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. 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 attributed 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. 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 the life. After his death, all these notebooks, about sixty, passed to Fattori's only heir, his pupil Giovanni Malesci. 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. |
