Italy didn't have a major hand in developing many new styles after the baroque, though 19th-century works by Italy's master neoclassical sculptor Canova are scattered around Tuscany and Umbria, and Tuscany had one great neoclassical sculptor, Giovanni Duprè, born in Siena in 1817. The late 19th century also saw many of the faceless churches clad with fanciful "neo-Gothic" facades designed in admiring imitation of the time period in which the buildings were originally raised, but the prevailing tastes also led the romantic refurbishers to set most of these with glittering Venetian mosaics.
Tuscany had a brief moment in a very localized limelight again from the 1860s to around 1900 when the Macchiaioli, a group of artists in Florence and Livorno, junked the old styles and concentrated on exploring the structure of light and color in painting, concerned with the effect of the individual macchie, or marks of paint on the canvas. In effect, it was kind of a Tuscan Impressionism.
In the 20th century, little has stood out in the fine arts of Italy. Some individual Tuscan talents are Livorno's Modigliani, who garnered fame in France for his innovative oblong portraits; the futurist Gino Severini from Cortona; and Marino Marini, a Pistoian crafter of stylized bronze horses. In architecture, Tuscany had the privilege of hosting the only major new movement in Italy, its own variant on Art Deco (Art Nouveau in France) called the Liberty Style.
As the focus of Western painting and sculpture migrated to countries like France and the United States in the 20th century, Italy turned its artistic energies mainly to the cinema, fashion (Armani, Gucci, Versace, Pucci, and the like) -- an industry in which Florence shines -- and the manufacture of sleek, fun, and often mind-bogglingly useful industrial design objects like Alessi teakettles, Pavoni coffee machines, Olivetti typewriters, and Ferraris.
The Modren Conundrum -- Although some towns (such as San Gimignano, Spoleto, and Pistoia) actively encourage the development of contemporary art, most Tuscan and Umbrian cities are firmly fixed in, and fixated on, their greatest era. Choosing which artistic epoch to preserve is a tough judgment call to make in a country so steeped in multiple layers of artistic and cultural history, and it's an issue constantly debated across Italy.
Each city chooses differently, motivated by economic tourist pressures, local academic preferences, and deeply instilled senses of pride about certain periods. Florence, for one, is firmly entrenched in the Renaissance and refuses to look forward or backward. Florentines could care less about the Roman ruins lying under their streets, and over the past century have in many churches stripped off baroque and later accretions to return buildings to their "pure" Renaissance (or late Gothic, if there's a Giotto involved) state.
And so, Volterra touts the Etruscan urns in its archaeological museum but not the 15th-century frescoes in San Francesco, and Siena shows you its medieval streets and Gothic palaces but never calls much attention to the baroque church facades. Heaven forbid the much-maligned baroque ever becomes fashionable again or our descendants will detest us for clearing away fanciful baroque altars to reveal the medieval bricks beneath as much as we revile the 18th-century gentlemen who calmly whitewashed over Giotto's frescoes in Santa Croce.
