Foreword

d’Harnoncourt, Anne; Rishel, Joseph J.

Save Cite Share

Free

Foreword

Anne d’Harnoncourt and Joseph J. Rishel

Antonio Mancini: Nineteenth-Century Italian Master

~At the turn of the twentieth century, Antonio Mancini was a celebrated international figure. The catalogue of the 1899 Venice Biennale described him as follows:

Author

Anne d’Harnoncourt and Joseph J. Rishel

PublisherPhiladelphia Museum of Art

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-21154

Foreword

At the turn of the twentieth century, Antonio Mancini was a celebrated international figure. The catalogue of the 1899 Venice Biennale described him as follows:

Born in 1852 in Rome, where he lives, he paints genre scenes and portraits. He uses an audacious, vigorous technique that is hostile to tradition and practice. The power of his color and the violence of his light give him such a fluidity of effects as to render unforgettable certain male or female physiognomies, which jump off his canvases, animated by an overwhelming breath of life.1Terza exposizione internazionale d’arte della città di Venezia (Venice: Biennale internazionale d’arte, 1899), p. 182.

During his lifetime, major Italian museums acquired Mancini’s work. His trans-Atlantic reputation was high, and his supporters choice, particularly given his friendship with the American painter John Singer Sargent and the patronage of the Boston collector Isabella Stewart Gardner and her friends. Exactly when the pendulum of fame shifted is hard to establish, but it can safely be said that by the mid-twentieth century Mancini was an artist known by few and appreciated by fewer.

It was, therefore, particularly prescient of the late Vance N. Jordan, whose splendid group of fifteen works by the artist came to the Museum as a gift from his estate and is the inspiration and core of this show, to take Mancini as the principal focus of his private collection. Jordan was a highly successful art dealer in New York City, specializing in decorative arts and American painting. His gallery was particularly well known for its important shows of American Impressionism, starting in 1991, which represent a critical moment in the reassessment of this field. As a buyer rather than a seller, Jordan reveals a more private side, equally ahead of conventional taste. One would hazard that the sport of collecting a major group of works from across Mancini’s career gave him the same keen pleasure of exploration and reevaluation.

Vance Jordan was a friend of many years to Ulrich W. Hiesinger, a Philadelphia-based independent art scholar who worked closely with Jordan on some of his most ambitious exhibition projects; the 1994 Childe Hassam catalogue, for example, was a particularly substantial contribution to the literature. It was Jordan’s wish that Dr. Hiesinger organize the exhibition and prepare its catalogue for the Museum, which was the beneficiary of his collection. Nothing could be more fitting for Philadelphia, the delighted recipient of these remarkable works of art.

In the Museum’s galleries, Vance Jordan’s collection of Mancini paintings and works on paper join a comprehensive gathering of Italian art, from Renaissance gold-ground pictures to twenty-first-century innovations. The work of the artist’s own contemporaries such as Giovanni Boldini, Giuseppe De Nittis, and his friend the sculptor Vincenzo Gemito take on new dimensions with his arrival in their midst. This book likewise joins and enhances a splendid company of recent Museum publications devoted to Italian art, from the landmark volume Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century (2000), accompanying the exhibition of the same name, to the collection catalogues Italian Paintings, 1250–1450 (2004), by Carl Brandon Strehlke, and Italian Master Drawings (2004), by Ann Percy.

Our debts are many, most pointedly to Ulrich Hiesinger, whose tenacity and patient devotion to his friend’s wishes brought this project to fruition in such a satisfying and, we believe, illuminating way. Through his close contacts in Italy and knowledge of the Italian Ottocento, Dr. Hiesinger is (as Jordan well realized) the best person to shape the show with such a balance and to so evenhandedly (and accessibly) write this book about an artist whose biography—tragically dramatic as it was—could so easily have swamped his substance as an artist. The thoughtful choice of loans is completely Dr. Hiesinger’s, with the Museum staff cheering him on. This involved complicated loan negotiations with a far-flung set of public and private collectors, for whose generosity we are deeply appreciative. He has saluted his colleagues in the following acknowledgments, which reflect our own sense of gratitude and debt. Suffice it to say here that the success of this project is its own salute to the enlightened scholarship of Ulrich Hiesinger and to the informed and passionate eye of Vance Jordan.

Anne d’Harnoncourt

The George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer

Joseph J. Rishel

The Gisela and Dennis Alter Senior Curator of European Painting before 1900

1 Terza exposizione internazionale d’arte della città di Venezia (Venice: Biennale internazionale d’arte, 1899), p. 182. »

Previous chapter Next chapter

Base text size -

Chapter images ()