Painters of the future, corruptors of art, artists on a collision course with the rules of good painting: this is how many critics in the 1880s, who were still faithful to a traditionalist vision of art, wrote when defining the exponents of the new Naturalist school. Many a fundamental name on the Lombard artistic scene – the leader of the school of Naturalism, Filippo Carcano, first and foremost – were accused of being “colourists”, in other words painters who had abandoned drawing, the cornerstone of the art of painting, to entrust their efforts exclusively to colour. In actual fact, the works of these artists, who were active in the 1880s and 1890s, did indeed feature a predominant reliance on colour as the medium for constructing a painting.
When colour is privileged over drawing by the artist, it entails doing without the precise description of reality, casting off the idea of painting as imitation. With an extremely lively application of the paint, made up of substantial brushstrokes, dense with matter, practised rapidly and in summary fashion, these painters reinterpreted the landscape in the light of a completely new sensitivity.
The works on show in this room show how the artists were by this stage utterly focused on rendering the effect of their impressions, in other words of creating not a point-by-point reproduction of the individual details, but of their essential value of form, colour and light.
Flowers, tree leaves, bodies of water, the grass growing on the meadows, slopes and gradients of mountains, the snow that covers cobblestones and coats the roofs of houses in white, even the figures that populate the views: all of these became splashes of colour, forms constructed with rapid, synthetic brushstrokes, often intensely dense with matter.
The flowers that grow at random across the meadows were reproduced exactly as they looked: splotches of pure colour that vibrate against the intense emerald green of the grass. The tower of the little church that dominates Filippini’s snow-clad Evening in November is a bright red marker that stands out against the white of the snow, together with the intense blues of the country women’s cloaks. The increasingly free, increasingly mobile and articulate research into colour and the sign of the painters enabled them to sound out the emotional, expressive effects that could be achieved with the colour itself. The festive, playful character of Delleani’s little scenes, with their brilliant, saturated colours, provide a counterbalance to the melancholic tones of Bazzaro’s landscapes, whose shades of yellow and orange perfectly render the visual effect of the yellowed leaves that have fallen to the ground, in a poetic, emotional impression of the countryside in autumn.