Italian Painting in the Age of Unification

Laura L. Watts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367637460
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000400564
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Italian Painting in the Age of Unification reconstructs the artistic motivations and messaging of three artists—Tommaso Minardi, Francesco Hayez, and Gioacchino Toma—from three distinct regions in Italy prior to, during, and directly following political unification in 1861.

Each artist, working in Rome, Milan, and Naples, respectively, adopted the visual narratives particular to his region, using style to communicate aspects of his political, religious, or social context. By focusing on these three figures, this study will introduce readers outside of Italy to their diversity of practice, and provide a means for understanding their place within the larger field of international nineteenth-century art, albeit a place largely distinct from the better-known French tradition.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, nationalism, Italian history, or Italian studies.

1 Ottocento Painting and the Gap in Nineteenth-Century Art Historical Discourse

An Inchoate Narrative

Think of this book as a portrait of three artists.

The first artist is Tommaso Minardi (1787–1871), a scholar and painter from Faenza, outside Bologna. His devotion to Catholic pictorial traditions led him on a journey through Rome, to Perugia, then back to Rome where he revived the piety and grace of the early Renaissance, while transmitting the heights of Italy’s artistic traditions to the younger generations at the Accademia di San Luca (Figure 1.1).

Next to him is Francesco Hayez (1791–1882), borne from the mists of Venice, who found himself as a young man in the midst of the cosmopolitan artistic environment in Rome (Figure 1.2). Here he learned from historical models and contemporary translators to forge the modern school of painting, which he championed from his post at the Brera Academy in his adopted home in Milan.

The last artist of the group is Gioacchino Toma (1836–1891), an orphan from Naples who took his modest and unorthodox beginnings and forged a voice for the southern Italian people left behind after unification (Figure 1.2). Whereas his artistic formation was built from erratic periods of study, interspersed with revolutionary politics, his work centered on careful observation of the human condition in very real circumstances.

Similarly, think of this book as a portrait of three regions, or more accurately, three artistic capitals: Rome, Milan, and Naples. Each of these cities championed their own artistic inclinations, each were motivated by particular circumstances, and each city left its own legacy. It is also an investigation of the three institutions that colored the contours of these civic identities, and how the ambits not only differed from each other, but from the other regional institutions in Venice, Turin, Bologna, and Florence.

Alternately, refrain from thinking of this book as a comparative study of Neoclassicism, Romanticism, or Realism; instead, think of it as an investigation of Purismo, Romanticismo Storico, and verismo. In other words, this book does not attempt to rectify nineteenth-century art in Italy—Ottocento art—to the French or English paradigms. It is not about the Italian artistic identity, at least not in the sense of a comprehensive, all-inclusive characterization. My outsider status precludes such a reading. Rather, approach this book as a study of artistic differences both before and after the unification of Italy, one that complicates and at times contradicts the conventional wisdom associated with this artistic period and the broader art historical narrative. Think of it as an expression of local, regional interests and how they relate to a larger more unified national narrative, independently and distinctly. Whereas at times an artist’s style, influence, or theme may overlap and suggest continuity with a French artist, or with an artist from another city or region within Italy, this study cautions against seeking too cohesive a story. Not comprehensive nor granular, this study hopes to clarify through complexity, to reveal the character of painting at three distinct points to suggest the range, relevance, and impact of Ottocento painting.

Figure 1.1 Gaspare Landi, Portrait of Tommaso Minardi, 1801, o/c, Rome, Accademia di San Luca

Source: © Accademia di San Luca, Rome.

The genesis for this book stems from a chance encounter with Italian nineteenth-century art in the early 1990s. Early in my graduate studies, I began research on a nineteenth-century bust in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by the Neapolitan artist Vincenzo Gemito representing the Baron Oscar De Mesnil (1885) (Figure 1.4). Shortly after identifying the subject and context, I began to recognize distinct boundaries between the acknowledged artistic transcendence of the Renaissance and Baroque periods in Italy, and the forgotten and dismissed manner—outside of Italy—that accorded a more recent, modern history. What accounted for the vast gap between the easy familiarity held by a broad audience with artists from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, and the relative obscurity of artists from the nineteenth century, the era of nationalism? Why is it that—as one esteemed Renaissance art historian, a professor and mentor of mine, commented over dinner one night—“No one knows the artists Laura studies?” Why, indeed. From early on in my research, beginning with Gemito and then later and with more focus on the Venetian/Milanese artist Francesco Hayez, I kept struggling to find out why Ottocento artists, with their particular and profound aesthetic and social concerns, had not made their way into the present day and conventional art historical narrative, at least not in any significant way.

Figure 1.2 Francesco Hayez, Self-Portrait, 1862, o/c, Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia

Source: © akg-images / Cameraphoto.

As this book will most certainly illustrate, Italian scholars have conducted significant and exhaustive research on nineteenth-century art and its myriad of relevant influences, but outside of Italy it is known only in a scholarly context. Works by giants in the field—Sandra Pinto, Fernando Mazzocca, Carlo Sisi—have extensively investigated artists dismissed by the early twentieth century as a result of the growing dominance of the modernist aesthetic, yet these scholars’ works do not easily translate back into an already recognized and indomitable nineteenth-century canon, one that is progressively formalist and francocentric. Literal translations, although they rarely appear, would be easy enough to do. Such translations, though, would have to operate independently of a knowledge base and outside a common understanding of the nineteenth century as a Hegelian march from Neoclassicism to late-century Symbolism and beyond.

Figure 1.3 Gioacchino Toma, Self-Portrait, 1857, o/c, Naples, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte

Source: Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali e per il Turismo, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte.

In Italy, it is not so easy to construct a progressive dialectic, at least not a geographically inclusive one. With no central fine arts academy, but 16 primary ones and over 30 secondary ones, a dominant artistic practice does not exist.¹ It is not only that Italy did not have one artistic center, it was polycentric, both politically and culturally. The nineteenth-century political realities of the patchwork peninsula carved up into territories, all with recognizable identities, do not encourage a strategic confrontation with the established narratives of France, England, or America from the same period. Rather, stylistic outlooks at times conflict; an Italian art historical narrative is diverse, inconsistent, and elusive. Italy’s continued artistic richness from the nineteenth century, therefore, is too unwieldy to a broader art audience, and a comparative methodology with France results in Italians being cast as less inspired followers.²

My contention is not that existing scholarship has marginalized the era, or ignored critical issues from this period; Mazzocca and his colleagues profoundly prove otherwise. Rather, the breadth of regionalist production has hindered the study of art from this period on a broader, international stage. Scholars use a relevant and perhaps parallel conception of regionalism in twentieth-century American art to describe works by Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, artists working outside the mainstream artistic establishments. Their otherness illustrates the tendency in America, as in France, to discuss art in terms of its most visible and authoritative artists. Benton is a Regionalist because he shuns the abstraction promoted by the Modernists on both coasts. He is a Regionalist because he is not identified with New York, although even then he spent 1926 to 1935 teaching at the Art Students League. His very conscious and vitriolic break with Modernist ideals and contemporary artistic institutions made him a Regionalist, an outsider, a provincial. In America, regionalism means anti-Modernist.

Figure 1.4 Vincenzo Gemito, Portrait Bust of Baron Oscar De Menil, 1887, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Note: Purchased with the George W. Elkins Fund, the Henry P. McIlhenny Fund in memory of Frances P. McIlhenny, and the John D. McIlhenny Fund, 1990, E1990–91–1.

In Italy, since there is no central academy or institution to define the insider, the very active and diffused artistic scene spreads throughout the peninsula. No artist is considered a regionalist artist, because all artists are regionalist artists. For scholars, the approach can only be far less collectivist than when applied elsewhere; the only solution is to maintain the regionalist approaches, the resulting variables, and shifting narratives to champion the diversity in intentions as a signal of the vast cultural wealth of the Risorgimento era. In other words, once the quest of a national artistic paradigm is abandoned, or at least qualified, the scholar of Italy is free to examine the regional and political biases of individuals, and of individual regions, for what they reveal individually.

In a sense, then, the primary mission of this book is an unusual one. Rather than establish connections with the major artistic movements of the nineteenth century, my aim is to reveal the multiplicity and inconsistencies of the Italian Ottocento experience to complicate, not clarify. Rather than avoid fragmentation, I aim to confront it, and to reveal the difficulty in representing and defining an Italian style, school, or artistic center without which a cohesive narrative remains inchoate. Under the current circumstances, a pejorative or subjugated conception of the role of Ottocento art persists in the minds of a broader public outside of Italy. By rejecting the comparative approach, how Italy measures up to Northern Europe, I aim in this study to amend the typical reading of Ottocento painting by those all’estero.

Sulle Spalle dei Giganti

For non-Italian readers, the Ottocento pictorial narrative is obscure; for Italian readers, it is well-established and accessible. The problem here, though, is not merely one of language, but also critical foundational works on which to build a more thorough understanding of the obstacles and challenges to scholars working to define this period. What follows is an assessment of several twentieth-century and contemporary authors who have worked to explicate and clarify the era, particularly after the myopia of Modernism began to diminish at the end of the last century.

No author has been more catholic in his research of the peninsula than Fernando Mazzocca, who has spent his career publishing prolifically to establish the reputation of the era for an Italian language audience. His 2002 publication, L’Ideale classico, presents excerpts from over two decades of research. His stated aim was largely to re-evaluate the artists and their motivations from throughout the century, to rescue artistic accomplishments “from a mode of criticism, which as they were conditioned by the myths of modernity and the avant-garde, made the keys to reading disappear.”³ I rely heavily on the broad scope of insights introduced by Mazzocca since 1978, especially in the area of Neoclassical and Romantic counterparts, throughout the peninsula. His work has been limited largely to the art historical context, but has incorporated literary influences, art writing (Scritti d’arte del primo Ottocento),⁴ and the cultural context of Milan (Hayez nella Milano di Manzoni e Verdi).

When non-Italian studies do appear, too often they take a different approach than Mazzocca’s. Every attempt is made to find corresponding examples and equivalents to already recognizable movements and aims. Authors seek a way in for the audience. When compared to France and its increasing focus on form over content, the Italian pictorial counterparts read as less accomplished, innovative, and bold. Francesco Netti recognized this in 1938 when he wrote the following, “Bad things occur when … one wants to establish in painting a scale of preeminence of one genre over another.”⁵ Netti was referring to academic prejudice, but the same holds true with prejudices formed by foreign academies, that is, French academies. When Norma Broude described Italian Impressionism as related to the Tuscan Macchiaioli, her focus was on how they preceded France, or in how their work shows less of an experimental desire.⁶ It is only with the 1993 publication by Albert Boime, a significant and valuable exception to the dearth of English Ottocento scholarship, that the work of the Macchiaioli was investigated against the backdrop of social struggle under the foreign dominated culture of Tuscany. Boime’s groundbreaking approach, an outgrowth of the work of Mazzocca and his contemporaries, does not venture far beyond the Macchiaioli, and does not account for the lacuna up until this point. But this is precisely its strength. By not being a summative exercise, he lays the groundwork for future authors to move away from the traditional categories and grand inclusive endeavors. In so doing, he emphasized the role art played in a social or political context, not simply its stylistic development. His study exposes how the Macchiaioli “reveal in their work a rich succession of layers of … social topography, portraying the ways Italians in a particular time and place tried to shape and occupy a national space” (Boime 1). His work appeared at a time when the Macchiaioli was receiving a good deal of attention for their relationship to Impressionism, as in Broude’s 1990 World Impressionism, a comprehensive and comparative study. Whereas Broude illustrated that the earlier practice by the Tuscan artists placed them not as provincial offshoots of the French movement, but as earlier and probable influences on all plein air, or all’aperta, experimentation, Boime sidestepped the “which-came-first” and “who-did-it-better” explanations to show the vibrant and committed group of individuals who saw their world and commented insightfully and effectively through their painting.

In addition, the scholarship...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Ottocento Painting and the Gap in Nineteenth-Century Art Historical Discourse
• 2. Three Portraits / Three Cities
• 3. Tommaso Minardi and the Roman Destiny
• 4. Francesco Hayez and the Rise of History Painting during the Risorgimento
• 5. Gioacchino Toma, Neapolitan Realism, and the Aftermath of Unification
• 6. The Regional/National Model
• Bibliography
• Index