Il modello austro-tedesco per i pittori italiani negli anni del Simbolismo: qualche ipotesi di ripresa visiva

The article identifies possible connections between Austro-German figurative expression and the works of some leading Italian artists – from the Divisionists Gaetano Previati, Giovanni Segantini, Emilio Longoni and Angelo Morbelli, to the Futurist beginnings of Umberto Boccioni – in the complex panorama of Italian art in the late 19th and early 20th century. This comparative analysis of paintings draws on contemporary documentary material like letters and sketchbooks, the artists’ libraries and other libraries accessible to them, book-lending registers, illustrated publications, exhibition catalogues, reviews and critical discussions of the time, sources that are fundamental for an understanding of the way Italian artists gained access to international works and the cultural context in which the appropriation of visual ideas should be placed. The fifteen comparisons presented and discussed here range from the expressive visionariness of Arnold Böcklin to the decorative stylism of Gustav Klimt, from the erotic symbolism of Franz von Stuck to the impressionist realism of Max Liebermann, documenting the vastness and variety of the visual models which Italian artists drew on and re-elaborated in an invariably original way.