Recently we saw a photo album of Van Gogh paintings rendered in “tilt-shift“, a camera technique that applies selective focus and that has recently been used a lot to make city scenes look like miniatures. Van Gogh looks very pretty rendered in this technique and we wanted to do one too. Here in Tuscany we have a home-grown artistic movement that lends itself rather well, too: The Macchiaioli was a group of painters active in Florence and Tuscany from 1840-70. A truly local movement, they precede the Impressionists and developed a lot of similar values related to capturing light through blotches of paint. The main artists of this movement are: Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, Telemaco Signorini, Adriano Cecioni, Odoardo Borrani, Giovanni Boldini, Giuseppe Abbati and Raffaello Sernesi. For the first time since the Renaissance, these Italian painters abandoned chiaroscuro and traditional perspective techniques.
So if we add a little perspective to the Macchiaioli? 
Giovanni Fattori, The Italian Camp at the Battle of Magenta, 1859
Silvestro Lega, Il Pergolato, 1866 (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milano)
Giovanno Fattori (Livorno 1825 – Firenze 1908, La diligenza a Sesto , circa 1872 – 1873 (Riccardo Molo collection, source)
Giovanni Fattori In vedetta (also known as Il muro bianco), 1872, Private collection
If you love these paintings, you should know that the exhibit Macchiaioli in Montepulciano has been extended through March 31 2011 so you’re still in time to go see some of these beauties in person.
interesting comment, H! But… it’s not Tuscan so you won’t see it here
Very interesting!! I'd like to see tilt-shift applied to some of Fausto Zonaro's paintings of Orientalist themes, particularly some of the Ottoman Imperial works.
[...] “Cavalleria Rusticana’s” composer. Giovanni Fattori was maybe the most famous among the Macchiaioli, while Amedeo Modigliani is popular for for his portraits of (naked) long [...]