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Concept
Liberty style
Summary
Liberty style (stile Liberty ˈstiːle ˈliːberti) was the Italian variant of Art Nouveau, which flourished between about 1890 and 1914. It was also sometimes known as stile floreale ("floral style"), arte nuova ("new art"), or stile moderno ("modern style"). It took its name from Arthur Lasenby Liberty and the store he founded in 1874 in London, Liberty Department Store, which specialized in importing ornaments, textiles and art objects from Japan and the Far East. Major Italian designers using the style included Ernesto Basile, Ettore De Maria Bergler, Vittorio Ducrot, Carlo Bugatti, Raimondo D'Aronco, Eugenio Quarti, and Galileo Chini.
Liberty style was especially popular in large cities outside of Rome (the capital) which were eager to establish a distinct cultural identity, particularly Milan, Palermo and Turin, the city where the first major exposition of the style in Italy was held in 1902. This marked a major event and featured works of both Italian designers and other Art Nouveau designers from around Europe.
Liberty style, like other versions of Art Nouveau, had the ambition of turning ordinary objects, such as chairs and windows, into works of art. Unlike the French and Belgian Art Nouveau, based primarily on nature, Liberty style was more strongly influenced by the Baroque style, with very lavish ornament and color, both on the interior and exterior. The Italian poet and critic Gabriele d'Annunzio wrote in 1889, as the style was just beginning, "the genial sensual debauche of the Baroque sensibility is one of the determining variants of the Italian Art Nouveau."
Liberty style is considered to be a western offshoot of the 19th-century British Arts and Craft movement, which was a response against the mechanization and dehumanizing of the artistic process.
The first examples of the liberty style in Italy are found in Palermo, in particular Villa Favaloro, and in the large building of Teatro Massimo and in its square with kiosks in this style dating back to the end of the nineteenth century.
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