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There were tensions between aesthetic concerns and content. The painters' dedication to their subject was bound up in their engagement with pictorial issues. In these carefully constructed compositions, painstakingly rendered with a profusion of tiny dots or dashes, fields shimmer, light is radiant, and clothes are a vibrant array of colors. The harmony these paintings achieve often conveys a meditative stillness and a serenity that is at odds with the farmers' or shepherds' exhausting labor. Although the artists were sympathetic to the peasants' plight, suffering, and exploitation, they also were preoccupied with formals matters. The contrast between the visual beauty of these paintings and the hardships being depicted elicited criticism from opposing camps. Angelo Morbelli's For Eighty Cents! (1895), showing bent-over mondine (the women who weeded the rice fields in notoriously awful conditions) in his native region of Piedmont, was alternately criticized for privileging aesthetics over commentary and documentation or for choosing to make a politicized statement and depicting "ugly" subject matter instead of painting appropriately appealing scenes. What these bilateral attacks demonstrated was that Morbelli, like many of his contemporaries, did not favor subject matter over painterly issues or vice versa. Instead, he married the two in an image that could alternately conjure sensorial pleasure and speak to social dilemmas. |
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