FRANCESCO GIOLI

Private Collection, a member of the Egyptian Royal Family, Alexandria, Egypt
Acquired by the present owner's family from the above, 1923
(thence by descent)

Venice and Perugia, 1887
Venice, Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte della Città de Venezia, 1914, no. 24 (illustrated in the exhibition catalogue)

Antonio Fradeletto, Francesco Gioli E La Sua Opera, Florence, 1923, p. 22
Albert Boime, The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento, Representing Culture and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century Italy, Chicago, 1993, pp 108 - 112, fig. 3.18, illustrated p. 109

Painted in 1887.

Francesco Gioli was a second generation Macchiaioli artist, who with La Boscaiuole di San Rossore, captured the democratic and painterly ideals of this influential group of artists. Founded in response to the Risorgimento, which unified Italy in democracy in the 19th century, the Macchiaioli decided to make paintings that celebrated the Italian way of life. These pictures often show simple people of the countryside, free from Austro-Hungarian rule, and that of other former conquering powers that kept Italy separated into staunchly divided regions for generations. La Boscaiuole, which means "The Women Wood Gatherers", is surely Gioli's masterpiece. The work was painted in 1887, after the Macchaiaoli had become a famous and respected group in Florence’s artistic milieu.

The work is set in San Rossore, a wooded area just outside of Castiglioncello, where Diego Martelli, the art critic, had a summer home. Gioli went there throughout the 1870s and 1880s with other artists such as Cristiano Banti and Giovanni Fattori, and from them he gained insight into the Macchiaioli’s methods and principles. Banti and Fattori each painted women wood gatherers, and Fattori’s version created a scandal when it won an exhibition prize, due to its lowly subject brought to life on an impressive scale. Each also painted a portrait of their young friend, Gioli, who went by the nickname "Cecco" among his fellow artists.

The women in the picture carry enormous loads of wood on their heads, trudging along in a rhythmic line. The bundles are full of eye-catching detail: a red ribbon is wound around the wood at far left, and a boot hangs incongruously from the largest central stack. These intricate additions emphasize the wood piles’ enormity and the back-breaking weight they represent to their humble, yet noble transporters. The women, marching towards the viewer, cut off the majority of the landscape and force the viewer to confront their heroic power. As Albert Boime discusses in The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento, “Here there are no idling shepherds or pastoral accessories to encourage the contemplative stance; on the contrary, the work-laden women overpower the landscape field and seize the beholder’s attention, the sweep of the stark, barren environment heightens the effect of fatigue: the women appear to recede and advance in perspective across a wide expense of terrain, suggesting the long distance they have had to traverse and the distance they have yet to cover….the vertical line of the bodies…establish silhouettes of a tree-like form.” (Boime, p. 110)

The name Macchiaioli is a play on the word “Macchia”, which in Italian means “spot” or “underbrush”. For these artists, the word came to denote a direct translation of a subject from nature to the canvas, without preparatory drawings or the traditional approach of recreating views in the artist’s studio from memory. In the context of the Macchiaioli’s aims, La Boscaiuole di San Rossore is a tribute to the strength of Italian peasant women, while also being a detailed and