he Macchiaioli (pronounced "mah-key-ay-OH-li") was a relatively small but fascinating school born during the 1840s, probably as a direct consequence of the Risorgimento, a movement whose dream was to unite the Italian peninsula under one government. These Italian artists were descendants of early Renaissance painters.

The group consisted of revolutionary Tuscan painters active in the second half of the nineteenth century who, breaking with the antiquated conventions taught by the Italian academies of art, painted outdoors in order to capture natural light, shade, and color. These idealistic young men, dissatisfied with the art of the academies, shared a wish to reinvigorate Italian art by emulating the bold tonal structure they admired in such old masters as Rembrandt Van Rijn, Caravaggio and Tintoretto. They also found inspiration in the paintings of their French contemporaries of the Realistic Barbizon school.

The Macchiaioli were forerunners of the Impressionists who, pursued similar aims in France. Like Russia's Decembrists, they were definitely a product of their time.

The Macchiaioli developed their own technique of capturing the moment, by means of bold strokes and "pools" of color obeying the artist's emotional reactions to the scene, rather than his intellectual awareness of it. This technique had always been used by painters, but historically it was employed for the first draft, as an alternative to the sketch.

Because the term for these areas of color was macchia (meaning "stain" or "spot"), the Tuscan artistic revolutionaries soon came to be known as Macchiaioli. Members of the establishment quipped that the word could also mean "renegade" or "outlaw," because of the phrase "darsi alla macchia", which means "to hide out in the bush" (which of course is exactly what the Macchiaioli had chosen to do).

For most of their lives, the Macchiaioli were misunderstood, criticized and ridiculed. Many of them died penniless. They were soon overshadowed by the Impressionists, who came along 20-30 years later.

It wasn't until the first half of the this century that critics began to look at their work with understanding and praise.