Italian painter and writer. He was one of the leading exponents of DivisionismGLOSSARYSee Pointillism, particularly skilled at large-scale decorative schemes, and especially important for his writings on technique and theory.
He studied at the School of Art in Ferrara, in Florence, and in 1877 with Giuseppe Bertini (1825-1898) at the Brera Academy in Milan. In 1878, influenced by Grubicy, he turned to ImpressionismGLOSSARYA style of painting that became prominent in the last quarter of the 19th century as a reaction to the ossified doctrine of the Academy and the content-oriented atelier, historical, and genre painting. The name is derived from the 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet, and first was used by art critics as a mocking description for a group of artists excluded from the official Salon, but who had their own first group exhibition in 1874 at the salon of the Parisian photographer Nadar. Impressionism, as a new type of naturalism, negated classical pictorial methods; based on contemporary theories of physics, it indicated the natural object in a revolutionary fashion - entirely as a manifestation of colour. Their supreme principle was "plein-air" or open-air painting, through which the painters tried to capture a direct, spontaneous impression of what they saw.. He painted historical subjects to begin with but after studying the work of Rossetti and other Pre-RaphaelitesGLOSSARYA group of English artists, among them Holman Hunt, Millais and Rossetti, who in 1848 formed the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, aiming to produce work in the spirit which imbued Italian artists before Raphael's move to Rome. The movement was a mixture of romantic medievalism and the desire to return to a realistic depiction of nature, disregarding what they considered to be the arbitrary rules of academic art. These preoccupations were unified by a kind of seriousness which turned painting into a moral as well as an aesthetic act. The group also had an impact on the decorative arts through painted furniture, tapestries, stained glass and designs for fabric and wallpaper. his work became spiritual. During the late 1880's he adopted Divisionism (separation of colour into dots or patches applied directly to the canvasGLOSSARYA woven cloth used as a support for painting. The best-quality canvas is made of linen; other materials used are cotton, hemp, and jute. It is now so familiar a material that the word 'canvas' has become almost a synonym for an oil painting, but it was not until around 1500 that it began to rival the wooden panel (which was more expensive and took longer to prepare) as the standard support for movable paintings (the transition came later in Northern Europe than in Italy). Canvas is not suitable for painting on until it has been coated with a ground, which isolates the fabric from the paint; otherwise it will absorb too much paint, only very rough effects will be obtainable, and parts of the fabric may be rotted by the pigments. It must also be made taut on a stretcher or by some other means.). During his lifetime his work was exhibited throughout Europe. He also wrote several books on theory and technique of painting.
