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who characterized the artistic community of Bellosguardo as „Europeans of the future“
(Europäer von Übermorgen). The dissertation reconstructs the social and intellectual
interaction of the artistic circle by focusing primarily on the English and German artists
– Stanhope, Evelyn De Morgan, Stillman, Hildebrand, Marées, and Böcklin.
The engagement of Italian artists with their own medieval and early Renaissance past
was also an important force in the creative life of Bellosguardo. Italy had only recently
been unified and the active interpretation of its artistic heritage played an important role
in the formation of its new national identity. Early Italian art was seen as offering
something especially vital to the present. Painters such as Giovanni Costa and Giuseppe
Catani Chiti, who were associated with English artists at Bellosguardo, saw in fifteenthcentury
Florentine painting the basis of a true Italian art, purged of institutionalized and
formulaic realism, on the one hand, and the foreign influence of Impressionism on the
other. Since accounts of this period have tended to represent the Italians as passive
observers rather than active participants in the work being done around them, their
contribution is important to emphasize.
Reasons for the neglect of the Bellosguardo circle are not far to seek. The study of
nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century modernism has been dominated by
assumptions which tend to foreground French art and especially the radically new formal
language that culminated in abstraction. These assumptions have been questioned in
recent years, by British scholars working on British art, who have pointed out that
French developments should not be regarded as normative: they have made the case
that movements such as Pre-Raphaelitism and the Gothic Revival are symptomatic of
modernism even though they are radically backward-looking. Useful as it has been,
this scholarship is limited by its tendency to reinforce a nationalistic orientation and to
encourage a similar treatment of other national traditions. Such an approach overlooks
the vitality and importance of internationalism as a motivating force and a pervasive
factor in the development of modern art. A study of the English and German artists
of Bellosguardo and of the way in which they respond and contribute to the
development of an international modernism in Florence, can thus contribute to our
understanding of modernism as a whole.
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Forschungen des wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses