Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

1. Antonio Mancini, The Fruit Seller, Dordrechts Museum.
like Tranquillo Cremona, who, during the same years,
portrayed Milanese upper-middle-class young women,
for instance in the painting In ascolto, of 1874, reached
the level of Mancini, who probably was the greatest
Italian portraitist of the last three decades of the century.
Alongside this psychological penetration, another
strong theme emerges: that of the characterisation of the
indoor scenes by means of the presence of objects that
are not decoration, but convey a symbolic connotation,
in order to achieve the definition of the sitter. Consider,
for instance, the stock character’s costume placed
on the table, and the bottles and empty cups on the
floor, in Lo scugnizzo (Terzo comandamento); the
blood-stained white coat in Dopo il duello; and the
seemingly jumbled-up objects in La figlia del mugnaio
and Lo scolaro povero, of 1875. Mancini detaches
this procedure from Verism, entrusting to objects an
important character-building function that will be
constantly present in his paintings, including the one
we are presenting here, with the bust of a boy, the
book the sitter holds, and the sculptures visible in the
background.
Mancini, by then, was already a modern painter,
bursting out of the nineteenth century and advancing
into the twentieth. After nine years in Naples, in 1873
he travelled to Paris for the first time. There he was
engaged by Goupil & Compagnie, who assigned him a
monthly stipend while giving him freedom in the choice
of subjects, this granted him a living while the gallery
was able to promote his fame on an international level.
Only a year before, in 1874, the first official exhibition
of the Impressionists had been held in the photographer
Nadar’s studio; others followed in the Durand-Ruel
Gallery, in 1876 and 1877. So Mancini had come
to Paris in a very eventful period for painting; but he
already had his own, completely independent style,
and was not influenced by the impact of these novelties.
In Paris, however, he began to show the first symptoms of
a nervous depression that later, in some periods, made
it difficult for him to work. He returned to Naples in
the grip of nervous fits in which persecution mania and
delusion appeared. In 1881 he was sent to the Mental
Hospital of the city, from which he was discharged in
February 1882, after being declared recovered. During
that period he made some portraits of doctors and a
great number of self-portraits.
In the same year he moved to Rome, where he was
backed financially by Marquis Giorgio Capranica Del
Grillo, who also partly acted as his art dealer.
In a diary from that period, Mancini reported that seeing
paintings by Velásquez, Innocent X in the Galleria Doria
and the Self-portrait in the Galleria Capitolina, had a
deep influence on him 2 .
In 1885 he met Hendrik Willelm Mesdag, a Dutch
banker, painter of seascapes and patron, who began
to purchase his paintings, having Mancini send them
directly to The Hague, a situation which continued until
after 1900. Mesdag presented three works of Mancini’s,
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