Diego Martelli

Diego Martelli (October 29, 1839 – November 20, 1896) was an Italian art critic who was one of the first supporters of Impressionism in Italy.

During his third trip to the French capital in 1870 he attended lectures on organic chemistry by Michel Eugène Chevreul, whose color theories were of great interest to Martelli.

[2] In the mid-1870s, letters he received from his friend Federico Zandomeneghi, who had relocated to Paris in 1874, stimulated Martelli's curiosity about the Impressionists.

[5][7] The articles he wrote for various Italian journals during his stay reveal his developing interest in the formal and optical qualities of Impressionism, which supplanted his earlier enthusiasm for art that emphasized rural values and social concerns as exemplified by Millet.

In a lecture he delivered in Venice in 1895, he praised the Neo-Impressionists, who "on the basis of the theories of light and color combinations, scientifically explained by the chemist Chevreul, ... carry out experiments that today are ridiculed but that will probably be the triumphs of tomorrow.