An exhibit celebrating 19th
century Italian masters of the Macchiaioli movement opened
Friday at the Italian Cultural Institute of New York.
Twenty-four paintings from private Italian collections have
been gathered to show Tuscany's precursors to the French
impressionist movement.
The movement, which lasted from the mid-1800s to the early
1900s, broke with art academy conventions in an effort to
capture the colours and effects of natural light.
Critics originally mocked them with the moniker
Macchiaioli - a pejorative term playing with an art term meaning
"spot" or "mark".
The landscapes and scenes of everyday life that have since
been embraced by generations growing up in Florence, Pisa,
Livorno and other parts of Tuscany, are largely unknown in the
US, said art historian Marco Bertoli, who organized the exhibit.
The exhibit includes work by artists Serafino De Tivoli,
Cristiano Banti, Vito D'Ancona, Giovani Fattori, Silvestro Lega
and Telemaco Signorini, whose works speak in the reconstructed
salone just as the artists themselves once gathered in
Florence's Caffe' Michelangelo to discuss art and aesthetics.
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