Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

La jeune mère, L’enfant de choeur (1872) and Studio
di bambina at the Exposition des XX in Brussels. He
became a steady point of reference for Mancini, and
organised exhibitions of works of his in 1897, 1899 and
1902 3 .
Most of the aristocracy and upper middle class of that
period, the artists Thomas Waldo Story, H.T. Abbot, the
families Pantaleoni, Almagià, Ambron, Bondi, Volterra,
Sonnino, Charles and Mary Hunter, and the American
billionaire Isabella Stewart Gardner, became clients of
Mancini. Mrs Stewart Gardner, who had come to Rome
in 1895 and already owned a work of his, Ciociaretto
portastendardo, asked him to paint her portrait.
In 1901 Claude Pensonby, one of Sargent’s friends,
invited Mancini to London, where he stayed until 1902.
In London Leopold Hirsch asked him to paint a portrait
of his wife Mathilde, who at that time was also being
portrayed by Sargent. The latter painted the Ritratto di
Mancini (1902) now in the Gallery of Modern Art of
Rome. During his stay in London, Mancini also painted
the portraits of Mr and Mrs Hunter and the Ritratto della
signora Wertheimer, wife of the connoisseur and art
dealer Asher Wertheimer.
From 1890 onwards, Mancini’s work went through a
transformation: the pigment of his colours became
increasingly thick, and eventually became a
considerably raised surface. During the same years he
also began – and he was the only artist to do this in
that period – to use a frame with perpendicular threads
forming a grid, called a reticolato, similar to the one
used by the old masters to reproduce a sketch on a larger
scale. Mancini, however, used it for a different purpose:
that of creating an actual screen between himself and
the surface of his painting, so as to be forced to apply
the paint between the squares of the grid, thus obtaining
a thick layer of colour on which the perpendicular lines
left by the threads of the grid are still visible 4 .
This procedure, which was unknown to all the
contemporary painters, anticipated some experiments
of pictorial language synthesis carried out later by
Cubism and abstract painting.
Among the earliest examples of this technique, we
wish to point out portraits by Mancini such as Ciociara
che annusa un fiore, later in the Du Chène de Vère
collection in Milan; Ritratto di Aurelia Ciommi, 1897,
Rijksmuseum Van Bilderbeek-Lamaison, Dordrecht;
and the portrait of a young woman, ca. 1898, in the
Gerrit Van Houten collection in Groningen.
The tendency to apply a thick layer of painting with
a spatula rather than a brush reappears also in two
horizontal canvases, both of them in the Van Houten
collection, that seem to foreshadow the portrait we
are presenting here: Bloemenverkoopster, ca. 1898,
and Portret van een vrow, ca. 1898. And the closest
antecedent of our Ritratto del pittore Trussardi Volpi
(60cm x 100 cm) is an only slightly larger canvas from
1898, La venditrice di frutta (72 cm x 102 cm) (fig.1),
formerly owned by Mesdag and now in the Dordrecht
Museum.
Giovanni Trussardi Volpi (1875-1921) was born
in Bergamo and had studied in the Accademia
Carrara, later enrolling in the Academy of Fine Arts of
Florence. He moved to Rome shortly after 1900 and
struck up a friendship with Mancini, who was like a
father figure to him. Mancini portrays him here in his
studio with a sculpture of the bust of a boy to the left,
reflected by mirrors at the centre of the picture and to
the left – an invention that recurs in other paintings
of this period.
The structure of the composition, with a half-length
figure surrounded by objects (although in this portrait
the figure is at the centre and in Venditrice di frutta
it is to the right), the same mechanism of light that is
projected on the figure and makes it stand out from the
background, and the thick, substantial accumulation
of the paint, suggest that the two pictures may have
been made in the same period.
Another painting that is close to these two because it
shows the same relationship between construction
and material is the portrait Mio padre, 1904, in which
the figure, however, stands out on a light-coloured
background.
Mancini also painted another portrait of Trussardi Volpi,
who had been introduced to him by Chène de Vère after
the death of Mancini’s father: the face is in three-quarter
profile, with the same straw hat, but on a light-coloured
background (as in the portrait Mio padre, from 1904).
Here the light runs opposite to that of our version, which
is closer to that of his ‘Flemish-style’ paintings. The latter
are all based on the idea that the shapes, immersed in
darkness, are revealed by a light that comes from an
artificial source, not a natural one – a typical feature of
Caravaggio’s and Rembrandt’s paintings 5 .
The present Portrait of the painter Trussardi Volpi most
likely belongs with the group of portraits executed on
a black background, marked by a strongly luminist
quality and painted by Mancini chiefly in the years
from 1895 to 1905, several of which were purchased
by Dutch clients.
Translated from a text by Marco Fagioli
89