ABBATI, Giuseppe

To this day, the hilly Tuscan countryside is dotted with olive groves and ominous cypress trees, frequently found along roadsides and near cemeteries. Abbati chose a patch of sandy, yellow road for the foreground, where long afternoon shadows are casting the shades of other cypress trees to be imagined outside of the picture plane. Large areas of different hues are effectively played off against one another in a rather abstract fashion.

The mid-nineteenth century in Italy was the period of the Risorgimento, the movement that culminated in Italian unification. That movement provided the political and cultural backdrop for one of the most important and influential groups in Italian art in the second half of the nineteenth century: the Macchiaioli. This group of landscape, portrait and genre painters, flourishing from about 1850 to 1880, was based on Florence. The core of the Macchiaioli consisted of eleven painters born between 1824 and 1838, most important of them among the older painters were Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, Serafino de Tivoli, and Vincenzo Cabianca, while Giuseppe Abbati and Telemaco Signorini belonged to the younger. There were some other artists associated with the group to varying extent, such as Guglielmo Ciardi, Giuseppe de Nittis, Federigo Zandomeneghi, and Giovanni Boldini. The last-named three all took their bearings from France, and eventually moved to Paris.

Alongside history paintings, the early period of the Macchiaioli notably included the Castiglioncello School of landscape art, of significance in the 1860s in particular. (The school was named after the Tuscan coastal town where the artists gathered to work.) The painters of this school, among them Giuseppe Abbati, Odoardo Borrani, and Giovanni Fattori, constituted a homogenous subgroup within the Macchiaioli. At first Abbati’s art was to the fore, subsequently that of Fattori.

Abbati was very taken with the clear, serene light of that part of the country, and with the colours, and he was the most regular of the visitors. A typical painting of the 1860s was his Landscape at Castiglioncello.

A soft light, filtering through the glass of an ancient window, illuminates a young woman engrossed in prayer in a church. A tombstone, on which some flowers are scattered, can be seen on the floor. In the background, immersed in the shadows, a man with a thick beard dressed in black is looking closely at something out of sight. The woman is wearing a taffeta gown, and the chiaroscuro effect of its drapes, comprised of folds illuminated by different intensities of light, almost make its texture tangible to the beholder.

The scene is intimate and melancholic, a fragment of daily life that only a painter “of the sentiments” like Abbati could capture with such indescribable delicacy.

More a genre painting than a portrait, this woman is standing near a fireplace resting her hands on the back of a chair, a pose that was customary in portrait photography at that time. The composition focuses on her long, bluish dress and the bonnet, held down by a black scarf, while her features are only summarily executed in large daubs of colours.

Abbati painted in the cloisters of Santa Croce in Florence in 1861-62 while the monument was being restored. Numerous black and white marble blocks were strewn around the grounds, offering clear-cut shapes and sharp, elementary contrasts. Beyond the empty foreground, a row of stones is placed against the shaded walkway of the cloisters, with only the figure of a worker or stonemason as a living element in this rather abstract composition.