Vincenzo Cabianca (1827–1883) was an Italian painter, born in Verona and considered one of the most staunch and experimental of the Florentine painters known as Macchiaioli, who broke with academic tradition for their free and direct approach to the depiction of light and shadow. He was initially trained in Verona and Venice, and found himself on a fairly traditional path of religious and historical paintings, but by the 1850s he had moved to Florence where, at the Caffè Michelangiolo, he became familiar with other painters, such as his friend Telemaco Signorini and Odoardo Boranni, and this shift in his personal circle of friends opened him to Realism. One of his own Macchiaioli colleagues, Cecioni, described him as “the most declared, violent and uninhibited macchiaiolo”, a statement which encapsulates his adherence to the tenets of the movement and his special interest in the impact of intense Mediterranean sunshine. As well as being artistically radical, he was also politically active and was jailed in 1848 for participating in the defence of Bologna during the events of revolution that accompanied the unification of Italy. He continued his painting and exhibited activity until the 1890s, alternating between Florence, Parma, Rome and finally permanently settling in Rome where he died in 1902.
Early Life
The art of Cabianca in his early years reveals a painter torn between the safe and accepted world of academic painting and an incalculable intellectual curiosity that had nothing to do with painting technique. He was born in 1827 in Verona and was formally trained before he reached the age of fifteen at the Accademia Cignaroli in the city under the tutelage of Giovanni Caliari, where he studied sacred subjects in a purist style, appropriate to the religious patrons of the city. It was in conjunction with this traditional training that he quietly began to form an alternative interest in medieval architecture, sketching in notebooks in an explicit imitation of John Ruskin, an unusual activity for a young man who was being trained as a religious painter, and an indication that his mind was interested in the structure and the detail he saw in history rather than devotional convention. When he was seventeen he traveled to Venice from Verona, thinking more about the wide range of music of the eighteenth century than any specific reformist concept, to take up his studies at the Accademia. In 1848, however, a determined youth, as a fervent admirer of the Young Italy movement and of Giuseppe Mazzini, Cabianca shunned the call to arms and fought for the independence of Bologna during the revolutionary events of the time; he was arrested and jailed in Castiglione dei Pepoli and then in the fortress of Castelfranco Emilia, a political incarceration which only interrupted but did not end his early academic education.
Signature Works
Cabianca’s more mature work is more of a gradual progression from the piety and purity of his earlier subjects to a more assertive, sunlit Realism. He worked well in the academic purism of an early work such as Sant’Eufemia (1851); but from 1855 onward, he began spending more time at the Caffè Michelangiolo with Signorini and Borrani, and they took him out on trips to the countryside, encouraging him to make his first direct studies of the outdoors. Over the next decade, the most famous of his works are the genre scenes, again against a background of intense value contrast such as Il porcile al sole (The calf in the sun, 1860) and La mandriana (The cowherdesses, 1861-62), as well as Le monachine (The Nuns, 1861-62) and I novellieri toscani del XIV secolo (Tuscan Storytellers of the Fourteenth Century, 1860, which was bought on the spot by the future King Vittorio Emanuele II). He was also one of his Macchiaioli colleagues who did not seem to want to completely give up historical and literary content for a pure landscape, and he preferred to depict scenes from Boccaccio and costume from the Renaissance, as well as more recent genre painting. His subsequent career took him to Parma (1864–68), and ultimately to Rome, where he broadened his subject matter further without ever losing his predilection for powerful, sunny contrast, which had established his reputation since his Florentine days.
Inspiration
The development of Cabianca’s art seems more like a series of conflicting forces than one dominating the other. Though his formal schooling was very traditional (from the studio of Giovanni Caliari in Verona, and subsequently at the Venice Accademia), his personal interest in medieval Gothic architecture, which had nothing to do with his schoolwork, started to grow alongside his formal education and is reflected in his writing on the subject as well. That early direct study from observation came to its full fruition once he came to Florence and, most importantly, met Telemaco Signorini and Odoardo Borrani at the Caffè Michelangiolo, a friendship that, especially with Signorini, is said to have influenced him away from the genre towards the more dramatic plein-air realism that became the hallmark of the Macchiaioli. His creation was as heavily influenced by political conviction as by artistic association: he was an avid supporter of Mazzini’s Young Italy movement, and his imprisonment in 1848 for supporting the defence of Bologna, is indicative of the wider Risorgimento sentiment which permeates much Macchiaioli work including Cabianca’s own. It is no surprise that many critics of the day saw sunlight as his primary subject; in the case of Angelo de Gubernatis, the group as a whole was described as “accurate researchers of effects,” while Cabianca is singled out for his particular fascination with the qualities of sunlight and Gottardo Garollo’s biographical dictionary entry reads: “Outright” a painter of “the effects of the Sun”.
Awards and Recognition
The recognition Cabianca received was far less formal than that of prizes, and more from the admiration of his own art community, and the patronage of other important art collectors. Within the ranks of the Macchiaioli himself was a special reputation; Adriano Cecioni called him “the most declared, violent and uninhibited macchiaiolo” and later critics such as de Gubernatis and Garollo picked him out specifically as one of the most committed practitioners of the movement, whose handling of the sunlight was of particular significance. He was immediately recognized by the future King Vittorio Emanuele II through acquisition (his painting I novellieri toscani del XIV secolo was acquired upon his exhibition in the Società Promotrice fiorentina) and was directly added to the Royal collections, before being integrated into the permanent collection of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Florence. He was later appointed to a succession of professional postings, to Parma and Rome, which indicate the continuing as well as occasional demand for his work from various regional markets. A monograph on Cabianca, the first comprehensive study on the subject and the result of twenty years of work, has been recently published by Silvana Editoriale, and his importance in the nineteenth-century Italian Realism is still the subject of serious academic studies as evident from the work of his publisher.