Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, landscape painting in the area between Milan, Genoa and Turin acquired a new lease of life from the presence of foreign artists. In Milan, after the death of Giuseppe Canella and Massimo d’Azeglio’s retirement from the art scene, success came to the German Julius Lange, who had trained in Düsseldorf and Munich, whose mountain landscapes painted from life were pervaded by a heroic sentiment of nature, capable of suggesting “all the fantastic power of the land of Goethe and of Schiller”. As a counterbalance to the frantic pace of urban life, art was rediscovering the beauty of uncontaminated places, as Alpine painting, with its sense of the infinite and fidelity to nature as it was, became the testing ground for artists. Pronounced realism was the line adopted by the works of Luigi Ashton, Gottardo Valentini and Gaetano Fasanotti, while, off the beaten track of the official circuits, an irregular genius of the calibre of Piccio broke through the barriers of convention with his pure rendering of the effects of light and of atmospheric values as he pursued his own thoroughly independent path.
The most important artist to be working on developing landscape painting in the middle of the century still nevertheless remained Alexandre Calame, the great maestro of the Swiss school. His atelier in Geneva, a crossroads for artists who came from all over Europe, was frequented by large numbers of pupils, who were attracted by the grandiose, intensely realistic rendering of his Alpine landscapes, which his contemporaries felt to be capable of speaking directly to the soul.
Once some of them had been purchased by Prince Oddone of Savoy, his works found their way to Genoa, one of the culturally liveliest cities of the day, where they had a direct influence on the artists who showed in local exhibitions, such as Edoardo Perotti, Giuseppe Camino and Angelo Beccaria. Also the Piedmontese artist Antonio Fontanesi, who spent part of his youth in Geneva, was captivated by the realism of the effects of light in his works, before turning his attention to the more audacious experiments of contemporary French artists, especially François Daubigny and François-Auguste Ravier. The urge to break away from the canons of romantic landscape painting is said to have driven Fontanesi to create a form of painting with such surprising effects of light and transparency as to invest the simple motifs inspired by nature with a constant stream of new meanings. These experiments were influenced by his trips to Paris, his discovery of Corot and of the artists who congregated around the charismatic figure of Théodore Rousseau, the founder of the Barbizon School that triggered the evolution of modern landscape painting.