Telemaco Signorini and Macchiaioli Giapponismo: A Report of Research in Progress

Abstract

The influence of Japanese prints was felt in Italy during the second half of the 19th century. The painters known as the Macchiaioli were the earliest, if not the first, artists in Italy to incorporate in the formal organization of their works certain recognizable features of the Japanese aesthetic and its pictorial structure. A compositional arrangement they often used was the open-X kind of division of pictorial space employed by Japanese printmakers when modifying Western one-point perspective, in which the vanishing point becomes a horizontal line from which figures depend on repeating orthogonale. Other non-Western devices for showing distance can also be seen in Macchiaioli compositions. These influences are here shown in some works by Telemaco Signorini dating from 1874 to 1890, together with substantiating documentation from his contacts and travels.