The Fattori Museum

Entering the historic Villa Mimbelli which houses the Fattori Museum, I am met by the frescoes by Annibale Gatti, by the Moorish-style smoking room, by the staircase decorated with putti in glazed ceramic. I then go through the rooms where the paintings of the Macchiaioli are kept, Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, Telemaco Signorini and the post Macchiaioli, Giovanni Bartolena, Vittorio Matteo Corcos, Oscar Ghiglia, Ulivi Liegi, Guglielmo Micheli, Plinio Nomellini, Llewellyn Lloyd, Raffaello Gambogi etc.
Between the Macchiaioli, active since 1855, and the post-Macchiaioli there is a twenty-year period, which transformed the strength of Fattori’s brushstrokes into increasingly less realistic and more decadent mannerisms.
Fattori’s room is unmistakable, I have to sit in front of the large paintings of battles and landscapes, with that sting in the stomach that real art gives and that I cannot describe with any academic note.

Big brushstrokes, squat characters, trousers baggy from use, oxen and haystacks, Risorgimento battles with rearing horses. The verist renewal is declined in a Tuscan, Maremma style, in opposition to the romantic ruins, the ladies in languid poses, the pensive poets. The images are contrasts of color spots, obtained through the technique called of the black mirror, using a mirror blackened with smoke which allows to enhance the chiaroscuro contrasts within the painting. Dots and lines are eliminated because they do not exist in nature and replaced by splashes of colour. Chronologically, the Macchiaioli preceded the French Impressionists, and tend towards the reproduction of the present, as it is caught by the immediate eye, without cultural superstructures, but also without full identification, rather as testimony and commentary.