Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introducing modern Italian culture
- 1 The notion of Italy
- 2 Social and political cultures in Italy from 1860 to the present day
- 3 Questions of language
- 4 Intellectuals, culture and power in modern Italy
- 5 Catholicism
- 6 Socialism, Communism and other ‘isms’
- 7 Other voices: contesting the status quo
- 8 Narratives of self and society
- 9 Searching for new languages: modern Italian poetry
- 10 Drama: realism, identity and reality on stage
- 11 Italian cinema
- 12 Art in modern Italy: from the Macchiaioli to the Transavanguardia
- 13 A modern identity for a new nation: design in Italy since 1860
- 14 Fashion: narration and nation
- 15 The media
- 16 Since Verdi: Italian serious music 1860-1995
- 17 Folk music and popular song from the nineteenth century to the 1990s
- 18 Epilogue: Italian culture or multiculture in the new millennium?
- Index
- Series List
12 - Art in modern Italy: from the Macchiaioli to the Transavanguardia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introducing modern Italian culture
- 1 The notion of Italy
- 2 Social and political cultures in Italy from 1860 to the present day
- 3 Questions of language
- 4 Intellectuals, culture and power in modern Italy
- 5 Catholicism
- 6 Socialism, Communism and other ‘isms’
- 7 Other voices: contesting the status quo
- 8 Narratives of self and society
- 9 Searching for new languages: modern Italian poetry
- 10 Drama: realism, identity and reality on stage
- 11 Italian cinema
- 12 Art in modern Italy: from the Macchiaioli to the Transavanguardia
- 13 A modern identity for a new nation: design in Italy since 1860
- 14 Fashion: narration and nation
- 15 The media
- 16 Since Verdi: Italian serious music 1860-1995
- 17 Folk music and popular song from the nineteenth century to the 1990s
- 18 Epilogue: Italian culture or multiculture in the new millennium?
- Index
- Series List
Summary
The Macchiaioli and the unification of Italy
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the term 'Italy' was an abstract concept that intellectuals and artists since Dante had used to describe their imagined homeland rather than a political reality. The first group of artists who presented themselves as linked to the nation were the Tuscan Macchiaioli, whose emergence was made possible by the Prima Esposizione Italiana ('First Italian Exhibition') that was held in Florence in 1861, a matter of months after unification. (The name 'Macchiaioli' was taken from macchia which means 'sketch' or 'sketch technique'.) It was at this exhibition that, for the first time, artists who were living and working in different parts of the Italian peninsula were grouped together. As is well known, the centuries-long fragmentation of the Italian states and the numerous foreign dominations had signifi- cantly contributed to the absence of a 'national' art or culture. Moreover, the divided state of the peninsula did not facilitate exchanges between different regions. Not surprisingly, many nineteenth-century artists who, with unification, wished to expand their boundaries and horizons considered Italian life and art to be marked by cultural provincialism.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture , pp. 243 - 264Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001