Focus on ...

Giovanni Fattori, possibly the most important painter of the nineteenth century in Italy, received his first instruction in drawing from a lesser painter of his native town, Livorno. In 1846 Fattori moved to Florence to attend the Academy. During the 1850s Fattori joined the innovative artists, called 'Macchiaioli', who met at the Caffè Michelangelo in Florence and were champions of a new technique and style to contrast the conventional academic language. During those years, he still produced works that could be assigned to the historical-romantic school but his interest in studying from life also extended to landscape painting and the military life of the day became the subject of his first experiments in painting using the "macchia" technique.

Giovanni Fattori, a page from a notebook

Fattori approached the new technique and style placing a great emphasis on the realistic observation of nature. In a short autobiography, written in his late years, Fattori defined "la macchia" as "lo studio scrupoloso della natura com'è e come si presenta" (the scrupulous study of nature as it is and as it appears). As a consequence Fattori made it a habit to note, since the late fifties, all his observations in small notebooks (taccuini) that he kept with him, illustrated with innumerable sketches in pencil taken from life. During the rest of his artistic life Fattori gave the utmost importance to these small notebooks, which often founded his work as a painter, draughtsman and etcher.

After his death, all these notebooks, about sixty, passed to Fattori's only heir, his pupil Giovanni Malesci, who, unfortunately, sold many of them, the most in a sale in 1914. After that date Malesci bound in leather the "taccuini" left in his hands, and numbered them with golden letters, but the dispersion went on and only fifteen notebooks were in his possession when he died in 1961.
A few notebooks had the sad fate to be dismembered for commercial purposes, and only three "taccuini" reached Italian public collections: one was sold by Malesci to the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Rome, another one was acquired by the Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe in 1970, and one notebook, from the collection of Carlo Grassi, entered the Milanese Galleria d'Arte Moderna in 1956, as part of the Grassi bequest.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: the topic of Fattori's notebooks has been dealt thoroughly and with the utmost competence by Dario Durbé e Cristina Bonagura. See D. Durbé and C. Bonagura 'Fattori. Dal noviziato sotto il Bezzuoli alla "macchia" (1846-1859)', Rome, 1981. Drawings from Fattori's 'taccuini' have been considered through the whole book, but see, particularly, the 'Premessa' (page 11) and the 'Appendice' (I taccuini "del 59", "dei bambini" e "livornese"; pages from 94 to 99).