LEGA, Silvestro

One of the masterpieces of ‘Macchiaioli’ painting, this intimate rendering of country life translates truth and reality into clear and composed volumes. The two women are seen strolling casually in a sunlit garden, holding their parasols while engaged in an intimate conversation. The figures are reduced to almost abstract shapes of broadly brushed pigments, while the intense summer light and cool shade are rendered in a muted palette.

A young farm girl knits while leaning on a ladder, giving the viewer the impression of a casual encounter with country life. This painting probably belongs to the last decade of the painter’s life, when he was a frequent houseguest at a villa in the Tuscan countryside. Though ailing and becoming increasingly blind, the artist went on to paint the village and its local people with an eye for realistic effects.

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.

The painters of the Macchiaioli were familiar with the liberal, but romantically religious ideas of Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872), the leading ideologue of the Italian national movement. His liberal ideas, influenced by French socialism and by positivism, had a real impact on the revolutionary movement. Silvestro Lega painted Giuseppe Mazzini on his Death Bed, recording the passing of a giant in one of Macchiaioli’s finest achievements. The dying man is seen almost life-size. He is resting on two pillows and seems no longer aware of what may be going on around him. The cool colours highlight the solemnity and sadness of the mood.

Even if the subject in the painting is an intimate middle-class scene, the naturalism of the representation does not dispense with the compositional rigour of the Tuscan painting tradition.

In the early 1860s, Telemaco Signorini and Odoardo Borrani settled in the Piagentina area east of Florence, to join Silvestro Lega who was also working there. Lega developed an overriding interest in effects of light, an interest he expressed in the plein-air nature studies he painted around Piagentina after 1861. He also painted simple genre idylls which used loving detail to record the everyday lives of ordinary rural folk. At times Lega’s approach could resemble the Biedermeier period in southern German art. One of his finest paintings is The Pergola, which preserves the flavour of his Purist schooling in its clarity and its compositional balance.