness to the world, the modernity of its ruling class, and its undeniable and priceless international appeal, which attracted so many illustrious personalities from the arts, business and politics during this long span of time. An openness that also characterized the last years of the Lorraine rule: despite a court of great proportions, and despite a ceremonial that from the Medici onward had never been streamlined (this heavy apparatus, after all, was necessary to give the Lorraines visibility in the eyes of the world), the intent of the ruling family was to convey to their subjects anew image of power, more in line with the times. Hence, the great public works (the architectural modernizations that were promoted in all the main centers of Tuscany, land reclamation, the enlargement of the port of Livorno, infrastructure, starting with the construction of the railway network and the improvement of the road network), tax reforms (such as the one of 1824-1825 that succeeded in significantly reducing the tax burden), those in favor of individual freedoms (starting with the press reform that sharply reduced the mesh of censorship allowing Florence to become an important publishing center: only the measures adopted after the ’48 uprisings would deal a blow to this achievement), the reform of the university system, and several other measures. However, the brief period in which Florence was capital of the kingdom was enough to radically change the face of the city with a profound rearrangement of the historic center (many were the demolitions and demolitions to make room for a new idea of the city, and the urban plan drawn up by Giuseppe Poggi was not without strong criticism) and with the expansion of the city towards the neighboring areas, invaded by the new neighborhoods that had to respond to the new needs of the city designated to be the capital of Italy.

Signorini’s story starts in Florence and radiates from there elsewhere, but, as anticipated, the Tuscan city never ceased to be a point of reference for them. It was said at the beginning that the exhibition was born from the discovery of an unpublished correspondence between Giovanni and Telemaco (which, in truth, also extends to other members of the family, that is, Leopoldo and Paolo, two other sons of Giovanni): the letters will soon be published by Elisabetta Matteucci, but it is in any case possible to anticipate that from the missives emerge the figures of two artists who were very attached to their native city and perfectly inserted in the Florentine cultural and artistic milieu. There is then a further consideration that accompanies the relationship between the Signorinis and Florence: the reflection on their connection with the city, writes the editor, “favors the analysis of the figurative sources at the origin of the formation, as well as suggesting an evaluation of the urban theme so investigated as to become identifying.” It is also a research that, Elisabetta Matteucci further emphasizes, “could not overlook the influence exerted by the city in the social sphere.” These are all themes that are punctually examined in the halls of the Florentine exhibition, in the context of which the image of the city also becomes a means to "narrate the different seasons that determined the evolution of a style in relation to the urban and social mutations of Florence and also to the countless solicitations coming from the international community that had identified the city on the Arno as the most suggestive landing place for the escapades of sentimental travelers," Carlo Sisi points out in the catalog.

Hall of the exhibition The Florence of Giovanni and Telemaco Signorini

Thus, after a brief introibo devoted to family portraits (among which are a fine unpublished portrait of Egisto, the eldest of Giovanni’s three sons, and a portrait of 13-year-old Telemaco, executed by Egisto himself and which returns to public display almost a hundred years after the last occasion), the first image of Florence to emerge is that of Giovanni’s views. A timely framing of the Giovanni Signorini “vedutista” had been offered by scholar Silvestra Bietoletti on the occasion of the 2009 Palazzo Zabarella exhibition (and reiterated by the art historian herself on the occasion of this one): if his early landscapes still drew on the seventeenth-century tradition of Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorrain, a more thoughtful meditation on Tuscan views of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (beginning with those of Giuseppe Gherardi, present at Palazzo Antinori with two works that are compared with those of Signorini) resulted in a more serene and objective painting à la Canaletto (with whom Signorini’s father shared the habit of taking from life) but with a more heartfelt interest in the picturesque, with contrasts of light that at times know how to become marked to the point of almost becoming the main protagonists of the composition and, Bietoletti emphasized on the occasion of the Padua exhibition, without losing the contrast with an image of Florence that, often dreamy, sometimes manages to merge the real with the ideal. The Florence exhibition masterfully exemplifies all these passages with a precious succession of works on loan from private collections (like most of the paintings that make up the exhibition): it starts with two navies strongly indebted to the art of Salvator Rosa and made of soft lights and dark hues, with views with an intense lyrical flavor (this is what happens in Marina con due velieri: the two boats that are leaving the port of Livorno proceed towards a sunset that illuminates the entire scene with a warm and enveloping light), and we move on to works such as Veduta dell’arno da Ponte alla Carraia, animated by intentions that we could say are more “scientific” than the previous works (and between the two phases there is a gap of just five years) and with a gaze that completely changes reference, since it migrates from the landscapes of central Italy in the seventeenth century to the northern view. For the curators, Signorini’s soothing views also have underlying political implications (they thus become allegories of the harmony that reigned under the rule of the Lorraines), and as the era of the grand duchy drew to a close (especially following the reactionary turn that followed the 1848 uprisings), Signorini’s paintings acquired a more nostalgic and melancholy dimension: a clear example of this is a work from 1856, The Summer Harvest, where the most classic of panoramas of the city, seen from the hills to the south (so that the profile of the dome of the Duomo, Giotto’s bell tower, Arnolfo’s tower, and the spire of the Badia Fiorentina stand out), serves as a backdrop to a kind of country idyll that almost dissolves in the reddish light of a warm June sunset. A nucleus of works that completes the discourse begun with the exhibition in Padua, since at Palazzo Antinori they are more numerous and broaden the gaze even to works closer to the romanticism of the beginnings.

And it is in this context that the first experiments of a Telemaco barely twenty years old or thereabouts are also inserted, reread through the relationship with his father (always cordial, Bietoletti points out, and nourished by a lively family climate inclined to support the young man): it is in fact on the image of Florence, mediated by his father’s filter, that his artistic personality begins to form, as is evident from two unpublished ovals, a Panorama of Florence from the hill of San Miniato and a View of the Arno and Santa Maria del Fiore from the Forte di Belvedere, which are related to the Reaping just mentioned because of their idyllic atmosphere. However, they are also works that, the curators explain, "attest to a modern use of light, conducted through intense contrasts of chiaroscuro, which until now the painter had used to increase narrative involvement and a sense of truth in historical-literary episodes or in studies of urban architecture, but which now connotes the actuality of a vision aimed at the landscape observed en plein air, before the usual reworking in the studio." This romantic image of the city is one that, at the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, distinguished the production of many painters active in the area: this is the case, for example, of Lorenzo Gelati (Florence, 1824 - 1899), whose Veduta della chiesa di San Miniato al Monte seems almost to invite us to admire assortments of a foreshortening that seems made especially for a postcard, or of Nino Costa (Rome, 1826 - Marina di Pisa, 1903), a leading name in painting from life in the mid-nineteenth century, who with his panel Un pomeriggio alle Cascine seeks the suggestive effect.

At the same time, the young Telemaco, towards the end of the 1850s, having by then abandoned the path traced by his father to embark on his own, was beginning to fine-tune his painting of "macchia," which to some extent he would also enunciate on a theoretical level in an article published dsu La Gazzetta del Popolo in 1862, in response to a polemical anonymous critic who, as is well known, by adopting the term “macchiaioli” intended to connote negatively those young people who set out to “reform painting.” “in the heads of their figures,” we read in the piqued unsigned article, “you look for the nose, mouth, eyes, and other parts: you see there formless spots [...]. That the effect must be there, who denies it? But that the effect should kill the drawing, fin the form, this is too much.” To these attacks, Signorini responded by writing that “the macchia was nothing but a too precise mode of chiaroscuro, and an effect of the necessity in which the artists of the time found themselves to emancipate themselves from the capital defect of the old school, which, to an excessive transparency of bodies, sagrified the solidity and relief of its paintings.” The " macchia " of Signorini, Fattori, Borrani and colleagues, Bietoletti wrote in 2009, was born in response to the need to free painting from the didacticism that had characterized Romantic history painting and, conversely, to renew this genre in search of a more passionate involvement of the viewer. This earliest season of spot painting is not documented in the Palazzo Antinori exhibition, which, on the contrary, focuses on the new landscape painting, elaborated at the turn of the period before and after the Second War of Independence. At the end of hostilities, Signorini, after the death of his father Giovanni that occurred in 1862, moved to Piagentina, in the countryside just outside Florence, where he founded a kind of free school of painting together with Silvestro Lega (Modigliana, 1826 - Florence, 1895) and Odoardo Borrani (Pisa, 1833 - Florence, 1905), based on en plein air painting that kept in mind the example of the Barbizon school (whose results Signorini had been able to appreciate while staying in Paris a few months earlier), on the observation of the mere natural datum, on the desire to sever ties with the academy, on the awareness of the fact that it was necessary to imprint a sensation on the canvas. From the Piagentina season three of the best-known works are on display, thus constituting a nucleus reduced in quantity but of very high quality: Il ponte sul torrente Affrico, a compendium of this interest filtered through the interest in rustic life that often returns in Signorini’s production, and again La luna di miele, a fully Macchiaioli painting cloaked in delicate lyricism, and i Renaioli sull’Arno, dense with those atmospheric effects that the painter was insistently seeking in this period of his activity. Telemaco had now made himself completely independent of his father’s example.

Giuseppe Gherardi, View from Ponte Vecchio, detail (1825; oil on canvas, 37 x 52 cm; Private collection)

Giovanni Signorini, Marina di Livorno with the Medici Fortress in the background (c. 1840; oil on canvas, 40.5 x 59.5 cm; Private collection)

Giovanni Signorini, View of the Arno from Ponte alla Carraia (1846; oil on canvas, 56 x 89 cm; Private collection)

Giovanni Signorini, The Summer Harvest (1856; oil on canvas, 98 x 132 cm; Private collection)

Telemaco Signorini, Panorama of Florence from the Hill of San Miniato (c. 1856; oil on canvas, 73.4 x 55.2 cm; Private collection)

Telemaco Signorini, View of the Arno and Santa Maria del Fiore from Forte di Belvedere (c. 1856; oil on canvas, 73.4 x 55.2 cm; Private Collection)

Lorenzo Gelati, View of the Church of San Miniato al Monte (c. 1865; oil on canvas, 62 x 90 cm; Private collection)

Nino Costa, An Afternoon at the Cascine (1859-1869; oil on canvas, 39 x 66 cm; Private collection)

Telemaco Signorini, Piagentina. The bridge over the Affrico stream (1861-1862; oil on canvas, 74 x 58 cm; Private collection)

Telemaco Signorini, The Honeymoon (1862-1863; oil on canvas, 31.5 x 98 cm; Private collection)

Telemaco Signorini, A Morning on the Arno (Renaioli sull’Arno) (c. 1868; oil on canvas, 40 x 60 cm; Private collection)

A long chapter of the exhibition, consisting of the fourth and fifth sections, accompanies the public through the transitional era that, in the span of a few years, would lead Florence to become the capital of the Kingdom of Italy: the exhibition at Palazzo Antinori follows this transformation, one might say, first on the outside (in the boulevards, in the squares, observing how the city’s image was changing) and then on the inside, among the salons and in the thick of society life. The task of tracing a historical profile of these upheavals is entrusted by the curators to different brushes than Signorini’s: the Viale principe Amedeo in Florence by Giovanni Fattori (Livorno, 1825 - Florence, 1908) witnesses the opening of the new ring roads, which, according to the Poggi plan, were to be opened on the route of the ancient walls, which for this reason were in many sections torn down (the same Viale principe Amedeo was renamed “the stradone delle mura” by the Florentines). The work takes on special significance because Fattori was not a painter particularly inclined to urban views: on the other hand, Ruggero Panerai (Florence, 1862 - Paris, 1923) was, whose The Paddock paints a parade of jockeys at the Cascine racecourse (Florentines, after joining the Kingdom of Italy and especially after the proclamation of Florence as capital, had taken to maturing interests similar to those that were fashionable in the great European centers: among these was horseracing), while with the Impressionist-esque Ponte di Santa Trinita, he tells us of the elegant walks along the lungarni of the city’s commercial and industrial bourgeoisie. Signorini was perfectly at home in this world, given also his refined, salacious and exuberant character: in the production that scrutinizes the circles of high society as it entered his homes, the piano lesson, a typical occupation of girls from good families of the time (and very common in France, so much so that it became the subject of choice for many painters beyond the Alps), and the tiny Interior of the drawing room of the Bracken house in Florence, Italy, stand out, a work of only twelve centimeters by seven, but enough to wittily describe the essence of the living room of the English diplomat William Stewart Egerton Bracken, who had moved with his wife to the banks of the Arno for work, and with whom Signorini soon became so familiar that he became a regular visitor to their abode.

The sixth section, rather interlocutory in nature, returns to the Macchiaioli theme of light, introducing the public to the technical innovations pioneered by Signorini and colleagues. In the exhibition, alongside his works, paintings by Raffaello Sernesi (Florence, 1838 - Bolzano, 1866) and Vito D’Ancona (Pesaro, 1825 - Florence, 1884) appear in this room: the former occasionally went to Piagentina, without arriving at the regularity of Borrani and Lega, to paint together with Signorini, while the Marche native met Telemaco among the tables of the Caffè Michelangelo, which as is known was one of the most significant meeting places of the Macchiaioli, and introduced him to the thought of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. His closeness to Proudhonian instances that advocated the importance of the social role of art not only brought Signorini closer to an art that often took the side of the last (Thetowpath is the most famous example: the work, however, is not in the exhibition), but in a certain way also helped shape his approach to nature, since Proudhon himself promoted the importance of an art that restored nature without filters and without academic mediations. Thus, when Signorini presented his works at the 1867 exhibition of the Florentine Promotrice, the great critic Diego Martelli (Florence, 1839 - Castiglioncello, 1896), who was among the main supporters of the Macchiaioli, loudly praised the “freschissima impressione dal vero” of a “quadretto con cavalli attaccati ad un carro,” which Giuliano Matteucci has proposed identifying with the canvas Un mattino di primavera. The White Wall, published in 1949 by the collector Mario Borgiotti and which is among the painter’s most exhibited works (it could therefore not be missed even at Palazzo Antinori). A balanced painting, where the protagonist is the morning light that illuminates this piece of countryside, giving the scene an almost abstract, surreal atmosphere, of which Ettore Spalletti, who described the work in one of his essays in 1994, appreciated the white wall that, horizontally, “separates the compositional planes, luminous and compact diaphragm of analogical references that are truly neo-fourteenth-century.” Unpublished, however, is a Tuscan Street with Figures, which the curators date to 1874, upon the artist’s return from a stay in Paris, emphasizing “the peculiarities of the style, distinguished by a precious, subtly descriptive stroke, illuminated by the spring power of light”: the canvas’ “analytical lingering” is, the curators suggest, a reflection of Signorini’s meditations in France on the naturalist literature of the time.

The journey into late 19th-century Florence concludes in the last two sections of the exhibition: the seventh begins with a quotation from Henry James (New York, 1843 - London, 1916), who, while visiting the Tuscan capital, had described it as a “jewel-city.” According to the editors, James’s image corresponds to the one elaborated by Signorini, who, they write, “considered its urban heart sacred and inviolable,” and for that reason would have taken a stand against the gutting of the new urban plans, just as Henry James had done who criticized the opening of the new quarters as being responsible for the demolition of large portions of the city’s medieval heart. The issue becomes rather complex, however, by virtue of the fact that several areas of the historic center of Florence (which in the 1870s had a population of about one hundred and seventy thousand) were indeed blighted, unhealthy, and infamous: the reference, in particular, is to the area of the Jewish Ghetto and the Mercato Vecchio, which became the protagonists of Signorini’s painting in the years immediately preceding the vast demolitions with which the ancient fabric of the area was totally erased. The reasons of public health and the fight against decay eventually prevailed over the nostalgic sentiments of those who wished to preserve the neighborhood: thus the vast redevelopment operation envisaged by the urban development plan conceived in 1866 and then finally approved in 1881 could begin, and the medieval quarter was transformed into a network of orderly streets intersecting at right angles according to the most typical canons of nineteenth-century urban planning (this is the area that corresponds to the present Piazza della Repubblica and adjacent streets). Old houses, medieval public buildings, towers, and churches were lost. As for Signorini’s position, on the one hand we can cite a now famous anecdote, reported among others also by historian Sergio Camerani (although its primary source cannot be traced), according to which, to a journalist who had asked the painter why he cried “over the rubbish that goes down,” the artist allegedly replied “I don’t cry so much over the rubbish that goes down as over the rubbish that comes up” (there is to be considered that the population was moved to more modern neighborhoods with better hygienic conditions, and a painter attentive to the ambitions of the last as Signorini was will surely have taken this aspect into consideration), or one can speak of the poem, made known in 2008 by Silvio Balloni, which sings of destruction (“and now, the professors have killed you / Farewell forever, poor Mercato / farewell, treasure of art, unexplored”), while on the other hand one can interpret the frequency with which the ghetto and the Mercato Vecchio appear in his production of the early 1980s as a defense of this reality destined to disappear. These images, noted art historian Paul Nicholls, also had another function, however: that of placing images of the Florence of yesteryear on the flourishing English market, which were particularly popular with customers across the Channel (and indeed Signorini’s intuition proved particularly fortunate commercially). Here, then, Signorini becomes a privileged witness to “Florence as it was”: among the poor roofs of the ruined houses of Florence’s Il Mercato Vecchio, the outline of Brunelleschi’s dome emerges; the Via degli Speziali is depicted in its ancient aspect, which has nothing to do with the present; and finally, an unpublished canvas, owned by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, allows us to penetrate a street lined with medieval buildings demolished in the mid-1980s.

Signorini’s sentimental vein is best expressed, however, in the paintings he made during his many excursions to the hills outside Florence, to which the last section of the exhibition is devoted. Settignano became a favorite destination for the painter, who in the small suburban hill town found an ideal place to study variations in atmosphere, according to the modus operandi typical of many painters of the time, Impressionists in the lead (the Florentine painter was the first in Italy to try his hand at the genre). The exhibition gives an account of this with two splendid views of the piazza of Settignano executed in pendant, one painted on a rainy day, with the houses taking on gloomy hues and the signs becoming less legible, darkened as they are by the gloom of the atmosphere, and the other with the outlines clearly delineated by the light of a clear day. The last work in the exhibition, a view of Limite sull’Arno, a pleasant village in the Empolese area, also fits into this vein, where Signorini proves himself up to date with the achievements of contemporary European painting with a work that stands out for its ability to describe with sensitive rapidity and a frayed and immediate brushstroke a piece of Tuscan countryside. In the last Signorini, the view seems almost to become poetry.

Giovanni Fattori, Viale principe Amedeo in Florence (1880-1881; oil on canvas, 29.5 x 60 cm; Private collection)

Ruggero Panerai, The Paddock (1885; oil on panel, 20 x 34 cm; Private collection)

Ruggero Panerai, Ponte Santa Trinita (c. 1885; oil on canvas, 45 x 66 cm; Private collection)

Telemaco Signorini, Piano Lesson (c. 1868; oil on canvas, 18 x 22 cm; Private collection)

Telemaco Signorini, A Spring Morning. The White Wall (c. 1866; oil on canvas, 27.5 x 57 cm; Private collection)

Telemaco Signorini, Tuscan Street with Figures (1874; oil on canvas, 38 x 34.4 cm; Private collection)

Telemaco Signorini, Mercato Vecchio (1882-1883; oil on canvas, 39 x 66 cm; Private collection)

Telemaco Signorini, The Old Market from Via degli Speziali (c. 1882; oil on canvas, 86 x 55 cm; Private collection)

Telemaco Signorini, Scorcio di strada nel centro storico di Firenze (circa 1880; oil on panel, 31 x 19 cm; Florence; Fondazione CR Firenze)

Telemaco Signorini, La piazzetta di Settignano on a rainy day, detail (c. 1881; oil on canvas, 36 x 51.4 cm; Private collection)

Telemaco Signorini, Piazza at Settignano, detail (c. 1881; oil on canvas, 32.8 x 53 cm; Private collection)

Telemaco Signorini, Limite sull’Arno (c. 1890; oil on cardboard, 40 x 50 cm; Private collection)

Lacking in the long history of exhibitions related to Telemaco Signorini was a focus dedicated to the image of Florence that developed in his art, starting from the achievements of his father, also due to the fact that, if one excludes exhibitions of drawings, the monographic exhibitions dedicated to him have all had a merely reconnaissance character (taking away, of course, the tribute-exhibitions that were dedicated to him in the first decades of the twentieth century). Important occasions, which have allowed critics a precise reconstruction of the Florentine painter’s artistic profile. In particular, in addition to the already widely cited exhibition in Padua in 2009, it is worth mentioning the exhibition in Montecatini in 1987, curated by Piero Dini, and the one in Palazzo Pitti in 1997, curated by Francesca Dini, Giuliano Matteucci, Raffaele Monti, Giovanna Pistone and Ettore Spalletti: it was at the turn of these years that the production of the great Macchiaioli painter was retraced for the first time according to an eminently scientific perspective. It should be added that these exhibitions were part of a “rediscovery” of the Macchiaioli that was expressed through a long series of exhibitions held since the 1960s (the studies of Dario Durbè and Paul Nicholls were particularly important in this sense), and that the results achieved by the monographic exhibitions on Signorini would be confirmed and expanded with the 2009 event. If, therefore, the critical discourse on Signorini was already rather settled (and a new exhibition would have added little), the Palazzo Antinori review nevertheless succeeds in having its own character of originality, distinguishing itself by focusing attention on the relationship between the Signorinis and the ciottà, by further investigation of the figure of Giovanni that is substantiated in a dense contribution by Silvestra Bietoletti, by delving into the relationships that bound father and son to the cultural circles of their time (much of Elisabetta Matteucci’s long essay is devoted to this topic: the individual histories of Signorini’s patrons and friends are also traced), for examining, thanks also to the unpublished works, their work in a broader perspective, and for further emphasizing the European dimension of their art. And now all that remains is to await the publication of the recently discovered correspondence.

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