During the 19th century Italian artists responded to movements such as Romanticism and realism, but with some originality. The most original art was produced in the 1850s and 1860s by a called group "Macchiaioli" (patchers). Largely inspired by Corot, they painted pictures which, formed by flat areas (patches) of strong colour, anticipate post-Impressionism. The main artists were Giovanni Fattori (1825–1908), Silvestro Lega (1826–1895), and Telemaco Signorini (1835–1901).

Fattori was born in modest circumstances in Livorno. His early education was rudimentary and his family initially planned for him to study for a qualification in commerce, but his skill in drawing persuaded them to apprentice him in 1845 to a local painter, Giuseppe Baldini. The following year he moved to Firenze where he studied under Giuseppe Bezzuoli.

The group of painters to which Fattori belonged became known as the Macchiaioli. They were forerunners of the Impressionists and, like their French counterparts, were criticized for their paintings' lack of conventional finish. The Macchiaioli did not go as far as the Impressionists did in dissolving form in light, however, and when Fattori visited Paris in 1875 he reacted unenthusiastically to Impressionist works, expressing a preference for the artists of the Barbizon school.

Lega was born in Modigliana to an affluent family. From 1843 to 1847 he attended the Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence, studying drawing under Benedetto Servolini (1805–79) and Tommaso Gazzarini (1790–1853), then studying painting, briefly, under Giuseppe Bezzuoli. During 1847 he attended Luigi Mussini’s school, where the teaching emphasized the 15th-century Florentine principles of drawing and orderly construction. Then and for some years afterwards he continued to attend the Scuola del Nudo of the Accademia.

Silvestro Lega was an Italian realist painter. He was one of the leading artists of the Macchiaioli and was also involved with the Mazzini movement.

As a Garibaldian volunteer, Lega participated in the military campaigns for Italian independence (1848 - 1849) before resuming his training, this time under Antonio Ciseri, completing his first large-scale painting, Doubting Thomas (1850; Modigliana, Osp. Civ.). In 1852 he won the Concorso Trienniale dell’Accademia with David Placating Saul.

The painter Telemaco Signorini was the first to use the "macchia" reference in a positive way, acknowledging a sense of group identity for the Macchiaioli through their technique, which abandoned traditional chiaroscuro to juxtapose color and shadow with color and light in "blotches" that gave a sketchy, overall idea of effects. In any event, the innovations introduced by the Macchiaioli were not strictly technical or of form - they also involved subject matter. These painters wanted to get away from the religious or historical themes propagated by the academy in favour of the beauty of il vero, "the truth/life", or perhaps we should even introduce "the real" as in verismo or verism. It involved a whole range of new subject matter exalting real life, domestic scenes, familiar settings and everyday life, the local countryside, rural and urban scenes, the war.

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