Antonio Mancini at Art Museum (2nd review)

'Will paint for food':
Let us now praise minor artists

ANDREW MANGRAVITE

“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.

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 as Boldini, yet who seems to have been as careful as Vermeer in using a string-grid device of his own invention to get his portions just right. He’s always broke and will knock off a work of art just to get pasta money—sometimes even paining on one of the restaurant’s serving plates. Don’t you just have to love such an unregenerate artist?

My first thought on seeing the work of Antonio Mancini (1852-1930) was how much it reminded me of Adolphe Monticelli’s. For a second I wondered if they weren’t the same painter. But no, Mancini is an Italian artist through and through, with the love of opulence and style—and that sentimental affection for children—that reminds me that he couldn’t be French. What the devil would Mancini care about recreating the mood of Watteau’s Fêtes Galantes?

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 “hot” 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—an Amleto in the making?

I frankly admit that I had never heard of Mancini prior to this show. 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—minor painters, minor poets, minor composers—while they do not define an age, add richness and flavor to that age. We are always worse off without them, and so it’s always a pleasure to welcome one of them back.



To read responses, click here and here.
To read another review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.