The first chapter of Scapigliatura ended with the death of Cremona in June 1878.
The following September, Vittore Grubicy organized the retrospective exhibition.
Brera Academy having declined to host the show, it took place at La Scala, in the Boxes Foyer: as paintings could not be hanged on the opera house’s walls, the artists had to lend their easels to present the works.
Symbolically, the exhibition assumed the meaning of a commitment to continue on Cremona’s footsteps.
From then on, Vespasiano Bignami and Luigi Conconi became the leaders of the group.
Bignami, who five years earlier had created the Famiglia Artistica ,was to carry on the anti rhetorical, subversive aspect of the movement, rephrasing its sardonic and satirical character (see for instance the painting A session of the Organizing Committee of the Arts Indisposition in 1881, in which he immortalizes the physical altercations of the Art Commission members).
Conconi too, was a caricaturist , working for the “Guerin Meschino “ a satirical journal of which Cremona had produced the logo just before his death: painter, architects and practitioner of arts under all possible forms, Conconi was primarily a graphical artist of genius.
The generation born in the fifties corresponds to that of the so called “Lombard impressionism “, a movement that contributed primarily to the development of landscape, but in portrait paintings all of them can be considered heirs of Cremona.
Then a new phenomenon surfaced in that decade, one that in Milan like in Paris, could not have taken place without the aesthetic revolution which changed the course of arts in the sixties: the coming out of the autodidacts, those self-taught artist formed under the leadership of a chosen mentor by congregating in cafés and osterie,e who were refusing to subject themselves to the art schools’ rigorous training.
Conconi, Emilio Gola, both engineering students at the Polytechnic of Milan, Camillo Rapetti, who, according to the Academy registers, took figure drawings and decorative design but quit before entering the painting class, Vittore Grubicy, all belong to this category: without formal training, they were to leave a major or minor legacy to the art field.
Paolo Troubetzkoy’s brother, Peter, the painter, born in 1864, whose artistic career was to continue in London from the end of the eighties and in Virginia later, is also self taught.
I thought necessary to conclude this section on the academic painter Eleuterio Pagani, whose subliminal influence alimented the discourse on realism during the seventies and the eighties.
Even though he was a man in his sixties at the height of the Scapigliatura movement, and therefore remained faithful to the iconography of bourgeois painting, he was able, late in life, to open himself to the Scapigliata influence in his use of color and brushwork.
The Scapigliata phase of the future Divisionist painters Divisionism marks a departure from the Scapigliati culture, a breaking away from its influence, a far reaching choice to leave behind what would have been a more conservative path, for an avanguard, uncharted one.
While Ranzoni painting , in its estrangement, goes beyond the Scapigliati aesthetics pushing the limits to the point of rejecting the movement premises, as Cremona had done in a minor way, and as Medardo Rosso was to do, the Divisionists based their innovations on the Scapigliati‘s technique but in their attempt to rationalize its unblended brushwork in order to express light through color, they abandoned the manner of their beginnings, and turned their back to a culture which, nevertheless, was to leave a lasting trace on their future research.
Vittore Grubicy, art dealer of great foresight and international vocation, was determinant in creating a framework of study for the future scholars of Cremona and Scapigliatura but he was also an influential figure in the diffusion of the Divisionist technique.
His own career as a painter started late, after 1889 and Woman at the Window is the only one of his paintings that can be considered Scapigliato. Strongly influenced by the literary movement called “democratic Scapigliatura", Morbelli’s subject matters are inspired by metropolitan social plagues: prostitution, alcohol abuses, suicide, neglect of the elderly.
Dereliction presented as a human tragedy rather than a political problem is an important source of romantic pathos in the positivist literature which was to have a lasting impact on Morbelli .
On the contrary Previati, who remained immune to the positivist bent of Scapigliatura, derived his visionary imageries from its late romanticism aspect and that influence remained the backbone of his symbolism until the beginning of the twentieth century.

Close