Italian Renaissance Art Analysis

Art is influenced by everything around it, it comes as a direct result of the cultural sphere it occurs within. The Italian group of painters known as the Macchiaioli are no different from this rule, during the nineteenth-century they took outside influences to create a new esthetic that reflected their personal ideals. Although how independently this new esthetic came about, and who influenced them directly can varied. Depending on the point of view of the author writing on the Macchiaioli, there can be a very large difference of opinion. The influence of outside sources is agued in four different ways by the authors Norma Broude, Nancy Troyer and Anna Cavina. Each have a different way to examine the same group of Italian artists, although …show more content…
A Path towards the Modern,” discuses a nineteenth-century Italy that is not fragmented by politics but, considers it united by several factors that encourages the Macchiaioli to all come together in Florence. She argues that by drawing from Italian Renaissance art techniques, the Macchiaioli were able to make a widely successful and purely Italic artistic movement. “It was the encounter between modern life and ancient ways of seeing, between the ephemerality of the image and the classical tradition that gave the Macchiaioli their dynamic force and explains how they were able to establish the basis for a unified figurative language for a nation that was in the process of being born.” The Italian Macchiaioli took the Renaissance pictorial strategies of austerity and, integrated them into their modern style that was appropriate for their day. By the mid-1800’s the Macchiaioli succeeded in creating a modern and national pictorial language that Cavina argues is comparable to Realism and Impressionism in Europe. Cavina presents an argument that focuses almost exclusively on the Macchiaioli as Italians, which can be considered both a strength and a weakness when a reader is attempting to understand the nineteenth-century movement. She explains the context of Romantic Italian landscape design, where foreigners depicted a perfected Italy that the Macchiaioli came to change into a realistic and lived in environment which they took pride in. A glaring negative to this interpretation is found within not the points expressed but, the omission of the author in fully identifying the Impressionist movement and its attributes. By focusing directly on Italy and the political disconnections between the provinces, France as an influence is pushed to the side not allowing the reader to fully understand macchia as an overall