FROM CAMERINO TO PARIS.
A MARCHE INHABITANT OF INTERNATIONAL REPUTATION: SERAFINO MACCHIATI.
by Guido Garufi.
One of the worthiest and most brilliant representative of the Italian artistic colony in France is also a great artist of Marche, valid illustrator of interesting literary events in the publishing fervor of the beginning of the 19th Century.
We’re talking about Serafino Macchiati, painter and illustrator of Camerte unjustly forgotten and mistreated by the critic, that, after the difficult beginnings in the mother country, will gather ample recognition in France, where thanks also to the encouragement of Vittore Grubicy and Giacomo Balla (he makes a portrait of them in 1900), he will be destined to find the ideal atmosphere to provide to his own expressive language an original mark, managing to conquer a position of great relief in the scene of the european graphic and pictorial art.
Although at the beggining of his career some critics defined him as from Ferrara, Serafino Macchiati was born in Camerino the 17 of January 1860, but he developed his first and unfortunate steps, of his artistic activity in Bologna and later on, in Rome.
Being a self-taught person, in Bologna, he frequents the free school of Nude under the direction of Luigi Busci, where the 19-year-old Macchiati will make his debut in the local Promotrice show of 1879 with a small painting. He moved to Rome where, at the time, prevailed that style of painting, not tolerated in academic atmospheres. He did not fold himself to the dominant taste, he ‘resigned himself’ to the illustration, with which he would obtain a fast and lasting success.
Then a refreshing incursion into the stimulating atmospheres of Milan publishing houses of the beginning of the 19th Century: this way he makes his first vignettes for some volumes of the publishing house Sonzogno: Stories of Christmas of Cordelia (1886) and the Song book of Children of Enrico Fiorentino (1888) published both by Treves, they are still proof of the beginnings enough stereotyped as creativity and weak as signature, it would be the series of drawings that in two years of collaboration, between 1894 and 1895, will publish in “La Tribuna Illustrata”, what would give him the occasion to affirm his personality, revealing as a self-assured illustrator of the period dating from the last decade of the 15th Century up till the French Revolution.
In Paris, where he moves in 1898 by invitation of the publisher Lemerre who assigns him the illustration of Crime d’amour of Paul Bourget - previous to the about twenty volumes that he will illustrate for Marcel Prevost, Armand Blanc, Edmond Rostand - Serafino Macchiati manages to define better his own iconographical writing and conquers, in a short period, big notoriety, working incessantly to improve his own style.
These novels of contemporary subject and high atmospheres find in his person a fine and brilliant exponent: the artistic personality of Macchiati consolidates mainly in the elegance of the style and the refined and competent reduction in exquisite black and white vignettes of scenes of worldly life and graceful figures characterized by a great skill in the pagination, in the alive sense of movement and in a decorative taste that never falls in affectation.
His illustrations are small masterpieces by the spirit who fills the scene, by the penetration of the outlines of the figures, by the nature of the behaviors and the expressions that, in the variety of the types and its safe individuality, show the constant and analytical observation of reality.
Except from his participation in the illustrations of the Divine Comedy for the publisher Alineri of Florence (1902), from beginnings of the Century all his production will be destined to foreign orders: besides the Parisian publishers Lemerre, Laffitte, Hachette, Artheme Fayard; he will collaborate with french magazines such as “Figaró Illustré”, “Je sais tout”, “Lectures pour tous” and the german “Illustrierte Zeitung”.
The french public appreciates widely his aptitudes of complete artist: illustrator of the madding Paris, theatrical designer (Cyrano of Bergerac) and excellent painter of landscapes and pictures, to which he dedicates himself with passion in all the free moments he has after his obligations like illustrator. His predilection for painting is not unjustified, it’s obvious that it allowes him to make a series of works of recognized value and optimal result: above all his pictures and landscapes of poetic and dreamy tone. His participation in the Biennial exhibitions of 1901 and 1907 and, even more significant, the retrospective that it was dedicated to him in that same place in 1922 evidences it.
Young and in the peak of the fame, Macchiati dies in Paris the 12 December 1916 on an sudden disease, leaving in the Italian critics with the remorse of not having recognized him in his mother country as he had been consecrated abroad, as it is documented in his obituary on “Emporium” in January 1917.
It’s time to discover an attractive and complex artist of Marche, in a certain sense neglected, either by a brief artistic life and who found his success outside Marche, or by the tendency to not appreciate the total value of the illustrators.
It seems therefore a duty to pay tribute to a Marche inhabitant of international reputation, just at the moment in which the taste has already extended to those aspects of Art traditionally considered a “minor art”, and in order to finally recognize to Serafino Macchiati the absolute modernity and the knowledge of his art, in perfect tune with the spirit of his own time. |
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