The splendor of nineteenth-century French painting is so much a part of that epoch that it is almost easy to overlook the fact that painting was going on elsewhere during that time. This is, of course, an exaggeration. Even the most dilatory student of art history can name a few nineteenth-century painters of distinction working outside of France: Constable and Turner in England, for instance, or maybe Homer in the United States. Yet there can be no denying the pre-eminence of French painting in that century, as well as at the beginning of our own. The extraordinary confluence of talent and genius that was Impressionism alone is all but inconceivable to us today, inured, as we are, to a culture predicated on the gratifications of irony and spectacle.

Catalogue essayists, by their very nature, are cheerleaders of a sort.

So who can blame Roberto Tassi, essayist of the catalogue accompanying the exhibition “Masterpieces of Nineteenth-Century Italian Painting from the Gaetano Marzotto Collection,” for writing with an art-historical chip on his shoulder?¹ Catalogue essayists, by their very nature, are cheerleaders of a sort and Tassi is one who knows what he’s up against. He is, after all, arguing the merits of a group of unrenowned artists—unrenowned outside of Italy, anyway—who call into question, albeit gingerly, the School of Paris while begrudgingly acknowledging its accomplishments. The organizers of the Marzotto Collection know what they’re up against too. The introductory wall label states that one is “hard pressed