"I love the sea because I was born in a seaside town." The sea in the painting of Giovanni Fattori

When the great Fattori Exhibition was organized in Florence in 1925 to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Giovanni Fattori (Livorno, 1825 Florence, 1908), it fell to critic Margherita Sarfatti (Venice, 1880 Cavallasca, 1961), a leading figure in Italian art in the early 20th century, to review it for Il Popolo d’Italia. Among the salient passages in that review, the comparison between Fattori and Claude Monet on the theme of the sea should certainly be highlighted. In particular, Margherita Sarfatti had focused on Fattori’s Riposo in Maremma, then kept in the collection of the painter Giovanni Malesci (Vicchio, 1884 - Milan, 1969), and thus spoke of it: “that note of the sea in the sun, all movement, while the land is barren and motionless, is a masterpiece of Italian style, for it is not Claude Monet’s sea, with all the analytical details of its movement, according to the hour, the season, the time. It is the sea: summed up in the definitive atypical characters.” Of course: it is necessary to strip the passage just quoted of all the rhetoric, typical of the period, that implicitly intends to project Fattori’s art in a perspective of presumed superiority over that of Monet, but it is interesting that precisely the element of the sea constitutes the ground on which Sarfatti advances her comparison. The sea is, in fact, one of the most recurrent motifs in Giovanni Fattori’s art. And the Leghorn artist was fully aware of this: in his Scritti autobiografici, the painter described himself as a “meticulous observer of the sea, in all its phases, for I love the sea because I was born in a sea town.”

It was not unusual for Fattori and his colleagues to go with canvases, palettes and brushes to the seashore, to sit on the rocks or on the beach and begin to paint, to capture with colors the warm light of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Tuscan coast, on sunny days, or in variable weather, and sometimes even with overcast skies. In 1866, a 41-year-old Giovanni Fattori went to the sea with another great Macchiaiolo, Silvestro Lega (Modigliana, 1826 - Florence, 1895), and immortalized his friend and colleague while the latter was busy painting right on the rocks. Kept in a private collection, but sometimes exhibited at temporary exhibitions, and once also belonging to the aforementioned Giovanni Malesci, the small picture, a small oil on panel, is emblematic of the relationship between Giovanni Fattori and the sea, for several reasons. First, because it is evocative of an important period in the history of the Macchiaiolo movement, that of his sojourns in Castiglioncello, a pleasant coastal town near Livorno. There, critic Diego Martelli (Florence, 1839 - 1896) had inherited a property, and since 1862 he had begun to invite various exponents of the movement to his estate, from Giuseppe Abbati (Naples, 1836 - Florence, 1868), who also resided on Martelli’s estate, to Raffaello Sernesi (Florence, 1838 - Bolzano, 1866), to Odoardo Borrani (Pisa, 1833 - Florence, 1905). The Macchiaioli, staying for long periods of time in Castiglioncello, had the opportunity to study the effects of different light intensities on the landscape on an ongoing basis, and they chose to produce small-format works (such as Fattori’s tablet portraying Lega) because on the one hand they were better suited to quickly capturing a moment of the day (although the works were always finished in the studio), and on the other because they better responded to a style that wanted to be essential. Fattori himself was a guest of Martelli’s in Castiglioncello in 1867, and on that occasion he portrayed his friend resting on a deckchair in the middle of an idyllic pine forest, with the sea in the background. And he always chose a small-format panel.

The portrait of Silvestro Lega (but the same could also be said of the one of Diego Martelli) also gives an account of one of the artistically happiest and most prolific moments of Fattori’s career, who on the contrary, on a personal level, was experiencing the drama of the illness of his wife Settimia, who later died in 1867: probably art represented a tenacious moment of revenge with respect to the tragic family events that had severely tested him. By that time, the young Leghorn artist had already revealed himself as an extraordinarily receptive artist who, in the late 1860s, in contact with the painters of what would later go down in art history as the "Castiglioncello School," was able to draw important cues for his painting. Contacts that, however, Fattori was able to initiate long before he took to frequenting the coastal village: for example, his friendship with Giuseppe Abbati dates back to the early 1860s. In 1862 the latter exhibited at the Promotrice Fiorentina a Motivo presso Castiglioncello, also known today as Marina a Castiglioncello (also housed in a private collection): it depicts a beach near the town with, in the background, Diego Martelli’s house, isolated above a promontory. It is also a painting representative of Abbati’s vaguely melancholy temperament, with the warm, reddish light, typical of days when warm winds blow, that cloaks the entire placid maritime landscape and bears witness to the Neapolitan painter’s research into luministic effects involving natural elements. This painting had a significant echo on Fattori, who at about the same time painted an Arno alle Cascine (a rather frequent motif in his art at that time) that has many features in common with Abbati’s work: the calm and almost solemn atmosphere, the horizontal view cut obliquely by diagonals (created by the river and the banks in Fattori, the sea and the beach in Abbati) that give life to almost uniform masses, the sparse and earthy color palette.

Giovanni Fattori, Self-Portrait (1866; oil on canvas, 59 x 47 cm; Florence, Gallery of Modern Art, Palazzo Pitti)

Giovanni Fattori, Rest in Maremma (c. 1875; oil on canvas, 35 x 72.5 cm; Private collection)

Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega paints on the rocks (1866; oil on panel, 12.5 x 28 cm; Private collection)

Giovanni Fattori, Diego Martelli at Castiglioncello (c. 1867; oil on panel, 13 x 20 cm; Private collection)

Giuseppe Abbati, Marina at Castiglioncello (c. 1862-1863; oil on canvas, 50 x 70 cm; Florence, Siceoli-Orsi Bertolini Collection)

Giovanni Fattori, Arno alle Cascine (circa 1862-1863; oil on panel, 6 x 33 cm; Private collection)

The apex of that fertile and creative moment is represented by one of the most famous paintings of his production, the Rotonda dei bagni Palmieri, made in 1866. With this painting and with those immediately following (among which are the portraits of Lega and Martelli), art historian Dario Durbè has written, “a new vein takes over in the painter’s production: as joyful, serene, snappy, as in the immediately preceding period recollection, severity and suave melancholy had dominated.” La Rotonda is a painting that captures a moment in the daily life of post-unification bourgeois Livorno, with a group of ladies gathering on the rotunda of the Palmieri bathing establishment on the Labronian coast for a chat by the sea, under a large awning that provides shade. Ladies all dressed up, but this is not a significant detail to infer the season: in fact, even in the height of summer at the time, people went to the beach fully dressed, since undressing was considered disreputable. The Rotunda is also considered one of the most important paintings of macchia painting: the composition is punctuated by a clear horizon that divides the composition substantially into four parts, represented by the tent, the outline of the coast, the sea and the rotunda itself, on which the ladies take their places, whose figures, like the landscape, are constructed with patches of pure color, which meet the need to capture a view from afar, which prevents the relative from capturing the details of the women’s physiognomy: at most, one can recognize their silhouettes, capable nonetheless of being strongly expressive (observing them, we almost seem to hear their chattering mixed with the lapping of the surf).

Durbè himself speculates that Fattori’s turn toward a more lively, serene and innovative painting originated from “contact with the mundane climate of the baths, produced by we do not know what precise concomitance of things.” a contact that “came to operate in his psyche a fortunate transmutation, and to generate in him an unusual disposition of the soul, where without the intensity of vision of the previous years being diminished at any point, everything is felt with a kind of joyful palpitation, of which up to this moment the sign is not given to perceive, except perhaps, but not with as much richness of motifs, in the first experiments of ”macchia“ of ’59.” Fattori’s hometown, moreover, had in those very years become an intense meeting place and social life, so much so that it also attracted a very young Giovanni Boldini (Ferrara, 1842 - Paris, 1931), then in his early twenties, but already strong in his work as a portrait painter and engaged, during his stay in Tuscany, in some interesting views, which Fattori probably knew. And it was perhaps the proximity to such a lively environment (despite the fact that Fattori had a very introverted character and, moreover, made even more closed by personal vicissitudes) that had beneficial effects on the Leghorn artist’s art, which, in fact, from 1866 onward, experienced a particularly intense season. The portrait of Silvestro Lega, as mentioned, exemplifies this new painting, devoted to simplicity, clarity, and immediacy: the friend is portrayed sitting on a rock, who knows how comfortable, while resting the stand on his knee and, sheltered by a small umbrella that saves him from the heat (since he has not even taken off his jacket and hat), painting concentrated. The enveloping light brings out the roughness of the rocks and colors the sea in varying shades of blue, while subtle oblique veils almost manage to suggest the idea of a breeze blowing on the coast.

The sea, at the time, probably represents the most recurrent motif in the production of Giovanni Fattori, who, with seascapes, long cliffs, depictions of boats plying the Tyrrhenian Sea, portraits of bathers caught from afar as in the Rotonda dei bagni Palmieri, filled several sheets in these years: notebooks of drawings have been preserved that clearly indicate how Fattori’s production in these years was strongly devoted to the representation of the sea. Observing these drawings is almost like following Giovanni Fattori during a summer by the sea, in his walks along the coast in search of an inspirational motif. These are ideas that would later lead to completed works, as in the case of Punta del Romito, a work datable to 1866, where the expanse of the calm sea, against which the verdant hills of the coast beyond Livorno are silhouetted, is interrupted only by the whitish sail sailing across the water. It is, moreover, the same view that can be appreciated from the Rotunda of the Palmieri baths. The painter has only changed his position so that he does not have the obstruction of the rotunda in front of him.

Giovanni Fattori, The Rotunda of the Palmieri Bath s (1866; oil on panel, 12 x 35 cm; Florence, Gallery of Modern Art, Palazzo Pitti)

Giovanni Fattori, Scogli (1866; pencil on ivory paper, 15.3 x 8.6 cm; Florence, Private Collection)

Giovanni Fattori, Sailing Boats (1866; pencil on ivory paper, 15.3 x 8.8 cm; Florence, Private Collection)

Giovanni Fattori, La punta del Romito (1866; pencil on ivory paper, 15.3 x 8.6 cm; Florence, Private Collection)

Giovanni Fattori, La punta del Rom ito (1866; oil on canvas fixed on cardboard, 18 x 55 cm; Private Collection)

Although the 1960s was one of the times when the sea returned most frequently in Fattori’s art, his relationship with the maritime theme punctuated his entire career by marking its various phases. Indeed: it is precisely by looking at the paintings that have the sea as their protagonist that it is possible to trace a history of the changes Giovanni Fattori’s painting underwent. If the 1970s were the decade of great international success, the following decade opened under the banner of instability (economic, first and foremost) and Fattori’s art began to lose that aura of joyful poetry that had distinguished it after the middle of the seventh decade of the nineteenth century, and began conversely to investigate the cruder and sometimes even more dramatic aspects of reality. Among the masterpieces that are perhaps best suited to describe this turning point is La libecciata, now at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Florence: a work with a horizontal cut and built on horizontal lines (this will be a constant, starting in the 1980s), it presents us with a maritime landscape, presumably from the Maremma (Fattori often went to the Maremma at the time) shaken by a storm: the tamarisk trees on the left are violently bent, the sea is rippling, the shrubs are moving, small touches of color distributed obliquely on the ground suggest the idea of the wind lifting the sand on the shore. The emotional afflatus that animates this work, and that the work itself manages to arouse, was recognized even by his contemporaries. Indeed, in a report of the commission, formed by Ugo Ojetti, Angelo Orvieto and Domenico Trentacoste, that the City of Florence assembled with the intention of supporting him in the purchase of several works by Giovanni Fattori from Giovanni Malesci, we read that La libecciata is a landscape “where even with very simple but precise means, without figures,” the artist “has given to a short line of country the same force of expression as to a human face”: the work was later purchased, along with a study of it on panel.

It is a painting that introduces toward Giovanni Fattori’s extreme research, in which those long and heartfelt meditations on states of mind that connoted much of late 19th-century painting almost seem to make their way in. In the last two decades of his activity, Giovanni Fattori turned with certain insistent interest to an investigation of the human figure in the landscape. In Sulla Spiaggia, for example, our attention is not so much drawn to the boat that occupies half the composition, or to the two fishermen resting without bothering to find shade since the leaden sky already screens the sun, and perhaps not even to the flat sea: if anything, we are led to focus on the sailor slowly making his way toward the sea, solitary, from behind, marked by the same earthy hues as the landscape, almost as if color becomes a means of fusing man and nature together, in a painting that Raffaele de Grada called “one of Fattori’s most Courbettian works.” These solicitations become all the more pressing in one of his last masterpieces, Sunset on the Sea (also known as Storm on the Sea), probably painted at the turn of the century. Under a sky made reddish by the setting sun, in front of a sea rendered in misty hues, a man from behind contemplates the infinity before him. It is a painting that renders well that image of the “painter’s state of mind expressed through things” of which Anna Maria Francini Ciaranfi spoke in 1944, it is the “disconsolate loneliness of a sunset seen by the old artist with heartfelt concern,” it is a work that takes it upon itself to convey to the viewer the painter’s emotion in front of the landscape, it is a masterpiece of lyrical syntentism that gives a kind of elegiac halo to the view by cloaking it in melancholy tones and existential reflections. It is a totally new phase in Giovanni Fattori’s art, one in which the “perfect works” that characterized his production until the 1970s appear surpassed, wrote Raffaele Monti, “in these canvases often as dry as sand, in these involute, abrupt or violently contracted images,” where it is the purest sentiment that still infuses the now 70-year-old Tuscan painter with extraordinary creative energy.

Giovanni Fattori, La libecciata (ca. 1880-1885; oil on panel, 28.5 x 68 cm; Florence, Gallery of Modern Art, Palazzo Pitti)

Giovanni Fattori, Study for La libecciata (circa 1880-1885; oil on panel, 19.2 x 32.2 cm; Florence, Galleria d’arte moderna di Palazzo Pitti)

Giovanni Fattori, On the Beach (1893; oil on canvas, 69 x 100 cm; Livorno, Museo Civico Giovanni Fattori)

Giovanni Fattori, Sunset on the Sea (c. 1895-1900; oil on panel, 19.1 x 32.2 cm; Florence, Galleria d’arte moderna di Palazzo Pitti)

And looking at these paintings we seem to see him, Giovanni Fattori, strolling along the sea pausing from time to time to think about his past, to put his memories in order, to bring back to mind a day spent painting in front of the waves, in the company of his dearest loved ones. The old artist would not abandon the habit of indulging in a little rest in front of the Livorno sea: and when he did, he was as if assailed by a kind of caressing melancholy that made him feel as if relieved. These are not mere conjectures: thanks to the artist’s correspondence, we can faithfully and rather profoundly reconstruct his disposition of mind in the last years of his life, we enter into the intimacy of his private habits, we have considerable additional elements to understand the reasons why in the extreme phase of his career figures of old solitaries in contemplation of something abound, who are walking sadly toward a horizon, who live in their sad silence a dimension of moved restlessness.

When Fattori did not entrust his feelings to shapes and colors, it was the pen that was his companion: and on the letters he sent to friends he poured out his thoughts, with a simple, immediate prose, marked by accents of deep tenderness and sincere demonstrations of affection. It will therefore be interesting to quote here, in its entirety, a letter that Giovanni Fattori sent in the summer of 1904 to a family friend, Elisa Ciacchi, and which is somewhat illustrative of his temperament, of the way he wrote and in which he addressed his loved ones, of the states of mind he felt in those years. And so here he is, Giovanni Fattori, with his future third wife Fanny strolling along the Livorno waterfront and thinking back on the years gone by, while images materialize in his mind that cause him a few moments of levity: “Dear Ms. Elisa, Your little letter has pleased me and I am going to answer it, I won’t say promptly but almost. She is glad to be in Florence and very much so when she enjoys the beautiful country united with the object she loves, and deserves to be loved. I enjoy in good and dear company the sea auras, I lead a simple and hygienic life. I get up, have breakfast, take my little box, mount my streetcar and go to the Ardenza in the face of the sea; I’m doing some spotting and enjoy seeing it ruffled, stormy which has given us and gives us a few hours of coolness - toward evening with Fanny we go on the dock to see the big steamers coming in from long voyages, and others leaving - there is no lack of these spectacles of their sentimentality, they are families breaking away, they are tears falling and perhaps never to see them again it’s sad and it has a sad effect on me because it brings up sad memories.... what do you do? I am sure in the midst of the good Miniati family, and his, in the midst of the very natural cheerfulness of children the days will be happy and full of sweet hopes. The resolution made could not have been better and seek with policy to maintain full agreement in their families, notably with her brothers who after all are good and perfect gentlemen. When you get a chance, greet them with all friendship for me. Write to me and much and I will be pleased and inform me of your resolutions which I already approve because they can only come out good. The reminding me of my canines only pleases me because I love those beasts so much, for they carry with them a history of happiness and memories dear and sad; but even sad they are always dear. When I pass by in the streetcar along the sea, and I see again a place where festive went before us, me painting and my poor Marianne went fishing... what I feel can you imagine!!! Yet that heartbreak is dear to me - but the love I have to those beasts and I am so grateful to ’Miniati and particularly Ida who care for them. The charge of the most affectionate things to Miniati and Ida I will make her two verses; with telling her I return kisses to all and sundry, I commend and thank her for the care she has of my canines and I shake her hands with all the affection of friendship, as well as to Ubaldo. Do not forget to Horace and uncle, to Emma, Carolina, Maria and the babies - kisses to all - to you many things with affection. Yours ever aff. friend, Fattori.”

Reference bibliography

• Carlo Sisi, Giuliano Matteucci (eds.), The Other Face of the Soul. Portraits of Giovanni Fattori, exhibition catalog (Florence, Modern Art Gallery of Palazzo Pitti, October 28, 2008 to January 25, 2009), Sillabe, 2008
• Anna Gallo Martucci, Giuliana Videtta, I luoghi di Giovanni Fattori nell’Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze. Past and Present, Mauro Pagliai Editore, 2008
• Carlo Sisi, Vanessa Gavioli, Silvestra Bietoletti (eds.), La Galleria d’arte moderna di Palazzo Pitti. History and Collections, Silvana Editoriale, 2005
• Cosimo Ceccuti (ed.), From Courbet to Fattori. I princìpi del vero, exhibition catalog (Castiglioncello, Centro per l’arte Diego Martelli - Castello Pasquini, from July 16 to November 1, 2005), Skira, 2005
• Silvestra Bietoletti, The Macchiaioli. The history, the artists, the works, Giunti, 2001
• Dario Durbè, Vittorio Quercioli, I Macchiaioli. New contributions, Edizioni Pananti, 1997
• Pietro Dini, Inediti di Giovanni Fattori: lettere, dipinti e disegni, Allemandi, 1987
• Raffaele Monti, I macchiaioli, Giunti, 1987
• Dario Durbè, Fattori and the School of Castiglioncello, De Luca, 1982
• Raffaele De Grada, Giovanni Fattori (from the series I maestri del colore), Fabbri Editore, 1965

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.