In 1903, several years before his decisive involvement with Marinetti and Futurism, Umberto Boccioni made a painting called Roman Landscape that shows a cow grazing in a dense field of grass and wildflowers. The field is a storm of sparky greens, mustards, reds, yellows. The conventional solidities and illusionist depth of realist painting are transfigured into the sheared all-over textures of Monet and Pissarro. It’s the kind of Impressionist scene that Clement Greenberg described as “decentralized, with a surface knit together of a multiplicity of identical and similar elements.” But the cow, high in the right corner, is affixed to that wiry, moiling surface like boilerplate, alien to the presentation of the scene. It’s as if Boccioni were pressing an Italian emblem onto French technique, to nationalize it perhaps, but also to rehearse what had been a crucial moment in Italian art.

That cow, with its even textures and inflections of light, is a Macchiaioli cow. For decades, oxen and cows had been a salient motif for a group of painters in Tuscany called the Macchiaioli, and no Italian painter at the turn of the century could pretend to ignore their existence, though in the making of modernist art their influence would be not nearly so decisive as that of the Impressionists. By the end of the century, the technique called la macchia, first developed in the late 1850s, had long been the most familiar manner in Italian realist painting, though by 1900 most painters were forsaking