Antonio Mancini – Painting Style and Career

“The sun sets. The man dies. It is right. But what a pity not to be able to paint any more.”
-Antonio Mancini to a friend.

Self-Portrait

Some artists just love to paint. You can sense it in the way the paint lies on the canvas—not some carefully thought-out every stroke just so, like a finicky housepainter painting a doorframe, but slapped on with such apparent abandon that you always think it’s a lie when you read that the artist actually thought everything out quite carefully. So here we have a painter who apparently went mad as a young man (perhaps from using paints with mercury pigments in them), who lays on his pigments with as much brio, yet who seems to have been as careful as Vermeer in using a string-grid device of his own invention to get his proportions just right. He’s always broke and will knock off a work of art just to get pasta money—sometimes even painting on one of the restaurant’s serving plates. Don’t you just have to love such an unregenerate artist?

Mancini is, to a degree, a “literary” painter in that a strong anecdotal quality runs throughout his work—but his subjects seem mostly to come from the everyday life of late-19th Century Italy. Mancini could, and did, render the occasional John the Baptist or a provocative harem scene, but he seemed just as happy doing sentimental studies of street urchins and commissioned portraits. But his urchins are rarely just lounging around being urchins; instead they all got up as carnival performers, standard-bearers and even as proper young lads solemnly regarding the bloodied shirt and fallen rapier of a father recently killed in a duel.

Some admit having never heard of Mancini prior to the Philadelphia Museum Exhibition in 2007. But his work was frequently exhibited in the United States during his lifetime and was collected by museums and discriminating private collectors, such as the painter William Merrit Chase. He seems to have gotten lost in the passage of time, and while I wouldn’t call that fate a tremendous injustice, it’s nonetheless unfortunate.

Mancini and his fellow minors—were they minor painters?- Jules Bastien LePage, Adolph Menzel, minor poets, minor composers—defined an age, and added richness and flavor to that age. We are worse off without them, so it’s always a pleasure to welcome one of them back.

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Poor Schoolboy

His painting, The Poor Schoolboy, exhibited in the Salon of 1876, is in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. Its realist subject matter and dark palette are typical of his early work. Paintings by Mancini also may be seen in major Italian museum collections, including Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, and Museo Civico-Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Turin. The Philadelphia Art Museum holds fifteen oil paintings and three pastels by Mancini that were a gift of New York art dealer Vance N. Jordan.

Purchase Antonio Mancini: Nineteenth-Century Italian Master from our online book store.

‘Will paint for food’:

Let us now praise minor artists.

Antonio Mancini (1852-1930) Italian painter.

Biography

Mancini was born in Rome and showed precocious ability as an artist. At the age of twelve, he was admitted to the Institute of Fine Arts in Naples, where he studied under Domenico Morelli (1823–1901), a painter of historical scenes who favored dramatic chiaroscuro and vigorous brushwork, and Filippo Palizzi (1818–1899), a landscape painter. Mancini developed quickly under their guidance, and in 1872, he exhibited two paintings at the Paris Salon.

Mancini worked at the forefront of Verismo movement, an indigenous Italian response to 19th-century Realist aesthetics. His usual subjects included children of the poor, juvenile circus performers, and musicians he observed in the streets of Naples. His portrait of a young acrobat in “Saltimbanco” (1877-78) exquisitely captures the fragility of the boy whose impoverished childhood is spent entertaining pedestrian crowds.

While in Paris in the 1870s, Mancini met Impressionists Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet. He became friends with John Singer Sargent, who famously pronounced him to be the greatest living painter. His mature works show a brightened palette with a striking impasto technique on canvas and a bold command of pastels on paper.

In 1881, Mancini suffered a disabling mental illness. He settled in Rome in 1883 for twenty years, then moved to Frascati where he lived until 1918. During this period of Mancini’s life, he was often destitute and relied on the help of friends and art buyers to survive. After the First World War, his living situation stabilized and he achieved a new level of serenity in his work. Mancini died in Rome in 1930 and buried in the Basilica Santi Bonifacio e Alessio on the Aventine Hill.

His painting,The Poor Schoolboy, exhibited in the Salon of 1876, is in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. Its realist subject matter and dark palette are typical of his early work. Paintings by Mancini also may be seen in major Italian museum collections, including Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, and Museo Civico-Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Turin. The Philadelphia Art Museum holds fifteen oil paintings and three pastels by Mancini that were a gift of New York art dealer Vance N. Jordan.

Purchase Antonio Mancini: Nineteenth-Century Italian Master from our online book store.