Starting from the 1860s in Lombardy, the tradition of landscape painting was marked by an innovation destined to shape its future destinies. Artists such as Gaetano Fasanotti, a lecturer at Brera, began to explore the expressive potential of painting en plein air, in direct contact with nature, in order to more effectively capture and reproduce the effects of light and colour captured on the real thing. This important moment of reflection led to a radical change in the conception of landscape itself: the tradition of the scenic landscape, of the landscape as a view organised according to conventional canons and principles, was abandoned. Painters now studied the characteristics of the landscape directly on the ground, developing a painting style that tended to become increasingly agile and synthetic, with brushstrokes sometimes thick and sometimes broken, enhancing the values and relationships between light and colours. This opened the season of so-called colourism, that is, of a painting no longer based on the prevalence of drawing, but of colour exalted also in its material value. What the painters aimed to do, when tackling the landscape, was to show the relationships between values and tones, the complexities of light and the richness of local colour, conveying the sense of immediacy and truth of what they see.
It was a new way of understanding the landscape and it called for a new way of interpreting it. The great masters of this pictorial season, from the leader of the Turin school, Fontanesi, to the Lombard painters Carcano and Gignous and the younger artists such as Mariani, Filippini, Bazzaro, Gola, Dell’Orto, Cressini, Belloni and, of course, Segantini, came to interpret a vision of landscape painting conceived as a search for chromatic and luminous harmonies, and thus of painting as the expression of a feeling for truth and nature, capable of evoking and suggesting emotions and sensations. Before these paintings, critics speak of the landscape as a “music without words,” of paintings to be viewed as if one were listening to an orchestra performing a symphony. Just as music through its notes and, therefore, through its constituent elements and the composer’s skill, is capable of suggesting and evoking sensations and emotional states, so landscape painting becomes the emblem of a painting that does not need to describe places, but which through its linguistic elements, through the expressive potential of brushstrokes, colour, tonal harmonies, and light, succeeds in arousing emotion. In this sense, the painter does not merely reproduce nature and, as the critics emphasise, it matters little where the work is depicted: the landscape painting becomes the place where an individual sensation experienced by the artist manifests itself and, in his own medium, transfigures it into a pictorial emotion. Each artist expresses a personal way of perceiving and rendering truth—of constructing, that is, pictorial harmonies capable of striking the most diverse chords, from the clearest and most serene to the most dramatic and profound.
The works displayed in these rooms, dating back to the 1880s, offer a glimpse into the exploration of what is commonly referred to as Lombard Naturalism, and which, stylistically, through the priority given to colour as a constructive and expressive means, reflect the modern impulses of colourism. The individual paintings represent as many ways of seeing and feeling reality: from the sunny visions of Dell’Orto, where the pictorial drafting enhances the intensity and radiance of the tones, to the dramatic notes of Leonardo Bazzaro’s painting, from the melancholic and sentimental atmospheres of Gignous, Filippini and Bezzi, to the power of the inner vision of the movement’s leading figure, Filippo Carcano.