Antonio Mancini

Antonio Mancini (14 November 1852 – 28 December 1930) was an Italian painter.

Biography

Mancini was born in Rome, Papal States, 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. Mancini developed quickly under their guidance, and in 1872, he exhibited two paintings at the Paris Salon.

Mancini worked at the forefront of the 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 Il Saltimbanco (1877–78) captures the fragility of the boy whose impoverished childhood is spent entertaining pedestrian crowds.

In 1871 two of his works, exhibited at the Neapolitan salon, were purchased by two foreign clients, both painters: Per un fiore (For a Flower) by the Canadian-born American painter François B. De Blois and L'ultima medicina (The Last Medicine!) by the French Felix de Lapommeraye.

In 1881, Mancini suffered a disabling mental illness. He settled in Rome in 1883 for twenty years, then moved to

The first exhibition in the U.S. devoted exclusively to Mancini's work was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 20, 2007 – January 20, 2008, a museum which owns fifteen oil paintings and three pastels by Mancini that were a gift of New York City art dealer Vance N. Jordan.

Gallery

• 
  Lo scungizzo
  (The Clever Urchin)
• 
  Il Malatino
  (The Weakling),
  ca. 1878
• 
  Standard Bearer of the Harvest Festival,
  c. 1884
• 
  Prevetariello in Preghiera
  (The Little Seminarian), 1872
• 
  Portrait of

  John Lowell Gardner II

  , 1895
• 
  Allegra canzone
  (Happy Song)
• 
  Il Saltimbanco
  (the Acrobat), 1879
• 
  Resting, c. 1887

References

Sources

• Ulrich W. Hiesinger (2007). "Antonio Mancini: Nineteenth-Century Italian Master" (Philadelphia Museum of Art), Yale University Press.
  ISBN 0-300-12220-9
• ISBN 0-300-03547-0
• "Philadelphia Museum of Art". Philadelphia Museum of Art.
• Carrera, Manuel; Mazzocca, Fernando; Sisi, Carlo; Valente, Isabella (2023). Antonio Mancini e Vincenzo Gemito. Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale.
  ISBN 978-88-366-5600-4
• Cinzia Virno, (2019) Antonio Mancini Catalogo Ragionato dell'opera. La pittura a olio - Repertori. Roma, De Luca editori d'arte.
  ISBN 978-88-6557-396-9
• Cinzia Virno, (2001) La collezione Mancini della Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Roma: qualche riflessione sulla tarda attività dell’artista, in Bollettino dei Musei Comunali di Roma, XV, 2001, pp. 155–162.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Antonio Mancini.

• Biography: Portrait of a young girl
• Selected works in Academic Classicism
• Short biography
• Notes for 2008 Exhibition notes at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
• Tumultuous Mind, Spread Across Canvas by Roberta Smith, The New York Times, Art Review, 4 Jan 2008