John Singer Sargent is said to have called Antonio Mancini “the world’s greatest living artist”. Jean-Léon Gérôme called him “a phenomenon”.
Mancini was an Italian painter who was so gifted at drawing as a child that he was admitted to the Naples Academy of Fine Art at the age of 12. He was producing accomplished large scale paintings four years later.
His career, though, would be troubled, marred by bouts of mental illness, poverty and emotional instability. The following description of his manic painting methods is quoted from the collateral prepared for a show currently on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art:
There at the back, before a little table on which I see scattered an infinity of bric a brac, cloth flowers, embalmed stuffed birds, an inexpensive doll, there is the model Aurelia, an insignificant type of woman with olive complexion and an aquiline nose. She was posing as a vendor. Mancini, in shirt sleeves, extremely nervous, bustled about delivering brush strokes, that resembled blows of a whip, onto a canvas supported on the back of a chair. He snorted, he muttered to himself, he cursed at the model who wasn’t able to remain still, then he quickly distanced himself from the subject and bent down on his knees. Plump and not too flexible as he was, he stooped down and withdrew from his pocket binoculars which he used to view her in reverse. All of this while panting out of breath, and raving like someone obsessed.
The account goes on to add that Mancini’s elderly father added to the scene by standing off to one side, badgering him the whole time to put down his brushes and go to dinner.
Mancini was also so poor at times that he didn’t have proper clothing and reused his art materials. One of the pieces in the Philadelphia Museum show, which is the first major retrospective of his work in the U.S., is mounted so that you can see his painting on both sides of the same piece of canvas (one side of which is unfortunately upside-down from our point of view).
He was in a way rescued from his poverty, which was to some extent caused by naivety, by Sargent, who introduced him to English society patrons who paid to have his extraordinary style applied to their portraits. Sargent also painted a portrait of Mancini.
Mancini’s paintings are wonderful and eccentric, with thin veils of paint that barely mask the canvas in one area and huge gobs of impasto, looking like they have been chunked onto the canvas with a spatula, let alone a palette knife, in others. “Painterly” is an inadequate word to describe the way paint is scooped, mounded, troweled and scraped across the canvas in places, yet the same image will have passages of sublime modeling and blending.
One of the other remarkable characteristics of his paintings is his use of what he called a “graticola”, a grid method; in which a mesh of rectangular areas produced by threads strung across a frame were used to interpret a scene by using a similar grid against the surface of the canvas.
This was not an unusual method in painting and has been known for hundreds of years, you will often see preliminary sketches in which the gridlines show and lay the groundwork for transferring a sketch to a larger canvas. What is unusual is that the gridlines that are usually only in the drawing stage of the larger works, and are gone when paint is applied, have left their marks embedded in the thick layers of paint in Mancini’s final paintings, along with bits of glass, stone and other items he worked into his canvasses for texture and effect.
Mancini’s wild, intense and ultimately beautiful canvasses are striking on a number of levels, the application of paint, the use of texture, and the sometimes unusual surroundings for his subjects. He also often used street urchins for his models, in some ways mirroring his own economic circumstances, both as a child and as an adult.
The exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art only runs to January 20th, and includes wonderful loans from some of the great museums in Europe, but it was assembled in honor of a gift of 15 Mancini oils and pastels to the museum’s permanent collection.
There is a book accompanying the exhibition (more details here).
[Suggestion courtesy of Harry Saffren]
wow.
Good post. I hope more people discover Antonio Mancini for his genius.
Thanks for all those links, Charley. I’ll probably miss the exhibition, but it was fascinating to try to piece together the look of his paintings from all those images. There’s something compelling about the faraway looks of his models, and his fevered brushwork. As always, your coverage gives the most thorough understanding of any given artist. You really do your homework, and leave a smorgasbord of fun links to let us learn more.
Hello Charly,
Great post. Truly a great artist. Had a chance in Boston to see his work first hand,”John the Baptist”, and “the Standard Bearer of the Feast” I’ve been hooked ever since. I make it my business to seek all things Mancini.Reminds me at his best, (there is so much work) and it seems quite often, that he was able to truly “penetrate” his subjects and go beyond technique, which in itself is dazzleing! One of the great Portrait artists (portrait as art) of all time. Keep up the good work. Blessings
By the way, to those interested, Irma Gilgore (the Gilgore Museum) in Naples Florida USA houses the largest American collection of Mancini paintings and she and her husband are working with a group of scholars and authors on a large catalog resonaie at this present time. I saw the show in Philadelphia, and I think it opened quite a few eyes to this “heavyweight” of artists.
Bill,
Thanks for the comments and info. The Philadelphia exhibit certainly opened my eyes to Mancini’s work.
Charley, again thank you for the Posts. One last observation concerning Antonio Mancini, a prime example of not judging an artists’ work UNTIL you see originals. In the case of Mancini, I never understood how he was critically admired in his day, for his COLOR. When you see his work in reality,it is so clean and subtle,being balanced BY greys and earth tones far more than most if not all of the “alla Prima” painters of his time, maybe with the exception of Joaquin Sorolla.
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Thank you for this great post and all the links, I’m off to check each one right now!!!
Joan
Antonio Mancini paintings a constant inspiration. Something to to keep us painting
when times get rough,and we might want to give up. We will always have Antonio to pick us up.