Telemaco Signorini

Telemaco Signorini (; August 18, 1835 – February 10, 1901) was an Italian artist who belonged to the group known as the Macchiaioli.

Biography

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 (1808–1864), a court painter for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, he decided instead to study painting. 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 Società Promotrice delle Belle Arti. 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."

Exhibitions

His presence at exhibitions was frequent and prolific. In 1860, at the Società Promotrice, he exhibited seven paintings, including I Toscani a Calcinato (The Calcined Tuscans). In 1861, he sent to Turin a somewhat polemical The ghetto of Venice. In 1865, he exhibited Le pazze (The Crazy Ones). In 1869 he made a series of etchings, and visited Paris for the second time. At the Exposition of Livorno he had three canvases; at 1887 in Venice, six paintings.

Signorini was also a passionate art critic, and was published in art journals, including a series of 99 sonnets titled Le 99 discussioni artistiche di E. G. Moltenì. In 1882, he was nominated professor of the Florentine Academy but declined the appointment.

Works Among his most notable paintings are The Ward of the Madwomen at S. Bonifazio in Florence (1865, Venice, Gallery of Modern Art in the Cà Pesaro); Prison Bath in Portoferraio (ca. 1890, Florence, Gallery of Modern Art in the Palazzo Pitti), which portrays the well-known brigand Carmine Crocco during his imprisonment; 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 Whisky billboard on the side of a building. Art historian Norma Broude has written of Leith: On the formal level, certainly, the Rob Roy 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. 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.

In 1888 he began teaching at the Instituto Superiore di Belle Arti in Florence. He died in that city on February 10, 1901.

Other selected paintings