California Italian Studies

The Divisionists were a loosely associated group of late nineteenth-century painters intent on creating a distinctly Italian avant-garde. They strove to override current anxieties about backwardness and cultural fragmentation in the recently established, but disconnected, Italian kingdom with a mission underpinned by modernist and nationalist aspirations. Although most of the movements’ members aligned themselves with the political left and were anticlerical, almost all produced canvases with religious or mystical overtones, sometimes undertaking to paint specifically holy subjects. The sources for the majority of these images lay in medieval and Renaissance art. This confluence of a Positivist painting technique (for Divisionism drew on scientific theories of chromatics and optics) and radical politics with anti-materialist and sacred themes, and modern art with historical prototypes, albeit paradoxical, was not an altogether surprising phenomenon in the 1890s, the decade when Symbolist art and revivalist trends thrived and spiritualism and science overlapped. Focusing on their sacred works, this essay explores the cultural context within which the Divisionists pursued spirituality and expressed metaphysical and transcendent ideas. It also demonstrates how the Divisionists negotiated the polarities of tradition and progress present in the post-Unification era and recognized that once they reinterpreted and recast their antecedents’ religious art and Catholic narratives with an empirical painting method and modernist strategies, they could forge new icons of spirituality and respond to nationalist exigencies.