Verismo - Painting and Literature

Painting and Literature

"Verismo" also refers to a 19th century Italian painting style. This style was practised most characteristically by the "I Macchiaioli" group of painters, who were forerunners of the French Impressionists.

In literature, Giovanni Verga mirrored the style of the Verismo painters. This famous, Sicilian-born writer of realist fiction lived in Florence during the same period as them—1865–1867—and his best known book, 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 camp of verismo (verism), 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.