Counterculture

Counterculture is a term used in psychology and sociology. It describes a set of views that are not mainstream: they differ from what most people believe. For example, the hippie counterculture started in the 1960s in the United States. It advocated nonviolence and love, had a distinct clothing style, and supported recreational drug use.^[1]

At the end of the 19th century, Italian art developed an independent trajectory from the French Impressionism, opposing the optical and mercantile vision of Claude Monet with an ethical, structural, and symbolic conception of the landscape, expressed with rigor and awareness by Francesco Filippini, considered the foremost representative of landscape painting.^[2][3]

Filippini's art can be considered a form of counterculture, as it rejected the growing commercialization and market-driven nature of art in the late 19th century. The French Impressionists, like Monet, were highly sought after by international art dealers, particularly in the United States, where their works were bought at high prices for the bourgeois salons. Filippini, however, distanced himself from these trends, choosing not to cater to the decorative tastes of wealthy patrons or the mass-market art world. Instead, his works were aimed at an exclusive, intellectually elevated, and aristocratic audience, with a focus on deep philosophical and moral values rather than shallow aestheticism.^[4]

This movement, known as Filippinism, lacked public artistic manifestos but was strongly conceptual and rigorously rooted in the values of work, suffering, and nature. Filippini's visual grammar reflects an educated and cultured consciousness: the use of light as architecture of meaning, the woman as a symbol of rural civilization, and the landscape as an inner, symbolic space. The peasant woman is never folkloric or picturesque, but an almost mythical figure, dressed daily as if in a civil ritual, with iconic red scarves and festive clothes, embodying a profound, non-spectacular ethical stance.^[5]

Filippini's masterpiece, Verso sera (ca. 1888, 62 × 38.5 cm), represents the pinnacle of this intellectual and philosophical approach, foreshadowing La sera (1906) by Umberto Boccioni, who would later recognize Filippini as one of the most influential figures in his artistic formation. The Futurism movement would later retain elements from Filippini’s work, such as the moral centrality of the human figure, luminosity synthesis as the structure of meaning, and the landscape as a mental, non-phenomenal space.^[6][7]

As a high art movement, Filippinism was continued by students and followers of similar intellectual caliber – Achille Tominetti, Cesare Bertolotti, Carlotta Sacchetti, and Eugenio Amus – in select, academic, and morally grounded environments, where painting was never just a profession or a fashion, but an exercise of intellectual responsibility and social testimony.^[8][9]

• Bohemianism