Jacques Louis David (also Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres) We could start our search through the roots of contemporary art, choosing other artists as examples, but Jacques Louis David (1748–1825) was one of the most important painters to understand the Pasage from an old age of concepts through other new areas.

David was a majestic example of mastery: perfect bodies, great use of colors, and compelling atmospheres where you can find pathos, elegy, and the big influence of Ancient Classicism mixed with some tastes of Renaissance. In fact, "neoclassicism” means the most important creative direction for artists in Europe between the XVIII and XIX centuries. The lesson of “neoclassicism” was the recovery of the “classic art” of the ancient Greek and Roman cultures. The restoration of antique canons of architecture, fashion, and aesthetics (never ignored since the Renaissance!) as rules for a desired perfection. Following the scripts of archeologists like Johann J. Winckelmann, who described the Classical World as the peak of civilization in front of a contemporary decline. This was the last look at the past. After the French Revolution, the end of the XVIII century was the real start of the Industrial and Social Revolution, where—for the first time ever—western civilization began to look forward.

Antonio Canova: everything already said about David could be applied to the art of Antonio Canova (1757-1822), who was a great sculptor having the same mastery of some ancient Greek artists. During his rich and satisfying career, Canova was compared to "Fidia," the most famous sculptor of ancient Greece. If the paintings of David gave us the smell of an ancient world, the sculptures of Canova gave us the shape of that world. Those marble jewels are communicating all the canons and the rules followed by many generations of artists as guides to a magnificent expression of mastery.

“The Cenotaph of Princess Marie Christine of Absburg” and the “Por- trait of Paolina Borghese” are the manifest of that theory, the recovery of a lost ideal of beauty and perfection.

The rise of a new eye: realism and impressionism

Éduard Manet: the French Éduard Manet (1832-1883) was the most important artist who started a new language of painting. He is described as the precursor of the new school of realism of the XIX century. Manet pain-ted the “real life,” leaving behind himself everything related to the academic canons. Since his first works were done in the master’s studio, Manet revealed himself hostile to the official “mainstream” dictated by the artistic panorama. He refused to follow a “dead form of paintings created over dead subjects." In a word, fighting all those canons described in the previous chapter who were dictating the rules in the big part of European Fine Arts Academies.

Vincent Van Gogh: it’s a matter of history that many things were written about Van Gogh (1853-1890), a painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential artists in history. In a decade, he created over 2000 works, including around 860 oil paintings, most of which date from the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and self-portraits and are characterized by bold colors and dramatic, impulsive, and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. In fact, he was a precursor of what became expressionism in the following XX century. Not commercially successful, he struggled with severe depression and poverty, eventually leading to his suicide at age thirty-seven.

Paul Gauguin: Henri Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) was a French Post-Impresionist artist. Unappreciated until after his death, Gauguin is now recognized for his experimental use of color and style as an alternative to Impressionism. Toward the end of his life, he spent ten years in French Polynesia. The paintings from this time depict people or landscapes from that region. He strongly influenced the French avant-garde and many modern artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, and he is well known for his relationship with Vincent and Theo van Gogh. Gauguin’s art became popular after his death. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, and writer. He was also an influential proponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as high expressions of creative fine art.

The Italian scene: the “Macchiaioli movement, Realism, Divisionism, Symbolism

Giovanni Fattori (1825–1908) is considered one of the most sensitive exponents of the “Macchiaioli” (which means “Stain Painters”) movement. Showing himself intolerant of academic painting and its favorite historical-celebratory themes, he adopted the conception of the stains as components of color grades, a new pictorial and expressive technique linked with naturalistic poetics. This practice had its presuppositions in the dynamics of visual perception: focalizing the lights, justified by the fact that the human eye is struck only by colors, which with their abrupt interruptions describe the contours of objects. For this reason, Fattori’s design grid did not include the use of contour lines. Dealing with the more earthly and the daily aspects of reality, the artist approached these themes with different moods, sometimes presenting a great and innocent literary involvement and other times making polemical, ironic, or descriptive images.

Gaetano Previati (1852 - 1920) was an Italian painter who, after a youthful experience in the Milanese "Scapigliatura," was above all re-presentative of the current of Italian "Divisionism," the artistic brilliance of the "Scapigliatura." He participates in the first Triennale di Brera in 1891, presenting the work “Maternità (Motherhood), in which he makes explicit his adhesion to divisionism, where he will also be a theorist, making symbolist themes.

Giovanni Segantini (1858–1899) was an Italian painter, one of the greatest exponents of “divisionism" (pointillism). With his symbo-list production, Segantini preferred to go around the female figure, and in particular the subject with much in common with motherhood themes. These subjects are recurrent within all of Segantini’s poetics, both in the symbolist paintings and in the naturalist paintings as well. The border line between the two genres is subtle, and a good example is one of his last works, “Triptych of Nature," where the apparently naturalistic subjects rise to metaphors of life, death, and nature.

Giuseppe Pellizza (1868–1907) was an Italian painter who started his career as a divisionist, then became an exponent of social themes, author of the famous big work “The Fourth State," which became, in spite of himself, a symbol of the world of subordinate workers, socialists, and strikers who started since the nineteenth century onwards the socialist industrial revolution.

Against the renewal: mythologic symbolism, pre-Raphaelites (pre-Raphaelite brotherhood)

Max Klinger (1857–1920) was a German artist who produced significant work in painting, sculpture, prints, and graphics, as well as writing a script where he manifested his ideas on art and the role of graphic arts and printmaking in relation to painting. Associated with symbolism, the Vienna Secession, and Jugendstil (Youth Style), the German manifestation of Art Nouveau. He is best known today for his many prints, particularly the “Centaures” and a collection entitled “Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove." Remarkable his monumental installation as tribute to Beethoven at the Vienna Secession in 1902.

Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) was a German-Swiss symbolist painter. Influenced by Romanticism, Böcklin’s symbolist use of imagery derived from mythology and legend often overlapped with the aesthetic of the Pre-Raphaelites. Many of his paintings are imaginative interpretations of the classical world, or portraits of mythological subjects surrounded by classical architecture, often allegorically. Another characteristic of his art is the exploration of death myths in the context of a strange, fantasy world.

Böcklin is best known for his five versions (painted 1880 to 1886) of the “Island of the Dead," which partly evoke the English Cemetery in Florence, which was close to his studio and where his younger daughter Maria has been buried.

James Ensor: James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor (1860–1949), was a Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for most of his life. He was associated with the artistic group Les XX. While Ensor’s early works, such as “Russian Music” (1881) and “The Drunkards” (1883), depict realistic scenes in a somber style, his palette subsequently brightened, and he favored increasingly bizarre subject matter. Such paintings as “The Scandalized Masks” (1883) and “Skeletons Fighting over a Hanged Man” (1891) feature figures in grotesque masks inspired by the ones sold in his mother’s gift shop for Ostend’s annual Carnival. Subjects such as carnivals, masks, puppetry, skeletons, and fantastic allegories are dominant in Ensor’s mature work.

Ensor dressed skeletons up in his studio and arranged them in colorful, enigmatic tableaux on the canvas, and used masks as a theatrical aspect in his still lifes. Attracted by masks’ plastic forms, bright colors, and potential for psychological impact, he created a format in which he could paint with complete freedom. Ensor interpreted religious themes as a personal disgust for the inhumanity of the world. In 1888 alone, he produced forty-five etchings as well as his most ambitious painting, the immense “Christ’s Entry Into Brussels” in 1889. Considered “a forerunner of twentieth-century expressionism." Nearly lost amid the teeming throng is Christ on his donkey; although Ensor was an atheist, he identified with Christ as a victim of mockery.

Odilon Redon (Bertrand Redon, 1840–1916) was a French symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and pastelist. Early in his career, both before and after fighting in the Franco-Prussian War, he worked almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography, works referred to as noirs. During the 1890s, he began working in pastels and oils, which quickly became his favorite medium, abandoning his previous style of noirs completely after 1900. He also developed a keen interest in Hindu and Buddhist religion and culture, which increasingly showed in his work. His work is considered a precursor to both Dadaism and Surrealism.

Gustave Moreau (1826–1898) was a French artist and an important figure in the Symbolist movement. Jean Cassou called him “the Symbolist painter par excellence.” He was an influential forerunner of symbolism in the visual arts in the 1860s, and at the height of the symbolist movement in the 1890s, he was among the most significant painters. He was a prolific artist who produced over 15,000 paintings, watercolors, and drawings. Moreau painted allegories and traditional biblical and mythological subjects favored by the fine art academies. His art (and symbolism in general) fell from favor and received little attention in the early 20th century, but, beginning in the 1960s and 70s, he has come to be considered among the most paramount of symbolist painters.

Umberto Bottazzi (1865–1922) was an Italian painter, illustrator, ceramist, engraver, and decorator. In a word: a total artist. For a short time he attended the “School of Nude” in Rome, but he was basically self-taught. He made his debut in 1900, with some drawings presented at the Roman exhibition of the Society of Amateurs and Art Lovers.

Cesare Saccaggi (1868–1934) was an Italian painter exponent of the “school of Tortona” component of the generation of painters from Tortona who lived and worked at the end of the XIX century, contemporary of Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, Angelo Barabino, and Gigi Cuniolo. He was a brilliant pupil of Giacomo Grosso, Andrea Gastaldi, and Pier Celestino Gilardi. After completing his studies at the Albertina Academy in 1890, he spent a period of improvement in Rome, where he came into contact with D’Annunzio’s environment of “Byzantine Rome” with the painting of the Preraphaelites. During the last decade of the XIX century, his eclectic production covered a range from representations of classical and oriental scenes to costumes related to the classic era, from the Middle Ages until the eighteenth century, and others inspired by the realism of melodramatic acts.

John Everett Millis: Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet (1829–1896) was an English painter and illustrator who was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was a child prodigy who, aged eleven, became the youngest student to enter the Royal Academy Schools. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at his family home in London, at 83 Gower Street (now number 7). Millais became the most famous exponent of the style, his painting “Christ in the House of His Parents” (1849–50) generating considerable controversy, and he produced a picture that could serve as the embodiment of the historical and naturalist focus of the group, "Ophelia.”

Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (1828–1882) was an English poet, illustrator, painter, translator, and member of the Rossetti family. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Rossetti was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. His work also influenced the European symbolists and was a major precursor of the aesthetic movement.