Telemaco Signorini

Telemaco Signorini (August 18, 1835 – February 1, 1901) was an Italian artist who belonged to the group known as the Macchiaioli.

He was born in the Santa Croce quarter of Florence, and showed an early inclination toward the study of literature, but with the encouragement of his father, Giovanni Signorini, a court painter for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, he decided instead to study painting. [Steingräber, E., & Matteucci, G., 1984, p. 115] In 1852 he enrolled at the Florentine Academy, and by 1854 he was painting landscapes en plein air. The following year he exhibited for the first time, showing paintings inspired by the works of Walter Scott and Machiavelli at the Florentine Promotrice. [Steingräber, E., & Matteucci, G., 1984, p. 115]

In 1855, he began frequenting the Caffè Michelangiolo in Florence, where he met Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, and several other Tuscan artists who would soon be dubbed the Macchiaioli. The Macchiaioli, dissatisfied with the antiquated conventions taught by the Italian academies of art, started painting outdoors in order to capture natural light, shade, and colour. They were forerunners of the Impressionists who, beginning in the 1860s, would pursue similar aims in France. Signorini was a volunteer in the Second Italian War of Independence in 1859, and afterwards painted military scenes which he exhibited in 1860 and 1861. He made his first trip outside Italy in 1861 when he visited Paris, to which he would often return in the decades that followed. There he met Degas and a group of expatriate Italian artists in his orbit, including Giovanni Boldini, Giuseppe De Nittis, and Federico Zandomeneghi; unlike them, however, Signorini remained rooted in Italy. [Broude, 1987, pp. 136-137] He became not only one of the leading painters of the Macchiaioli, but also their leading polemicist. Art historian Giuliano Matteucci has written: "If we acknowledge Fattori and Lega as the major creative figures of the "macchiaioli", then Signorini must surely be recognized as their 'deus ex machina'", describing his role as "that of catalyst and energetic doctrinarian. In transforming attention away from history painting and the academic portrait towards a new poetical interpretation of natural landscape, the part of Signorini was of fundamental consequence to "macchiaioli" painting." [Steingräber, E., & Matteucci, G., 1984, p. 36]

Among his most notable paintings are "The Ward of the Madwomen at S. Bonirazio in Florence" (1865, Venice, Gallery of Modern Art in Cà Pesaro) and "Leith" (1881, Florence, Gallery of Modern Art in Palazzo Pitti). The latter, a street scene observed on a trip to Scotland, is predominantly gray in tonality, but dominated by a brightly colored Rob Roy whiskey billboard on the side of a building. Art historian Norma Broude has written of this painting:

On the formal level, certainly, the Rob Ray sign arrests our attention and plays with our expectations here as audaciously as a collage element in an early twentieth-century cubist composition. What permitted and encouraged Signorini's experimentation in this remarkably precocious and unprecedented manner was unquestionably the experience of photography ... For with his vision conditioned by that experience, he could accept—as the eye of the camera accepts— what artists before him would normally have pruned or screened out of their interpretations of such a scene. [Broude, 1987, pp. 142-143]

The influence of photography is often suggested by the asymmetrical compositions of Signorini's works, and his late etchings of street scenes reveal additional influences: those of Japanese art, and Whistler, in their simplifications of shape, atmospheric effects, and flattened treatment of space.

He taught at the Instituto Superiore di Belle Arti in Florence beginning in 1892. Signorini died in Florence on February 1, 1901.

Notes

References

*Broude, Norma (1987). "The Macchiaioli: Italian Painters of the Nineteenth Century". New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-03547-0
*Steingräber, E., & Matteucci, G. (1984). "The Macchiaioli: Tuscan Painters of the Sunlight : March 14-April 20, 1984". New York: Stair Sainty Matthiesen in association with Matthiesen, London. OCLC|70337478