WTI Magazine #73 2015 November 27
Author : Giulia Carletti Translation by:
Both Romantic and Symbolist, the work of Gaetano Previati is part of that last Italian attempt to create an art of an aesthetic and ecstatic evasion from reality. Throughout the 19th century Italian art had turned more Realist, informed primarily by the French artist Courbet. Gaetano Previati was born in Ferrara in 1852, where he studied Fine Arts at the Scuola di Belle Arti. He then continued his studies in Florence and in Milan, where his style was mainly influenced by the Italian artistic current of Scapigliatura and by the Historical Romanticism.
In 1892, the artist participated in the Salon de la Rose-Croix in Paris, where he reinforced his decadent and mystic artistic tendencies. Previati played an active role within the artistic debate of the late 19th century. In this period, the painter would approach the more international artistic current of Symbolism and adopt the artistic technique of the divisionism, the perfect technique not only for a magical rendering of light, but also for Previati's platonizing ideas on art. In other words, divisionism allowed Previati to experiment technically painting's possibilities but also to give a transcendental significance to his art. Such pictorial technique took shape out of the 19th century scientific discoveries within the field of optics, and it was based upon the separation of color into individual dotted or lined brushstrokes. In his paintings, Previati juxtaposed thin filaments of primary colors, making light dissolve across the surface, and the painting acquire a peculiar atmosphere and a sort of vibrancy. When direct lighting hits the painting, the white thin brushstrokes are highlighted from the rest of the colors. Such visual effect is similar to that occurring under the weak light of a trembling candle's flame.
In Previati's artwork La Danza delle Ore (1899), we see the thin light brushstrokes following a circular path. They act like the lines of force of the magnetic field, the pole coinciding with the source of light. The circular path of light is painted so sharply that it immediately leads the viewer's eye toward the source of light. Light is treated like something material. Unconsciously yet intuitively, Previati had literally painted the corpuscular nature of light, whose theory will be officially formulated by Einstein in 1905. Sometimes, art seems to intuitively show what scientific theory would have been about to explain.
Due to this particular technique, Previati's paintings explore the poetic relationship between lightness and the sense of disappearance. This inevitably leads to reflect upon the fragility of beauty, the ephemerality of form, and the very temporariness of art. Therefore, on one hand Previati's intention of producing gigantic works states the eternal status of art; on the other hand, the light and dream-like atmosphere of each paintings relate this concept of eternity with those of disappearance and illusion. Art, as humans, is destined to disappear, together with its beauty. And this is a very Romantic concept.
What is not Romantic in Previati's works, though, was both their sense of inner quietness and, obviously, the "modern" technique of divisionism. What is masterly about Previati, is that he makes the sublime interpenetrating with the sense of lightness of the dream; a dream dealing with myth, legends, stories, and beautiful characters. Neither is there any attempt to realism, but a will to evade from that same political debate in which the artist was soaked into in that period. Even if realist themes of the Italian Risorgimento are present, they are always treated with Platonic lightness and delicacy.
Between the 19th and the 20th century, Modernism was making its first timid steps, leaving behind the too-much-idealizing Romantic art to ultimately dive into the doubt and the uncertainties of the belle époque. Without abandoning his commitment to the artistic research, Previati decided to be part of the Berlin Secession in 1902. By 1911, he won the golden medal at the Munich Quadriennale, was able to exhibit in his own dedicated space (the so called "sala onirica") at the Venice Biennale of 1907, and witnessed Gruibicy's institution of the Society for the Art of Gaetano Previati, which granted the artist fame within Europe and financial wealth.
During the last years of his life, his style began gradually approaching the modernity of Futurism. However, in spite of his return to landscape painting after the Futurist experience, Previati continued to be famous for his anti-naturalism and tendency toward the artistic research.
