They were humorously dubbed macchiaioli (“patch-makers,” “spotters” or “splatters”) due to their representation of spots (macchie, singular macchia) or patches of light.

In keeping with the mood of young Romantics, they were enthusiastic about Italian independence and unification.

An early work by a future macchiaiolo, Giovanni Fattori, depicts a battle in the Second Italian War of Independence:

This is considered a pre-macchiaioli painting, since his style is still somewhat academic, but there are hints of the future movement.

Two of Fattori’s later paintings, Roman Carts and On Patrol (The White Wall), show how he moved in a more Impressionistic direction.

The Pergola (An Afternoon), by Silvestro Lega, shows how the painter treated the dramatic Italian afternoon light and shade.

The weather is slightly more overcast for Lega’s The Visit (1868).

Telemaco Signorini’s painting of the Old Market in Florence is a more Bruegelish subject:

In Signorini’s painting, the force of the light and shadow seems to drown out the hubbub of the scenes he depicts. The Merciaio* of La Spezia, 1859

(Merciaio: Merchant, Haberdasher, Merchandiser, Mercer)

Giuseppe Abbati depicts a quieter country scene:

While their search for authenticity and simplicity was Romantic, their attention to ordinary details was Realist.

There are also some interesting contrasts between the Macchiaioli and the French Impressionists […]

The Macchiaioli were greatly admired by a number of Spanish artists.

In the 19th century, Spain, and especially the southern region of Andalusia and its capital city of Seville, were fertile ground for a kind of painting called costumbrismo, which paid particular attention to local customs and traditions.

These paintings had titles such as El baile. Costumbres populares de la provincia de Soria [The Dance. Folk Traditions from the Province of Soria]. Many of them can be found in the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Málaga, Andalusia.

Costumbrismo has a Romantic aspect, in its attention to picturesque, authentic, expressive local and regional culture. But it also has a Realist aspect, in its attention to humble and ordinary parts of society.

Spain, and particularly southern Spain, would have been a good place to pursue this kind of painterly interest. A Mediterranean, Catholic culture had more to interest the costumbrists than a cold, northern, Protestant industrial city like Manchester, Rotterdam, or Hamburg.

Costumbrismo could be pursued outside of Spain as well, for example, in Rome.

Into the 20th century, artists such as José Gutiérrez-Solana continued to make costumbristical paintings as well.

On the one hand, there is an ethnographic aspect to costumbrismo, as an outside observer renders such customs, costumes, traditions and rituals visible to an external public. On the other hand, there is also an imaginative, appealing or fantastical aspect to costumbrismo, as the lively and compelling scenes might entice a viewer into imagining one’s own participation in them.

ABOUT

What is this? This is a collection of brief notes toward a broader, alternative history of modern and contemporary art.

Everyone knows that the mainstream of modern art, broadly speaking (if more so among critical interpreters than among artists themselves) abandoned or rejected in transcendent values such as beauty, truth, and goodness.

But, outside the mainstream, any number of modern artists continued to make work that reflected some commitment to such values.

Thus, an alternative history of modern art could be told, that focused on those artists who kept the faith, or kept the flame burning, so to speak.

It would look different than the accepted story, but it would also speak to a broad audience, starting with the many, many people who appreciate art in general but “don’t like modern art” because what they know of modern art is ugly or off-putting.

To be continued [Feb. 26, 2026]

INDEX

Here is an index where readers may get a quick overview of everything that has been posted here:

Ideas and concepts

Cloisonnism | Costumbrismo | Macchiaioli | Volcano School, the

Artists and artworks

Puvis de Chavannes, The Sacred Grove, 1884-1889

Several of these are in the collection of the museum at the Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park:

The painters brought familiarity with European and American art to the islands. David Howard Hitchcock of Hilo, Hawaii, graduated from Oberlin College and studied at the National Academy of Design in New York and the Académie Julian in Paris. Charles Furneaux of Massachusetts moved to Hawaii at the age of 45. Jules Tavernier, born in Paris, made his way to the islands via London and San Francisco.

As volcanoes go, Europeans were most familiar with Vesuvius, although Turner had also painted a Caribbean volcano from someone else’s sketches.

A volcanic eruption is a textbook cause of the aesthetic experience known as the sublime, defined by a sense of awe or even terror. About the sublime, Edmund Burke had written in 1757:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. [Part I, section 7]

[…]

The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. [Part II, section 1]

And Immanuel Kant had written in 1790:

“Bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piled up the vault of heaven, borne along with flashes and peals, volcanoes in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes leaving desolation in their track, the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force, the high waterfall of some mighty river, and the like, make our power of resistance of trifling moment in comparison with their might. But, provided our own position is secure, their aspect is all the more attractive for its fearfulness; and we readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the forces of the soul above the height of vulgar commonplace, and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature.”

When members of the Volcano School composed their paintings, they were able to contemplate the awe-inspiring power of the Hawaiian volcanoes, yet without placing themselves personally in immediate danger. They interpreted their experience of the Pacific islands from within a long-standing tradition in Western art.

In 1888, the critic Édouard Dujardin described the work of his friend Louis Anquetin by making a comparison to medieval enamels. Dujardin noticed that Anquetin placed his colors in discrete blocks within defined outlines, rather than shading them continuously.

At first sight, his works proclaim the idea of decorative painting: traced outlines along with strong and fixed coloration. Outline is quasi-abstract sign, gives the character of an object; unity of color determines the atmosphere, fixes the sensation. From this derives the circumspection of outline and color as conceived by popular imagery and Japanese art. The artists of the ‘’image d’Epinal’‘ and Japanese woodcut albums first trace lines within which are placed colors according to the ‘’color pattern’‘ process. Likewise, the painter Anquetin traces his design with enclosing lines, within which he places his various color tones juxtaposed in order to produce the desired sensation of general coloration. Drawing predicates color and color predicates drawing. And the work of the painter will be something like painting by compartment, analogous to cloisonné works of art, and his technique consists in a sort of cloisonnisme’ [emphasis added]

In La Revue indépendante (1 March 1888) / christies.com

This reminded Anquetin of the way that medieval enamels had their colors divided, separated, or enclosed (like cloister, claustrum or enclosure) in what is called the cloisonné technique.

Anquetin thought that this approach to color “determines the atmosphere, fixes the sensation,” and gives the “desired sensation of general coloration.” It would go on to be taken up by painters such as Émile Bernard and Van Gogh (Wadsworth / Van Gogh Museum), and be important for Post-Impressionism in general.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, the most renowned mural painter of the 19th century, was esteemed by both modern and traditional-minded camps in a deeply divided France, and beyond. How did he do it?

Painting for the Public

In an era when much modern painting was turning towards private and personal subject matter, Puvis stoutly continued to address the public as a whole, rendering great subjects of church and state for public buildings across France. Called France’s “greatest public painter,” Puvis’s murals “were imagined to embody a vision of France and to impart a sense of Frenchness.”

For the town hall of Poitiers, where Charles Martel’s Franks turned back the advance of the Umayyad Caliphate in a turning point of Western history, he created two murals from the hinge point between late antiquity and the early middle ages: one depicting Charles’s victory, and the other depicting the Frankish queen Radegund, founder of the local abbey, giving asylum to poets and preserving literature against the barbarity of the age.1

For the Panthéon in Paris, he created a cycle of the life of Saint Geneviève, the city’s patron saint.

For the Museum of Picardy in Amiens, he created a suite of murals on national and patriotic allegorical subjects, including War; Peace; Work; Rest; Patriotic Games; and Hail, Picardy, the Nourisher.

For the grand staircase in the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon, he created a mural showing the nine muses and the three arts (painting, sculpture, and architecture) dwelling in a sacred grove (of which a smaller version, above, is in the Art Institute of Chicago.)2

For McKim, Mead, and White’s Renaissance Revival Boston Public Library, he created nine murals to surround the grand staircase: The Muses of Inspiration Hail the Spirit, the Harbinger of Light; Philosophy; Astronomy; History; Chemistry; Physics; Pastoral Poetry; Dramatic Poetry; and Epic Poetry.3

The Ideal and the Spiritual

As this set of works suggests, Puvis preserved a connection to the tradition of art that took ideal or spiritual realities seriously, swimming against the tide in an era when schools of realism and materialism cast doubt on these things. One critic wrote that “Puvis always made reference to a humanism and system of philosophy of a very traditional nature, which was outmoded for his time.”4 In the view of another:

Without being positively Christian his inspiration preserves a clearly spiritual character. In the midst of the materialistic invasion of the second half of the nineteenth century Puvis (with Eugène Carrière) was the noblest champion of religious art in France […] He upheld the rights of the ideal in the modern world, making it known and detaching it from dreams, art, and poetry. He always had an unshakable faith in the holiness of the spiritual side of humanity and in the supreme importance of continuous search, aspiration, and unrest which form the moral capital of our race. As an artist he did much to maintain religion among men.5

Puvis engaged with the ideal both through allegory (that is, representations of abstract ideas such as war, peace, work, and rest) and through classicism (that is, by using figures from ancient myth who evoke abstract ideals or themes).

Many modern viewers find allegory and classicism to be off-putting, because understanding such works requires a certain effort by the viewer to achieve familiarity with the references, either acquired in school or through one’s own efforts. But the degree of such effort can be exaggerated. Either a wall label or a quick Google search is usually enough to get the basic idea. And the reward is that such works, including those of Puvis, invite contemplation of broader and deeper realities, by comparison with strictly materialist or realist works that claim to only depict the concrete matter at hand.

Modernist painting: flatness and rhythm

With such an attachment to traditional aspects of art, Puvis nevertheless gained the respect of his modernizing peers. This was because his stylistic approach recognized the prevailing concern that academic art had come to seem artificial, and detached from reality. So, instead of a slick illusionism, Puvis’s style used the medium of painting in a way that modernists found satisfying.

Long before the twentieth-century art critic Clement Greenberg, and quite differently from Manet (who is usually cited as the keystone of modernism), Puvis’s work respected the essential two-dimensionality of painting. Figures are typically grouped together in a shallow field rather than shrinking into the distance. The landscape is likewise rendered as shallow, with the foreground emphasized, and a high horizon line limiting the visible depth.

Rather than being shown in intricate depth and detail, the figures are drawn in a simplified, “naive” manner, sometimes appearing stiff or distorted, as flat “cutouts.” The shapes of the figures, and their heavy contour lines, are all in the service of the overall two-dimensional composition, its “solemn and magnificent rhythm.” (Compare Matisse’s Dance for a more extreme, 20th-century version of this.)

In the words of one critic, “These figures whose gestures and steps are like a rhythm, whose physiognomy speaks of a rest that nothing can disturb, appear in this silent wood like visions in a dream.” For another, “Figures are treated first and last as part of the flat design, stripped of arresting detail to such an extent that the painter has been accused of ignorance of structure.” Another, Jules Castagnary, writing about Marseilles, Gateway to the Orient at the 1869 Paris Salon, complained that Puvis’s models were “painted with such a poor and inexperienced hand that their model does not reach the relief of a mantelpiece.”

Color and surface: a beautiful dream

Words like dream, reverie, and idyll are often used to describe Puvis’s work. These point to a certain stillness and serenity in the compositions. There is not much violent action, or conflict. They convey a certain timelessness. Both the human figures, and the natural environment in which they are embedded, seem at peace. If there is tension, it is a harmonious tension, not an unpleasant or dissonant one. If Puvis’s work is like a dream, it would be a kind of daydream or nocturne—definitely not a nightmare.

His muted color palette contributes to this mood. Tending not to use any colors that are too bright or intense, Puvis keeps the viewer’s eye calm with muted blues, greens, and grays. The “delicately harmonious” colors “caress the eye.”

To imitate the pale colors of fresco in his murals, Puvis painted in a very light key within a narrow tonal range, “renouncing all the effects of depth belonging properly to oil.” Puvis was accused in his own day of starting “a contagion of white.” Lead white was found as a major component in every layer of paint sampled at the Boston Public Library. Puvis kept the range of colors simple, limiting the number of pigments used in each work and using them consistently within each painting. He likely achieved this harmony in a process, described by his student Baudouin, of mixing large amounts of “mother tones” (tons mères) in bowls (assiettes creuses) that he kept submerged in water so that they would not dry out.6

And:

Puvis’s use of a limited palette of pastel tones had the effect of removing his paintings from the world of everyday reality and of intensifying their mythical and symbolic status. This distancing—deployed to brilliant effect in the Ste. Genevieve murals in the Pantheon—created a muted world seen to imitate the purity of Renaissance fresco paint ing. Whether they adored or detested these works, contemporaries were aware that Puvis’s paintings were radically different from the vividly colored realism which crowded the walls of the Salon.7

Along with the pale colors, Puvis achieved a matte, non-reflective surface that made people think of fresco painting (pigment in wet plaster), although he was working with oil on canvas. He used an absorbent layer of white chalk in glue; drained oil from his pigments by placing them on blotting paper; and did not use (shiny) varnish to finish his murals.

The dreamlike state created by the muted colors and matte surface conveys a sense of timelessness, reinforced by the “almost exclusive use of verticals and horizontals” in his composition (as opposed to dynamic diagonals).

Traditional Themes and Modern Means

The patriotic and religious aspects of Puvis’s work, his commitment to public murals, as well as his idealization and classicism, met with approval from the traditional and established elements of society. At the same time, his style, with its simplified figures and flattened compositions, its matte surfaces and muted colors, and its unified, rhythmic, decorative aesthetic, was of interest to the modernists. Few painters can have been able to hold all of these things together as well as he did.

Further Reading

Jennifer Laurie Shaw, Dream States: Puvis de Chavannes, Modernism, and the Fantasy of France.

L.C. “Studies for the Childhood of St. Genevieve. Puvis de Chavannes.” Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago.