Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

Antonio Mancini
Rome 1852 - 1930
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Portrait of the painter Giovanni Trussardi Volpi
Oil on unlined canvas. Labels of the Lovere and Naples exhibitions on the stretcher.
60 x 100 cm (23 x 39 in.)
Provenance: Private collection, Milan; Private
collection, Naples.
Exhibited: Lovere, Accademia Tadini, Antonio Mancini
(1852-1930), Il collezionismo del suo tempo in Lombardia,
1997; Modena, Palazzo Cremonini, Raccolta di
dipinti e sculture dell’Ottocento e del primo Novecento,
2006; Naples, Galleria Vincent, Novecento, 2010.
Literature: D. Di Giacomo, Antonio Mancini: la luce
e il colore, Pescara 2015, pl.LXIX, p.115.
Although critics have tended to set the painter Antonio
Mancini in the context of Neapolitan Verismo of the
end of the nineteenth century, from the moment of his
debut at the Salon of Paris in 1872, his work actually
belonged to the wider culture of European art.
Mancini’s life was rich in events that have become
almost legendary. He was born in November 1852 to
a lower-class tailor, in the outskirts of Rome, in Via dei
2. Antonio Mancini, The Painter Trussardi Volpi, Marzotto
collection, Valdagno?
Pianellari, and was baptised in St. Augustine’s Church.
At the age of thirteen, being a precocious talent, he
was enrolled by his parents at the Institute of Fine Arts
of Naples, where Domenico Morelli, nicknamed the
despot, and Giuseppe Palizzi, were teachers. The story
goes that Morelli once declared of Antonio, whom he
called Totonno, A stu guaglione io nun aggio cchiù
niente da ’mparà (I have nothing more to teach this
youngster). 1
Here Antonio Mancini associated with Vincenzo
Gemito, who was the same age, and also with
Francesco Paolo Michetti. Mancini’s training indeed
took place in the context of Neapolitan Verism, and
he received considerable praise from painters such as
Giuseppe De Nittis, Michele Cammarano and Mariano
Fortuny, and showed, in the opinion of some critics, a
certain receptiveness, in this early stage, to the delicate
work of Gioacchino Toma; but, early on, there began
to appear in Mancini’s paintings the strongly luminist
and plastic quality that later became the unmistakable,
original mark of his style, and that some critics trace
back to the luminism of the seventeenth century.
During his first period in Naples, from 1864 to 1873,
Mancini produced his first masterpieces: Lo scugnizzo
(Terzo comandamento), 1868, Dopo il duello, 1872, Il
cantore, 1872, La figlia del mugnaio, 1872-73, Bacco,
1874. In the latter picture, the boy’s powerfully lyrical
face emerges from a dark background into the light.
This painting is a strong confirmation of Mancini’s ties
to the Old Masters and to Caravaggio in particular, but
its lyrical luminism is totally modern, without being
naturalistic or literary; it is intimately expressive, and
touched with melancholy and wonder, the typical
moods of adolescence.
The constant themes of Mancini’s poetics already began
to appear during this early period: a precocious feeling
of the emotional upsets of youth, almost a childhood
lost in regret. This appears, for instance, in the superb
portrait of a child in Lo studio, ca.1875. Mancini’s
deep psychological sensitivity to the sitter, which
has, however, led some critics to classify this picture
wrongly as genre painting, lumping it with the many
contemporary pictures of Neapolitan street urchins
and paupers, has never been equalled in European
paintings: not even a Lombard (not Neapolitan) painter
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