A major exhibition on the Macchiaioli with 80 works coming to the Aosta Valley

Opening on February 24, 2021 at the Fortress of Bard is the exhibition I Macchiaioli. A Revolution en plein air, which will bring on display eighty masterpieces of the artistic movement that revolutionized the history of 19th-century Italian painting. Open to the public until June 6, 2021, the exhibition is curated by Simona Bartolena, produced and realized by ViDi - Visit Different in collaboration with the Fortress of Bard; through the works on display it aims to analyze the evolution of the Macchiaioli movement, which was fundamental to the birth of modern Italian painting.

In the second half of the 19th century, Florence was one of the most active cultural capitals in Europe, a reference point for many intellectuals from all over Italy. At the Caffè Michelangelo, a group of young artists gathered who shared a common spirit of rebellion against the academic system and a desire to paint the sense of truth: thus were born the Macchiaioli, whose name, first used in a derogatory sense by critics, was later adopted by the group itself, as it perfectly embodied the philosophy of their works.

The exhibition itinerary, set up in the Cannoniere of the Fortress of Bard, kicks off with works by Serafino de Tivoli, forerunner of the Macchiaioli revolution, which will be compared with the early work of Silvestro Lega, whose style is still purist. It will then come to the more mature expressions of the Macchia with works by Telemaco Signorini, Vincenzo Cabianca, Raffaello Sernesi, Odoardo Borrani and Cristiano Banti, who definitively moved away from traditional Italian landscape painting, but also from the lesson of the French school of Barbizon, particularly prone to linger in formally refined tendencies linked to Romanticism, to choose a drier and more severe approach, capturing immediate impressions from life.

Also on display will be paintings of historical interest, with Giovanni Fattori’s soldiers, those made by the group’s protagonists after the 1960s, when Macchiaioli research lost the harshness of its early trials and acquired a more relaxed style, open to the more sedate naturalist tendency that was spreading in Europe. The exhibition closes with a reflection on the legacy of Macchia’s painting.

“This exhibition offers many cues for rereading the history of the Risorgimento and those complex years,” comments Fortress of Bard director Maria Cristina Ronc. “Revolutionary years, studded with names and personalities to be rediscovered and reread in the perspective of the time that has passed. The Fortress of Bard is not ”only“ an exhibition venue but before that it is a historical building and as such on this occasion, more than on others, it expands and dialogues with the Macchiaioli exhibition and the lives and works of these soldier painters. We like to remember one of them. Nino Costa, enlisted in the regiment of the Cavalleggieri d’Aosta in Pinerolo, who after various wanderings moved to Florence and frequented the Caffè Michelangelo. There he met Giovanni Fattori, certainly the best known name among the Macchiaioli, and whom Costa himself would recall as the one who opened his mind and encouraged him.”

For info: www.fortedibard.it

Hours: Tuesday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturday, Sunday and holidays from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Closed Mondays.
Tickets: Full 10 euros, reduced 8 euros. Free for children up to 5 years old.

Image: Giovanni Fattori, Recruits on the Sea.

A major exhibition on the Macchiaioli with 80 works coming to the Aosta Valley

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