Horses, fields, and peasant women, together with soldiers and the Italy of the Risorgimento, and also tamarisks, sheaves, men, women, clouds, and powerful oxen, flooded by the sun and wrapped in skies full of light.

The city of Livorno, on the artist's birthday (September 6), kicks off the celebrations dedicated to Giovanni Fattori and his bicentenary with a major exhibition at Villa Mimbelli, home to the civic museum dedicated to the painter.

200 years and over 200 works, including paintings, drawings, and etchings, many of which are rarely seen, invite you to discover the pictorial revolution of Giovanni Fattori, the artist of nature, the brushstroke, social life, and military life captured in its most human aspects.

An exhibition divided into sections that demonstrates the free vision of an artist who was able to gather the teachings of Italian painting and the foundations of drawing without ever imitating any style, always seeking a personal and authentic path, far from clamor and rhetoric because "free art satisfies and consoles and distracts."

Throughout a long life, Fattori maintained a firm awareness and pride in having the "always defiant Livornese blood" in his veins and feeling so emancipated for this reason, both in the great works, witnesses of the uprisings and the spirit of the Risorgimento and belonging to the new and powerful language of the Macchiaioli, and in his last intense trials.

Giovanni Fattori. A revolution in painting tells of the land and the sea, portrayed in their dazzling beauty, and the ferment of a historical period through the humanity of its protagonists. Thanks to colors and brushstrokes, the works convey the sense of summer warmth, its scents, the dilation of time, the essence of life, of an existence often harsh and steeped in effort that marks the faces to which Fattori's painting never loses dignity.