Today we are addressing the theme of Realism, a movement born in France but which also developed in Italy, placing particular emphasis on daily and often peasant life. Great attention was paid to the world of work and, above all, to the condition of women in the working contexts of that time in the countryside, the latter still tied to almost archaic traditions and lifestyles. Women's work, as told by these artists, always manages to maintain some ethical dimension. one can grasp the awareness that honest work, however humble, saves personal dignity. Depictions of women, mothers and daughters, very humble but full of pride. Art that wanted to demonstrate the social, economic and political changes of the time and linked to the growth of the urban proletariat and the birth of the class struggle. We will take as an example an Italian artist - perhaps less known to the public - Francesco Paolo Michetti and a painting in particular, The return from the fields (sotto sotto), where the condition emerges in which even children were engaged in work useful for the needs of maintaining the entire family. A very young barefoot girl who precedes her younger brother by a few steps, also barefoot. They have with them a simple harvest of fruit and some twigs in their hands and are followed in their step towards home by some sheep returning from the pasture. All this denotes a sort of pride. Note the cross around the girl's neck and in the background, at the top of the hill, a group of houses where the church with the bell tower and the olive branch emerge, iconographic symbols of protection and the search for hope. The nineteenth century remains a period - among the most recent - that best describes the socio-political conditions of our country. Marika Lion
Notes on realism
In France, realism was not consciously adopted as an aesthetic program until the mid-1850th century. Indeed, realism can be seen as a major trend in French novels and paintings between 1880 and 1826. One of the first appearances of the term realism was in the Mercure français du XIXe siècle of XNUMX, in which the word is used to describe a doctrine based not on the imitation of the artistic achievements of the past but on the truthful and accurate representation of the models that nature and contemporary life offer to the artist. French proponents of realism were in agreement in rejecting the artificiality of both Classicism and the Romanticism of the academies and in the necessity of contemporaneity in an effective work of art. They attempted to portray the life, appearances, problems, manners and customs of the middle and lower classes, of the unexceptional, the ordinary, the humble and the unadorned. Indeed, they conscientiously undertook to reproduce all the previously ignored aspects of contemporary life and society: its mental attitudes, physical environment, and material conditions.
Gustave Courbet was the first artist to consciously proclaim and practice realist aesthetics.
After his huge canvas The Studio (1854–55) was rejected by the Universal Exhibition of 1855, the artist exhibited it along with other works under the title “Realism, G. Courbet” in a specially constructed pavilion. Courbet was strongly opposed to idealization in his art and urged other artists to instead make the commonplace and the contemporary the focus of their art. He regarded the candid depiction of scenes from everyday life as truly democratic art. Paintings such as The Burial at Ornans (1849) and The Stone Breakers (1849), which he had exhibited at the Salon of 1850–51, had already shocked the public and critics with the frank and unadorned factuality with which they depicted humble peasants and peasant workers. The fact that Courbet did not glorify his peasants but presented them with boldness and crudeness created a backlash in the art world.
The style and subject matter of Courbet's work built on ground already broken by the painters of the Barbizon school. Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny, Jean-François Millet, and others settled in the French village of Barbizon in the early 1848s with the aim of faithfully reproducing the local character of the landscape. Although each Barbizon painter had his own style and specific interests, they all emphasized the simple and ordinary rather than the grand and monumental aspects of nature in their work. They moved away from melodramatic picturesqueness and painted solid, detailed forms that were the result of careful observation. In works such as The Winnower (XNUMX), Millet was one of the first artists to portray peasant workers with a grandeur and monumentality previously reserved for more important figures.
In Italy, realist art emerged as a response to the social, political and economic changes of the 19th century.
This artistic movement, known as “Italian Realism” or “Verismo,” was particularly influential in the mid- to late-century. Art primarily addressed the themes of everyday life, the working class, and the social conditions of the time. It was intended to be a movement of objective representation of reality, in contrast to the idealizations of the preceding Romanticism.
Among the most famous painters we remember Giovanni Fattori, Francis Paul Michetti and Teofilo Patini, who portrayed the poor people of their time in their daily lives, paying great attention to every detail of reality.
Michetti Francesco Paolo (1851 – 1929). He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, where he was a student, with Edoardo Dalbono, of the master Domenico Morelli, whose naturalism and visionary realism he initially imitated: a promising young man, his work was immediately noticed by Filippo Palizzi, his fellow countryman, who was living in Naples in those years. Like many painters of the time, since 1871 Michetti had also been interested in photography for the real study of the subjects of his paintings.
