From Italian term 'verismo', meaning realism in its sense of gritty subject matter
Meredith Frampton
Portrait of a Young Woman
(1935)
Tate
Was originally applied around 1900 to the violent melodramatic operas of Puccini and Mascagni. In painting it has also has come to mean realism in its modern sense of representing objects with a high degree of truth to appearances.
In its specific sense realism refers to a mid nineteenth century artistic movement characterised by subjects painted from everyday life in a naturalistic manner; however the term is also generally used to describe artworks painted in a realistic almost photographic way
The term modern realism is applied to painting or sculpture created since the development of abstraction in modern art but which continues to represent things in a realistic manner
Naturalism was a broad movement in the nineteenth century which represented things closer to the way we see them
‘A call reached me from somewhere across the fields (a call that disappeared almost imperceptibly, like a shooting star, so that in the end it seemed to have arisen from deep within my own breast)…’ Pier Paolo Pasolini
