Monday,
November 26, 2007
Forgotten "Antonio
Mancini" is About to be Rediscovered
The
ANNOTICO Report
Antonio
Mancini proves how fleeting artistic fame can be. A contemporary of Claude
Monet and Vincent van Gogh, Mancini was the toast of
He appeared in at
least 15 Venice Biennales between the first one, in 1895, and 1924; in 1920 his
paintings were given an entire gallery. He won a medal for painting at the 1900
Today? Outside the art world he's a stranger. But he is about
to be rediscovered.
Antonio
Mancini Worthy of a New Look
Antonio
Mancini proves how fleeting artistic fame can be. A contemporary of Claude
Monet and Vincent van Gogh, Mancini was the toast of
He appeared in at
least 15 Venice Biennales between the first one, in 1895, and 1924; in 1920 his
paintings were given an entire gallery. He won a medal for painting at the 1900
Who knows his
name today? Outside the art world he's a stranger, even though several major
American museums besides the
Thanks to a
bequest several years ago from the late
The exhibition
reveals Mancini to be a conventional painter of his time in some respects,
particularly subject matter, but an adventurous technician, a realist who
reveled in the physicality of pigment and sometimes piled it onto the canvas
like cake frosting. Subjects that in other hands might be mundane, such as a
young boy posing with toy soldiers or an old woman drinking tea, sparkle, not
only because of surface animation but because the artist has somehow made his
sitters project a mysterious inner light.
Mancini is a
fascinating artist because he combines attributes that should be contradictory.
He was part academic, part genre painter, part Old Master, part realist and
part romantic. Had he been French, he might have been a Salon painter turning
out slick narratives. But he was also more than a bit idiosyncratic.
He was obsessed
with poverty, which he experienced in childhood and consequently portrayed
through its effect on children. Yet he wasn't sentimental, which gives his
genre subjects a nervous edge. As a paint-handler he was as modern as any of
the impressionists or post-impressionists.
The emotional
frisson in Mancini's work, which can at times feel almost mystical,
distinguishes him from the Salon painters. Even his portraits, often of rich
people conventionally posed, suggest a combination of psychological and visual
tension. A few paintings are otherworldly - I'm thinking particularly of The
Statue Seller, a nude boy, recumbent on a patterned textile, holding a
small sculpture. One hardly knows what to make of this bizarre genre nude - or
is the painting supposed to be symbolic or metaphorical?
Mancini is hard
to pin down, in part because, even when measured against stereotypes of
artists, he was an odd duck. You will notice that some paintings, especially
portraits such as The Seamstress and Signora Pantaleoni,
display a textured quilted pattern across the pigment surface.
These grid
patterns result from his painting through a netlike frame, strung horizontally,
vertically and sometimes diagonally, that he placed in front of the canvas. Its unclear what purpose this device, which he called a graticola, served, or why he retained the
evidence of its use.
The grids tend to
attenuate the illusion of three-dimensional space; they also disrupt the
viewer's ability to scan the painting and pull together its component passages.
Even allowing for
this peculiarity, Mancini was capable of dazzling brushwork. He used a lot of
brilliant white, so his light tends to be chilly, like Constable's, but he
produced sensuous effects that no other painter of his time surpassed. These
can be fully appreciated in the pink-and-white efflorescence of The
Seamstress and also in the portrait called Lady in Red, among
others. In Old Woman Drinking Tea, Mancini achieves a gravity and
introspection worthy of Rembrandt.
Mancini's life
story, which guest curator Ulrich W. Hiesinger
reconstructs in the show catalog, adds to his appeal. Like van Gogh, he appears
to have lived exclusively for his art, in which he was magnificently
proficient. As for the rest of life, such as keeping himself
decently clothed and managing money, he appears to have been incompetent in a
childlike way. Confinement in a mental hospital for a few months during the
early 1880s also suggests that he might have been emotionally fragile.
Still, he's a
fascinating painter who demonstrates that
Art
| Forgotten Master
"Antonio
Mancini: Nineteenth-Century Italian Master" continues in galleries 153 and
155 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Contact
contributing art critic Edward J. Sozanski at
215-854-5595 or esozanski@phillynews.com. Read his recent work
at http://go.philly.com/edwardsozanski.
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/columnists/edward_j_sozanski/20071125_Art__.html
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