Gaetano Previati: how art and science create masterpieces
by Giulia Carletti
Both Romantic and Symbolist, the work of Gaetano Previati (1852–1920) is part of that last Italian attempt to create an art of an aesthetic and ecstatic evasion from reality.
L’Assunzione (Assunta), c. 1901–03, Oil on canvas, 105 x 87 cm, Ferrara, Museo dell’Ottocento. Courtesy of the museum.
Throughout the 19th century, Italian art had turned Realist, primarily informed by the French artist Gustave Courbet. Gaetano Previati was born in Ferrara, where he studied painting 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 Scapigliaturaand by the Historical Romanticism. In Paris, he reinforced his decadent and mystic artistic tendencies.
Previati adopted the artistic technique of the divisionism. This allowed him to obtain a magical rendering of light and to give shape to his platonizing ideas on art. In other words, divisionism allowed Previati to both experiment painting’s possibilities and give a transcendental significance to his art. Such pictorial technique took shape from 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 vibrant atmosphere. 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.
La danza delle ore, 1899, oil on canvas, Galleria di Piazza Scala, Milan.
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 a magnetic field. The circular path of light leads the 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.
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. What is masterly about the Italian artist is this combination of sublime and the sense of dreamely lightness.
Il monte Resegone, 1897, pastel on paper, 740 x 1040 cm, Ferrara, Museo dell’Ottocento. Courtesy of the museum.
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.
Originally published at uberaura.wix.com.
