What the Macchiaioli did was to paint patches of contrasting color first and let that determine composition. What made the Macchiaioli different from their predecessors? Teachers of the academic approach to painting believed that drawing a perspectival framework on the canvas was the foundation for all spatial relationships connecting those elements through color then followed. The prevalence of stone, usually cold, takes on another meaning in the rocky Italian countryside where the soil, difficult to farm at best and depleted of nutrients after centuries, would drive a mass outward immigration of its people for decades to come. Both feature architectural settings - a crumbling archway in one, a glorious arch in the other. I haven't been able to date the picture Young Girl Standing in the Sun but there are similarities to Interior of the Cloister, painted in 1861.

Macchia means patches or spots in Italian and Abbati's fellow painter Telemaco Signorini gave the group its name, as a poke in the eye to their critics. And how he extended this to working people in images of almost metaphysical stillness, as though time itself was bemused by the starkness of the Mediterranean sun.

While Abbati has been admired for his luminous landscapes, I am intrigued by his most radical use of the contrast between darkness and light, how the two coexist in a single moment.

Radical in art, radical in life, that was Giuseppe Abbati and the artists known collectively as the Macchiaioli.

Sun haven giuseppe