The Fattori museum

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Entering the historic Villa Mimbelli which houses the Fattori Museum, we are met by the frescoes by Annibale Gatti, the Moorish style smoking room, the staircase decorated with glazed ceramic cherubs. We then cross the rooms where the paintings of the Macchiaioli, Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, Telemaco Signorini and post Macchiaioli, Giovanni Bartolena, Vittorio Matteo Corcos, Oscar Ghiglia, Ulivi Liegi, Guglielmo Micheli, Plinio Nomellini, Llewellyn Lloyd, Raffaello Gambogi are kept.
Between the Macchiaioli, active since 1855, and the post Macchiaioli there is twenty years, which has transformed the strength of Fattori's brushstrokes into an ever less realistic and more decadent mannerism.
The Fattori room is unmistakable, you have to sit in front of the large paintings of battles and landscapes, with that blow in the stomach that true art gives and that you cannot describe with any academic note.

Thick brushstrokes, stocky characters, baggy trousers, oxen and haystacks, Risorgimento battles with rearing horses. The realist renewal is declined in Tuscan, Maremma style, in opposition to the romantic ruins, to the ladies in languid poses, to the pensive poets. The images are contrasts of color spots, obtained through the technique called the black mirror, using a mirror blackened with smoke that allows you to enhance the chiaroscuro contrasts within the painting. Dots and lines are eliminated because they do not exist in nature and are replaced by color spots. Chronologically, the Macchiaioli precede the French Impressionists, and tend to reproduce the present, as it is immediately caught by the eye, without cultural superstructures, but also without full identification, rather as a testimony and comment.