Florence, autumn 1859. Closed in his studio, Livorno's Giovanni Fattori (1825-1908) was reluctantly painting a large canvas of a historic subject, "Clarice Strozzi Orders Ippolito and Alessandro de' Medici to Leave Florence", when he was interrupted by the visit of Roman painter Nino Costa. As Fattori himself would have recalled in his memoirs, "Costa came in, examined my 'macchia' attempts done in the country (the sketches Fattori had done the previous summer, some of which recorded the presence in Tuscany of the troops of Gerolamo Bonaparte - Ed.), and with a certain cynicism looked over my Medicean painting and said in Romanesque dialect, 'Ti imbrojano. Tu hai un paro de cojoni così e non lo sai.' (They're deceiving you. You've got real balls and you don't even know it.) Those words bothered me a lot and I kept thinking about them." He thought about them so much that after Costa's visit, Fattori decided to definitively abandon the large melodramatic compositions, dear to the historic Romanticism, and embark on a new route, that of an integral naturalism; he would apply, even in his official and most ambitious paintings, the principle of live transcription of reality. This visit would be give rise to "The Italian Field After the Battle of Magenta" and "The Cavalry Charge at Montebello", both dated 1862, fundamental works of Fattori's production in that they boast a dual primacy: in subject matter, since they were the first paintings done by the Livornese artist on the Risorgimento epic and therefore on contemporary history, and in style, because for the first time, even in these official paintings - and not just in the studies - the boldness of the "macchia" painting filtered through. These two works - alongside 300 more, including paintings, drawings and engravings, in addition to a conspicuous number of photographs, letters, sketchbooks, and other memorabilia, like the press of his first etchings and his etching needles, his paint box, and the medal showcase holding the awards he received - are now on display in the monumental retrospective show set up at Villa Mimbelli in Livorno, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Fattori's death, which took place on 30 August 1908. Apart from the opening anecdote, it should be said that Fattori's turn toward realism and "macchia" painting had matured already in the early 1850s, during the evenings spent at the Caffè Michelangelo in Florence - enlivened by the sometimes heated discussions on art and politics with Signorini, Cabianca, Borrani, Sernesi, and Banti - and in the moments of rural solitude spent in the Tuscan Maremma region, in an intimate conversation with a harsh nature, the rough background of a marginalized humanity. For Fattori and the young Tuscan painters, "macchia" painting was a technical revolution motivated by deep ideals. It was a visual revolution that also expressed an ethical view of the world. They wanted to change the way of seeing and painting reality in order to turn society and the world over. Those dense, quick, impulsive brushstrokes that laid spots and patches of color on the canvas and defined landscapes and figures through distinct cuts of light and shadow were the means for capturing the image of reality in all its "immediate evidence". Those patches of light - born from the realism of the Barbizon school, from Corot and Courbet, and nourished by the libertarian and equalitarian ideals of the Italian Risorgimento - were both a rebellion against the academic dogmas and an assertion of the moral dignity of every man. Of this new sensitivity, which preceded the avant-garde movements in its crediting of form with the quality of cognition of reality, and opened the 20th century in its describing of everyday situations, Giovanni Fattori was the most uncompromising of the artists, orienting his production toward a sober and anti-rhetorical verism and remaining faithful to it until his death. The Livorno show covers Fattori's entire creative arc, from his huge battle canvases, the patrols and look-outs, the camps, and the scenes of French and Austrian soldiers of Risorgimento inspiration, to the glimpse of Livornese landscapes reproduced on the famous wood panels of his maturity, up to the middle-class portraits and magnificent images of Tuscan cowboys ("butteri") and oxen set in a remote and bucolic Maremma. The exhibition space is divided into twenty sections, eighteen of which in the elegant "Granaries" of Villa Mimbelli and two, those with the large Risorgimento epic paintings - such as the very famous "Cavalry Charge at Montebello", "Storming of the Madonna della Scoperta" - and the "butteri" studies - like "Maremman Herds" and "Cowboys of the Maremma Driving the Herds " - in the rooms of the Villa, the seat of the Civic Museum named after Fattori. The exhibition also covers the graphic arts - drawings and etchings - which constitute a portion of Fattori's art which is crucial and, in the opinion of many, the best portion. From the life drawing that brought him to approach realism, to copper and zinc plate etchings, to which he devoted himself in the 1870s, the graphic arts were a constant in his activity, considered an area for experimentation where he could continually reinvent his studies. Faithful to his favorite themes - Livornese landscapes, beaches, and boats, cowboys, and oxen - but breaking, in his nervous and impatient marks, with all the stylistic conventions of the type, Fattori's graphic works opened routes which would be taken by others only in the 20th century.