Telemaco Signorini
Encyclopedia
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
artist who belonged to the group known as the Macchiaioli
Macchiaioli
The Macchiaioli were a group of Italian painters active in Tuscany in the second half of the nineteenth century, who, breaking with the antiquated conventions taught by the Italian academies of art, did much of their painting outdoors in order to capture natural light, shade, and colour...
.
He was born in the Santa Croce
Santa Croce
Santa Croce is one of the six sestieri of Venice, northern Italy.-Geography:It occupies the north west part of the main islands, and can be divided into two areas: the eastern area being largely mediaeval, and the western - including the main port and the Tronchetto - mostly lying on land reclaimed...
quarter of Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....
, and showed an early inclination toward the study of literature, but with the encouragement of his father, Giovanni Signorini, a court painter for the Grand Duke of Tuscany
Tuscany
Tuscany is a region in Italy. It has an area of about 23,000 square kilometres and a population of about 3.75 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence ....
, he decided instead to study painting. In 1852 he enrolled at the Florentine Academy, and by 1854 he was painting landscapes en plein air
En plein air
En plein air is a French expression which means "in the open air", and is particularly used to describe the act of painting outdoors.Artists have long painted outdoors, but in the mid-19th century working in natural light became particularly important to the Barbizon school and Impressionism...
. The following year he exhibited for the first time, showing paintings inspired by the works of Walter Scott
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet, popular throughout much of the world during his time....
and Machiavelli at the Florentine Promotrice.
In 1855, he began frequenting the Caffè Michelangiolo in Florence, where he met Giovanni Fattori
Giovanni Fattori
Giovanni Fattori was an Italian artist, one of the leaders of the group known as the Macchiaioli. He was initially a painter of historical themes and military subjects. In his middle years, inspired by the Barbizon school, he became one of the leading Italian plein-airists, painting landscapes,...
, Silvestro Lega
Silvestro Lega
Silvestro Lega was an Italian realist painter. He was one of the leading artists of the Macchiaioli and was also involved with the Mazzini movement.-Biography:Lega was born in Modigliana, near Forlì, to an affluent family...
, Saverio Altamura and several other Tuscan artists who would soon be dubbed the Macchiaioli
Macchiaioli
The Macchiaioli were a group of Italian painters active in Tuscany in the second half of the nineteenth century, who, breaking with the antiquated conventions taught by the Italian academies of art, did much of their painting outdoors in order to capture natural light, shade, and colour...
. The Macchiaioli, dissatisfied with the antiquated conventions taught by the Italian academies of art, started painting outdoors in order to capture natural light, shade, and color. They were forerunners of the Impressionists
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
who, beginning in the 1860s, would pursue similar aims in France.
Signorini was a volunteer in the Second Italian War of Independence
Second Italian War of Independence
The Second War of Italian Independence, Franco-Austrian War, Austro-Sardinian War, or Austro-Piedmontese War , was fought by Napoleon III of France and the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia against the Austrian Empire in 1859...
in 1859, and afterwards painted military scenes which he exhibited in 1860 and 1861. He made his first trip outside Italy in 1861 when he visited Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, to which he would often return in the decades that followed. There he met Degas
Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas[p] , born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist...
and a group of expatriate Italian artists in his orbit, including Giovanni Boldini
Giovanni Boldini
Giovanni Boldini was an Italian genre and portrait painter. According to , he was known as the "Master of Swish" because of his flowing style of painting.-Early life:...
, Giuseppe De Nittis
Giuseppe De Nittis
Giuseppe De Nittis was an Italian painter whose work merges the styles of Salon art and Impressionism.De Nittis was born in Barletta, where he first studied under Giovanni Battista Calò...
, and Federico Zandomeneghi
Federico Zandomeneghi
Federico Zandomeneghi was an Italian Impressionist painter.Zandomeneghi, whose father and grandfather were sculptors, was born in Venice and enrolled in the Venice Academy in 1856. A supporter of Garibaldi, his political beliefs necessitated a move to Florence in 1860...
; unlike them, however, Signorini remained rooted in Italy. He became not only one of the leading painters of the Macchiaioli, but also their leading polemicist. Art historian Giuliano Matteucci has written: "If we acknowledge Fattori and Lega as the major creative figures of the macchiaioli, then Signorini must surely be recognized as their 'deus ex machina'", describing his role as "that of catalyst and energetic doctrinarian. In transforming attention away from history painting and the academic portrait towards a new poetical interpretation of natural landscape, the part of Signorini was of fundamental consequence to macchiaioli painting."
Among his most notable paintings are The Ward of the Madwomen at S. Bonifazio in Florence (1865, Venice
Venice
Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...
, Gallery of Modern Art in Cà Pesaro) and Leith
Leith
-South Leith v. North Leith:Up until the late 16th century Leith , comprised two separate towns on either side of the river....
(1881, Florence, Gallery of Modern Art in Palazzo Pitti
Palazzo Pitti
The Palazzo Pitti , in English sometimes called the Pitti Palace, is a vast mainly Renaissance palace in Florence, Italy. It is situated on the south side of the River Arno, a short distance from the Ponte Vecchio...
). The latter, a street scene observed on a trip to Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
, is predominantly gray in tonality, but dominated by a brightly colored Rob Roy
Rob Roy (novel)
Rob Roy is a historical novel by Walter Scott. It is narrated by Frank Osbaldistone, the son of an English merchant who travels first to the North of England, and subsequently to the Scottish Highlands to collect a debt stolen from his father. On the way he encounters the larger-than-life title...
whiskey billboard on the side of a building. Art historian Norma Broude has written of Leith:
On the formal level, certainly, the Rob Roy sign arrests our attention and plays with our expectations here as audaciously as a collage element in an early twentieth-century cubist composition. What permitted and encouraged Signorini's experimentation in this remarkably precocious and unprecedented manner was unquestionably the experience of photography ... For with his vision conditioned by that experience, he could accept—as the eye of the camera accepts— what artists before him would normally have pruned or screened out of their interpretations of such a scene.
The influence of photography
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...
is often suggested by the asymmetrical compositions of Signorini's works, and his late etchings of street scenes reveal additional influences: those of Japanese art
Ukiyo-e
' is a genre of Japanese woodblock prints and paintings produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries, featuring motifs of landscapes, tales from history, the theatre, and pleasure quarters...
, and Whistler
James McNeill Whistler
James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American-born, British-based artist. Averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, he was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake". His famous signature for his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger...
, in their simplifications of shape, atmospheric effects, and flattened treatment of space.
He taught at the Instituto Superiore di Belle Arti in Florence beginning in 1892. Signorini died in Florence on February 1, 1901.
Further reading
- Panconi, T., (1999). Telemaco Signorini, il caso del pittore letterato. In the Antologia dei Macchiaioli, la trasformazione sociale e artistica nella Toscana di metà Ottocento. Pisa: Pacini Editore.