Verismo (Italian for 'realism', from vero, 'true') was an Italian literary movement which peaked between approximately 1875 and the early 1900s. Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana were its main exponents and the authors of a verismo manifesto. Capuana published the novel Giacinta, generally regarded as the "manifesto" of Italian verismo.[1] Unlike French naturalism, which was based on positivistic ideals, Verga and Capuana rejected claims of the scientific nature and social usefulness of the movement.
Luigi Capuana, one of the main exponents of verismo in literature, and the co-author, with Giovanni Verga, of a manifesto on the movement.
Literary verismo was begun between around 1875 and 1895 by a group of writers – mostly novelists and playwrights. It did not constitute a formal school, but it was still based on specific principles. Its birth was influenced by a positivist climate which put absolute faith in science, empiricism and research and which developed from 1830 until the end of the 19th century. It was also clearly based on naturalism, a literary movement which spread in France in the mid-19th century. Naturalist writers included Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant; for them, literature should objectively portray society and humanity like a photograph, strictly representing even the humblest social class in even its most unpleasant aspects, with the authors analysing real modern life like scientists.
Literary verismo developed in the fruitful urban cultural life of Milan, which brought together intellectuals from different areas, but tended to portray central and southern Italian life – Sicily is described in the works of Verga, Capuana and Federico de Roberto, Naples in works by Matilde Serao and Salvatore di Giacomo, Sardinia in the works of Grazia Deledda, Rome in the poems of Cesare Pascarella and Tuscany in works by Renato Fucini.
The first author to theorize on Italian verismo was Capuana, who theorized the "poetry of the real" – thus Verga, at first part of the late Romantic literary movement (he was called the poet of the duchesses and had considerable success), later shifted to verismo with his short story collections Vita dei campi and Novelle rusticane and finally with the first novel of the 'Ciclo dei Vinti' cycle, I Malavoglia in 1881. Sicilian-born, Verga lived in Florence during the same period as the verismo painters – 1865 to 1867 – and his best known story, "Cavalleria rusticana", contains certain verbal parallels to the effects achieved on canvas by the Tuscan landscape school of this era. "Espousing an approach that later put him in the field of verismo, his particular sentence structure and rhythm have some of the qualities of the macchia. Like the Macchiaioli, he was fascinated by topographical exactitude set in a nationalist framework" – to quote from Albert Boime's work, The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento. Verga and verismo differed from naturalism, however, in their desire to introduce the reader's point of view on the matter while not revealing the author's personal opinions.
The movement had its detractors as well. For example, the Florentine journalist and playwright Luigi Alberti considered verismo to be polluting the minds of young people with ‘everything ugly, mean, and vulgar’ that existed in real life.[2][3]
Naturalism is a literary movement beginning in the late nineteenth century, similar to literary realism in its rejection of Romanticism, but distinct in its embrace of determinism, detachment, scientific objectivism, and social commentary. Literary naturalism emphasizes observation and the scientific method in the fictional portrayal of reality. Naturalism includes detachment, in which the author maintains an impersonal tone and disinterested point of view; determinism, which is defined as the opposite of free will, in which a character's fate has been decided, even predetermined, by impersonal forces of nature beyond human control; and a sense that the universe itself is indifferent to human life. The novel would be an experiment where the author could discover and analyze the forces, or scientific laws, that influenced behavior, and these included emotion, heredity, and environment. The movement largely traces to the theories of French author Émile Zola.
In opera, verismo, from vero, meaning 'true') was a post-Romantic operatic tradition associated with Italian composers such as Pietro Mascagni, Ruggero Leoncavallo, Umberto Giordano, Francesco Cilea and Giacomo Puccini. Verismo as an operatic genre had its origins in an Italian literary movement of the same name. This was in turn related to the international literary movement of naturalism as practised by Émile Zola and others. Like naturalism, the verismo literary movement sought to portray the world with greater realism. In so doing, Italian verismo authors such as Giovanni Verga wrote about subject matter, such as the lives of the poor, that had not generally been seen as a fit subject for literature.
Giovanni Carmelo Verga di Fontanabianca was an Italian realist (verista) writer, best known for his depictions of life in his native Sicily, especially the short story and later play Cavalleria rusticana and the novel I Malavoglia.
Italian literature is written in the Italian language, particularly within Italy. It may also refer to literature written by Italians or in other languages spoken in Italy, often languages that are closely related to modern Italian, including regional varieties and vernacular dialects.
Antonio Luigi Gaudenzio Giuseppe Cremona was an Italian mathematician. His life was devoted to the study of geometry and reforming advanced mathematical teaching in Italy. He worked on algebraic curves and algebraic surfaces, particularly through his paper Introduzione ad una teoria geometrica delle curve piane, and was a founder of the Italian school of algebraic geometry.
Purismo was an Italian cultural movement which began in the 1820s. The group intended to restore and preserve language through the study of medieval authors, and such study extended to the visual arts.
Luigi Capuana was an Italian author and journalist and one of the most important members of the verist movement. He was a contemporary of Giovanni Verga, both having been born in the province of Catania within a year of each other. He was also one of the first Italian authors influenced by the works of Émile Zola, French author and creator of naturalism. Capuana also wrote poetry in Sicilian, of which an example appears below.
Scapigliatura is the name of an artistic movement that developed in Italy after the Risorgimento period (1815–71). The movement included poets, writers, musicians, painters and sculptors. The term Scapigliatura is the Italian equivalent of the French "bohème" (bohemian), and "Scapigliato" literally means "unkempt" or "dishevelled". Most of these authors have never been translated into English, hence in most cases this entry cannot have and has no detailed references to specific sources from English books and publications. However, a list of sources from Italian academic studies of the subject is included, as is a list of the authors' main works in Italian.
Literary realism is a literary genre, part of the broader realism in arts, that attempts to represent subject-matter truthfully, avoiding speculative fiction and supernatural elements. It originated with the realist art movement that began with mid-nineteenth-century French literature (Stendhal) and Russian literature. Literary realism attempts to represent familiar things as they are. Realist authors chose to depict every day and banal activities and experiences.
Eleuterio Pagliano was an Italian painter of the Romantic period as well as an activist and fighter of the Risorgimento.
Federico De Roberto was an Italian writer, who became well known for his historical novel I Viceré (1894), translated as The Viceroys.
Realism in the arts is generally the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding speculative and supernatural elements. The term is often used interchangeably with naturalism, although these terms are not synonymous. Naturalism, as an idea relating to visual representation in Western art, seeks to depict objects with the least possible amount of distortion and is tied to the development of linear perspective and illusionism in Renaissance Europe. Realism, while predicated upon naturalistic representation and a departure from the idealization of earlier academic art, often refers to a specific art historical movement that originated in France in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1848. With artists like Gustave Courbet capitalizing on the mundane, ugly or sordid, realism was motivated by the renewed interest in the common man and the rise of leftist politics. The realist painters rejected Romanticism, which had come to dominate French literature and art, with roots in the late 18th century.
Antonino Gandolfo was an Italian painter.
Lazzaro Pasini (1861–1949) was an Italian painter, mainly of landscapes, but also some genre works.
Antonio Zoppi (1860–1926) was an Italian painter, mostly of genre and costume scenes, as well as landscapes.
Napoleone Verga was an Italian painter, mainly of illuminated manuscripts, but also of paintings.
Luigi or Louis Rubio was an Italian painter, active in both Neoclassicism but later Romantic styles, painting mainly historic-mythologic canvases, as well as some genre subjects, and portraits. His works harked back to the Troubadour style twenty years earlier.
American verismo describes an artistic style of American literature, music, or painting influenced and inspired by artistic ideas that began in 19th-century Italian culture, movements that used motifs from everyday life and working class persons from both urban and rural situations. American composers, writers, painters, and poets have used this genre to create works that contain socio-political as well as purely aesthetic statements.
The Monument to Luigi Capuana is a memorial erected in Piazza Buglio, in the center of the town of Mineo, province of Catania, region of Sicily, Italy. It memorializes the native novelist and dramatist Luigi Capuana, who alongside the Catanese Giovanni Verga, was one of the most prominent writers of the Verismo style in Italy.
Luigi Alberti (1822–1898) was a Florentine journalist, writer, and playwright, mostly known for his works in the genre of comedy.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
