Giovanni Fattori 1825–1908. The Genius of the Macchiaioli at Piacenza, Italy
From March 29 to June 29, 2025, XNL Piacenza will host the most extensive retrospective dedicated to Giovanni Fattori in the new millennium. More than ninety paintings, drawings, and etchings—many of which have previously been inaccessible to the public—trace the creative journey of the Macchiaioli master, under the curatorship of Fernando Mazzocca, Elisabetta Matteucci, and Giorgio Marini, and in collaboration with the Galleria d’Arte Moderna Ricci Oddi.
LEFT: Giovanni Fattori, The White Road, c. 1887, Private Collection, © Galleria d’Arte Moderna Ricci Oddi; RIGHT: Mrs Gioli in Fauglia, c. 1875, oil on panel, 32 × 18 cm, private collection / courtesy of Società di Belle Arti, Viareggio
The Man Behind the Master
Giovanni Fattori was born in Livorno in 1825 into a modest family of fabric merchants. After his initial studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence under the guidance of Giuseppe Bezzuoli, he became a regular at the Caffè Michelangiolo—an incubator for the future Macchiaioli movement. His first “macchie” (patches of color) date back to 1855–56, but the turning point came with the Ricasoli competition in 1859 and his celebrated painting “La Battaglia di Magenta”, which gained him entry into major public collections.
Appointed professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence in 1869, Fattori trained generations of artists—among them Plinio Nomellini, Llewelyn Lloyd, and Odoardo Borrani—while continuing to face financial difficulties. In the 1880s, encouraged by fellow painter Stefano Ussi, he discovered etching, revealing a surprisingly fresh and experimental spirit at the age of sixty. Fattori died in Florence in 1908, and only posthumously was he fully recognised as one of the founding figures of European realism.
LEFT: Giovanni Fattori, Lady in the Garden, c. 1875, Private Collection; RIGHT: Giovanni Fattori, Oxen with Cart, c. 1870, Private Collection
The Macchiaioli Context: A Revolution of Light and Form
Born in opposition to academic conventions, the Macchiaioli replaced detailed drawing with bold patches of color and light (macchie) that aimed to capture the immediate visual impression. While Manet and the Parisian Impressionists would go on to celebrate modern urban life, Fattori turned his gaze to the Maremma countryside, the battlefront, and rural existence—settings where humanity remained tied to an archaic, elemental truth, far from the frenzy of industrial progress.
 French Soldiers of '59, c. 1859, oil on panel, 15.5 × 32 cm, private collection
The Exhibition: Journey and Thematic Sections
Landscape and the Maremma
From “Pagliaie a Castiglioncello” to “La Rotonda di Palmieri”, Fattori captures the warm light of the Tuscan countryside with bold compositional choices that seem to anticipate the language of contemporary photography. His rural landscapes are not idealized but grounded and lived-in—visions of a land shaped by labor and human presence.
The Front Without Rhetoric
Works such as “Il campo italiano dopo la battaglia di Magenta” and “Il Quadrato di Villafranca” portray the Italian Wars of Independence without any hint of triumphalism. Soldiers appear wounded, horses exhausted, scenes suspended more in waiting than in action. For Fattori, war is not spectacle—it is endurance, weight, and silent humanity.
Portraits of the Soul
From the urban bourgeoisie “La cugina Argia” to the peasants of the Maremma, Fattori’s gaze remains egalitarian. Dignity is revealed in faces and posture, sculpted in the stillness of bodies and amplified by a reduced, austere palette. What interests the artist is not social status, but the intensity of being.
The Etcher’s Workshop
Thanks to loans from the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in Rome, over thirty etching plates, state proofs, and sketchbooks document Fattori’s graphic work, which he fully embraced in his sixties. In these pieces, color becomes mark, and light becomes the contrast of blacks and whites. This distilled visual language would later influence Morandi and the course of twentieth-century Italian printmaking.
Dialogue with the Present
The exhibition’s final section places Fattori’s painting in dialogue with the photography of “Elger Esser”, forging a bridge between artistic languages and sensibilities across centuries. Esser’s rarefied landscapes—suspended between vision and memory—resonate with Fattori’s poetic approach and suggest that nature, now as then, remains a living archive of history and collective identity.
LEFT: Installation view: Ph. Daniele Signaroldi; RIGHT: Installation view: Ph. Daniele Signaroldi
Ethics of Truth — Realism as a Moral Choice
In his Florentine notebooks, now preserved at the Uffizi Galleries, Fattori writes: “Rhetoric is not needed, only the truth of the people.” This is not merely an aesthetic statement—it is a civic stance that runs through his entire oeuvre and informs his most radical choices. While post-unification official painting celebrated the young nation with parades, gleaming uniforms, and heroic poses, Fattori frames exhausted soldiers waiting for orders under a scorching sun, carabinieri watching over weary horses, peasants bent over their plows, and herdsmen taming oxen amid dust and sweat. Even the animals, rendered with anatomical precision and almost human dignity, partake in this shared narrative of truth—not as décor, but as the living presence of a world that labors, suffers, and endures.
LEFT: Giovanni Fattori, Three Artillerymen, c. 1859, oil on panel, 13 × 10 cm, Private Collection, Brescia; RIGHT: Installation view: Ph. Daniele Signaroldi
The same anti-decorative logic shapes Fattori’s landscapes of the Maremma: broad brushstrokes, a limited range of earthy tones, and raw light that cuts through shadows without lyrical indulgence. “Nature needs no ornament,” he wrote to his friend Diego Martelli, rejecting the glazes and polished finishes fashionable in bourgeois salons. It is no surprise, then, that he often turned down lucrative commissions rather than betray his vision; and that, in his later years, instead of softening his style, he chose etching—a stripped-down language that allowed him to “distill” painting into essential mark-making.
This unwavering coherence led Ugo Ojetti, reviewing the Milan retrospective of 1910, to define Fattori as “the moral conscience of the Risorgimento.” Today, two centuries later, that judgment still rings true: in the galleries of XNL Piacenza, every brushstroke by Fattori reminds us that the greatness of an artist lies not in the spectacle of heroism, but in the honesty of his gaze.
Thanks to a curatorial vision that brings together iconic masterpieces and graphic rediscoveries, “Giovanni Fattori 1825–1908. The Genius of the Macchiaioli” invites the public to encounter an artist who, beyond the “macchia,” was a master of light, an ethical storyteller, and a tireless experimenter—a true classic who continues to speak to our time.
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