Romeo Mancini

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Romeo Mancini (Perugia, 28th May 1917 – 19th March 2003) was an Italian painter and sculptor.

The early years

In the years before the outbreak of the Second World War, Mancini attended the Accademia di Belle Arti di Perugia. There, Mancini studied and met another student who also became an artist, Leoncillo Leonardi. Some years later, while recalling the period he spent with Mancini at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Perugia, Leonardi wrote: "We talked down our professors passionately… and our friendship dates back to that. The years have passed… (and) Mancini has continued to fight against a narrow figurative culture, to criticise and to seek"

During the early 1930s Mancini appeared to be seeking examples to follow in the nearby Scuola Romana.

The friendship that began at school between Leonardi and Mancini was to be strengthened by their common aversion to fascism and, later, the decision both artists took to join the ranks of the partisans: Leonardi in Rome, and Mancini in Umbria, in the Colfiorito mountains, where he joined the Innamorati Brigade with Enzo Rossi.

With the end of the war, Leoncillo returned to Rome, and Mancini to Perugia, where, even if he did not continue his studies at the Academy, he continued to search on his own account a personal alternative to the narrow figurative culture.

The early works of Giuseppe Capogrossi and Mario Mafai appear to have been his points of reference for the Autoritratto (lit. Self-portrait) dated 1943, followed by Paul Cézanne in such works as the Gilet Rosso (lit. The Red Waistcoat).

And then, as the artist said himself, there was Pablo Picasso, clearly reinterpreted with an Italian eye, or better, in a Roman style, in the Suonatori (lit. Musicians), where the yellow of Mafai is used to plastically reinforce the frieze-like composition.

Mancini would go on to display this work during his first important exhibition, arranged in Rome at Lo Zodiaco Gallery in 1950.

In 1948, his sketch presented as part of the competition organized by the Sagra Musicale Umbra, along with three other contenders, was chosen as the official poster for the music festival that year. In the same period, Mancini also obtained his first important commission: a fresco to be painted using the technique of the ancient masters, “on fresh plaster, using first a cartoon and then pouncing”, in Luisa Spagnoli’s former headquarters.

After that, he travelled to France, along the Côte d’Azur, and on to Paris, city of twentieth-century artistic research. Mancini left Perugia taking with him some photos of his recent works. While in France he immediately came into contact with Édouard Pignon, heir to the tradition of Cezanne and Picasso.

The works that Romeo completed while in France, such as Barche ad Antibes, show a painter that was already detached from the element of realism, managing to create a painting entirely based on colour, and to evoke the swarm of ships’ masts through the rhythmic separation of vertical lines. Here, the blues of the sky, already decomposed into rectangles, mix with the reds and greens of the hulls, and the yellows of their reflections.

Villa Massimo

When he came back to Italy, Mancini decided to leave Perugia that not only Leoncillo, Rossi and Brunori, had also done. He chose to follow his group of friends and colleagues to Villa Massimo in Rome. Here, from 1948, a small group of left-wing Italian painters and sculptors had settled and arranged their own home-atelier in the building that had hosted the German Academy in Rome before the war. The neighbourhood of piazza Bologna, now housed some of the protagonists of the artistic events of the post-war period, in ateliers set diagonally against each other in the large park: Renato Guttuso, Emilio Greco, Renato Marino Mazzacurati, La Regina, Meli, and a handful of Umbrian painters led by Leoncillo Leonardi, who at first hosted Rossi in his atelier, before helping him to find his own.

Mancini had his first exhibition in Rome at Lo Zodiaco Gallery in 1950. He exhibited about twenty paintings at Lo Zodiaco: portraits, still lifes and landscapes.

The exhibition also included the Minatore (lit. The Miner), that the following year the painter also sent to the “Premi per la Pace” (lit. Peace Prize) contest organized by the “Rinascita” and “Vie Nuove” magazines. The panel was composed of the communist editors of the magazines that promoted the event, Palmiro Togliatti and Luigi Longo, and Pietro Nenni, the President of the National Liberation Committee representing the partisans, and technicians, Giulio Carlo Argan, Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, Roberto Longhi, Libero De Libero, and Mario Penelope.

The jury appreciated Mancini’s work, but were opposed by Togliatti, who was known to caution artists against supporting neo-cubist ideas from the pages of “Rinascita”

In 1950 the Italian Communist Party invited a group of some ten young left-wing artists to the Comacchio valleys, which at the time was one of the least well off areas in the country. Romeo participated, together with Treccani, Turcato, Scarpitta, and the Neapolitan artist Ricci. The works that resulted from this experience were exhibited during the Sagra della Fioritura Festival in Vignola, where a jury which included Mazzacurati awarded Mancini with the third prize, consisting of a wheel of Grana Padano cheese. Back in his atelier in Villa Massimo, Romeo re-elaborated the sketches made in Comacchio, and transformed them into large oil compositions. Of this group of works, the artist kept two temperas, Pescatori in riposo (lit. Fishermen at Rest) and Gioco della morra (lit. Game of Morra). These two fishermen are the predecessors of the two robots placed side by side that the artist calls Cattedrali (lit. Cathedrals), monuments to an era of machines and loneliness, which express man’s need to communicate with others, and converse with his peers.

When Mancini returned to Rome, would work for years on this theme, with different colours and language. Though he continued to paint fishermen, harpoons, oars and fishing lamps, he would open up his compositions to more and more abstract shapes. The 1950s were the central years of Romeo’s activity, including abroad. In 1953 he participated in the International Youth Festival in Warsaw with his work the Fiocinatore (lit. Harpooner) which earned him the second prize.

In 1951 Minatori was the painting chosen by Mancini to participate in the VI Rome Quadriennale .

In November 1956 Romeo was invited at the XXVIII edition of the Venice Biennale.

Here Mancini was presented with two ceramic high reliefs: Fiocinatori (lit. Harpooners) n. 2 and Fiocinatori n. 3, both created in 1956 and exhibited in Venice in a pavilion designed by Scarpa.

In 1956, partially as a result of a smear campaign led by the German press against the artists of Villa Massimo, along with their way of life, the government of that country was able to evict the Italians and reorganize the academy within the villa. In reality Mancini was already no longer living there permanently, due to the many commissions he received in Umbria.

The Fishermen

Mancini married in 1956 with Franca Ottalevi and moved back to Perugia.

The eviction of the group of artists from Villa Massimo marked the end of an era. Mancini nostalgically recalled: “By day each of us worked alone in his studio, but at night we were all together, not just those of us from Villa Massimo, but also Mafai, Scarpitta, Turcato, Attardi, Consagra, Vedova, and many others. We met at Menghi, the restaurant in Via Flaminia, where the unfortunate host is still waiting for us to pay our debts. He would be rich now if he had agreed to be paid with our works... And then, strolling together through a deserted Rome, until the early hours of the morning, discussing art”.

In 1957, Mancini became professor of sculpture at the local Academy of Fine Arts, a position he would hold for more than twenty years. In 1973 Professor Mancini was also appointed director, which saw him undertake the revision of the nineteenth century statute of the Perugia Academy, creating new courses and reorganizing, with the help of the conservator Pietro Scarpellini, the precious corpus of drawings and prints that the Pietro Vannucci Academy still conserves

Returning then to Perugia in the mid 1950s, Mancini once again began to frequent the studio in Via Baldeschi that he had shared with his brother the conservator, before his time in Rome. He remained there preparing the sketches for the monuments to the fallen during the war, he also returned to his paintings of fishermen, some Cubist, some realistic.

Mancini, however, did not break off all contacts with Rome, organizing regular exhibitions in the capital. In the spring of 1958 he organized a personal exhibition at the Galleria La Salita. In Umbria, where Mancini now resided, in 1959 he participated, resulting in significant recognition, in the first edition of the “Premio Perugia” (lit. Perugia Prize).

When in 1961 Romeo presented himself to the public in Perugia with twenty-seven recent paintings, exhibited between March and April in the Palazzo dei Priori. Lionello Venturi had theorized from the pages of magazines a decade earlier on his return from America: “Every work of art is both concrete and abstract, just as a painting that is entirely nature is as unthinkable as one that is entirely calculation... neither are sentiment or the nature of man enough to create the work of art. An act of abstraction performed by the imagination is therefore necessary, which brings the work from the level of nature to that of art”. Thus Romeo had not changed his way of referring to nature, or the subjects of his inspiration, which remained the poachers of the Comacchio Valleys. What had changed was his syntax, how to lay out the composition, the spatial relationship between shape and form, between foreground and background, a relationship that, in the words of Nello Ponente, the presenter of the exhibition “has become more important, and has emerged from the elementary nature of cubism, learned perhaps too quickly, and has reached its more effective concrete dimension”. If the expressionism of his early works was first solidified by a cubist geometry and palette for expressive needs, it had grown acidic and sometimes strident, while now a dynamite charge appears to have broken cubes and sharp angles. By contrast, the yellows and oranges had been replaced by more subdued greens and blues, to create a sophisticated and valuable transparency. The form has lost its correlation with reality, but it has maintained its light and direction.

Indeed, these fishermen of the 1960s were the direct descendants of their realistic predecessors from the previous decade, and now appeared to have adapted “to a splitting of the lines, to a dynamism that resolves in itself the dramatic contrasts and synthesizes them”

For Romeo 1963 was above all the year of the exhibitions held in America. He organized personal exhibitions in several states (Michigan, Indiana, Ohio).

Mancini supervised the scenery for The Firebird by Stravinsky at the Teatro Morlacchi in Perugia. The artist found inspiration for this work in the painting Antibes from the 1950s.

If the beginning of the seventh decade of the century marked the highest peak of abstraction that Romeo's language could reach, in the mid 1960s these forms begin to compose themselves in a kind of expressionistic realism. Boats, fishing lights, and fishermen remained his motifs of inspiration, but were once again renewed, as his relationship with them and with reality was also renewed. Mancini created these compositions with a new balance, not subordinating figures to their environment, or vice versa, but focusing entirely on the integration of planes and the plastic elaboration of volumes. This confers these paintings with a sense of monumentality, accentuated by the large canvases that the artist loved to use.

With his new language, Mancini once again presented himself, after a seven year absence, to the Roman public in 1965, with an exhibition of twenty oils and ten drawings at the Gallery Penelope. Presented by Nello Ponente.

The exhibition was a great success, and earned many positive reviews in a variety of newspapers, Valentino Martinelli in “Momento Sera” wrote "the figure of the fisherman, immune to any rhetoric, often taking on the appearance of a diving fisherman, who is struggling in the chase, with feline energy in the waves, a man who is always fighting with the elements to live and survive. And the variety of compositional solutions, the quality of the pictorial matter, and the outstanding plastic shapes, discourage for now the suspicion that the artist is about to withdraw into a formalist scheme, and confirm the sincerity of his commitment and consistency of choices”.

In 1966 Romeo was also invited to exhibit at the IX Quadriennale, where he presented two works on his usual theme of fishermen, called Tempi del lavoratore del mare (lit. Temples of the Workers of the Sea) and II.

Monuments dedicated to the Italian and International Resistance against fascism

Many monuments were commissioned to Mancini in the late 1940s and early 1950s by the municipalities of Umbria.

The municipality of Pietralunga commissioned a plastic and dense bronze monument with figures to commemorate their fallen (1948). Here the artist seems to have been heavily influenced by Mazzacurati, following the outline already established in 1942 with la Strage degli innocenti (lit. the Slaughter of the Innocents), which he would continue to repeat during the same period.

A reminder of Cubism emerges again in the large Monumento ai Caduti di tutte le guerre (lit. Monument to the Fallen of All Wars)1956, in Passignano, Perugia, which consists of a colourful ceramic frieze, mounted in a grey stone frame. Analyzing the individual scenes that make up the story of the frieze in succession, it is impossible not to notice that this is carried out consistently, and begins with a violently dramatic start - in which the scene of the bombardment and shooting evoke the terrible tones of Guernica - through the solemn break in the work of the fishermen and farmers, until the festive and cheering scene of the May Day celebration. And in this thematic contraposition we can glimpse a filtered and reworked memory of Picasso’s famous large War and Peace murals.

The study and construction of this monument took Mancini at least two years of work. Indeed, a group of studies for the various component parts was presented at the Brufani exhibition in Perugia of 1953.

Castiglione del Lago also wanted a monument to their fallen, and Romeo created a large composition in bronze bas-relief in which, on a barely sketched background of the city, there stands a turreted figure of Italy, that observes the scene of a mother bent over the body of her son, who has died for his country. The sculpture, cast in Verona, was inaugurated with a solemn ceremony in November 1956, by which time Romeo was already officially and internationally recognized as a sculptor, presenting himself as such at the XXVIII edition of the Venice Biennale.

In 1958 he realized the monument to the Partisan of Montebuono, Agello, Perugia.

In 1961, when he was asked to create a visualization of Perugia for the great exhibition in Turin, “Italia '61”. The work modelled in ceramic with an operation of synthesis and abstraction, recalls, thanks to the precious material, the golden glow of ancient sun baked Etruscan stones and, through synthetic and sharp forms, suggests the idea of the urban development of the medieval city. The sculpture was prepared by Mancini for the stand designed by the architects representing Umbria, Astengo, Zanetti and Campus, at of the great Turin exhibition.

In 1962 he realized the sculpture Dedicata al lavoratore (lit. Dedicated to the Worker), executed for the fountain in Piazza d'Anni at S. Giuliana in Perugia.

In 1967 he created the great Scultura in acciaio (lit. Steel Sculpture) for Città della Pieve and the Aerei (lit. Aircraft), also in steel, to commemorate the fallen in Passignano, on lake Trasimeno.

In the same year, the sculpture Icone 67 was sent to Alexandria in Egypt. The Venice Biennale had organized an exhibition of twelve artists in the city, and Mancini, on the recommendation of Valentino Martinelli, was invited to exhibit two sculptures and two paintings. At this time, the artist designed abstract works, clearly destined to live in the open air, in the interplay of natural light and his figures of fishermen or workers.

In 1984 Mancini produced works such as the sculpture in memory of Capitini one dedicated to the Fanciullo (lit. Young Man), and another dedicated to the Partigiano (lit. Partisan), all in Perugia.

The Cathedrals

In 1968, Mancini created the first prototypes of the Cattedrali per la conquista dello spazio (lit. Cathedrals for the Conquest of Space) that predated his entire output from that point onward date back to this time.

The use of metallic materials, visits to foundries, the idea that the world is now irrevocably reduced to a giant Meccano set, led Mancini to create a series of large paintings testing himself with a material that was new to him: acrylic. The smooth, cold surface created by this paint composes and decomposes itself, creating a split, sections of mysterious mechanical objects.

Romeo built new bodies mounted with machine parts that he called Cattedrali (lit. Cathedrals), but these pieces of machinery, these Cattedrali in the end always recalled the shape of the human body, or rather of two opposing human bodies. Cattedrali “in the desert, factories, as places where they concentrate all social value, collectives of positivity and human duration”. Everything is dominated by a lucid but serene rationality, that calls for the analysis of every detail, to wrap it in an empty space, as in an aura of mystery.

These facilities are located in the space like sculptures of the canvas; the inhuman characters that compose the image live suspended in a dense, intense blue. It is as if at any moment the gears of the mechanisms were about be put to work, to duel.

While the structure of these cathedrals have nothing in common with the monuments to God and to man himself built during the Middle Ages, they do however have the same value as a monument erected to a new creed: the machine and science, the modern technological discoveries of man. Thus, ultimately, they are a new monument by man to himself, and the destruction of the world, which he continues to achieve.

1972 saw a major retrospective at the town hall in Perugia, which featured, as well as older works, a series of more recent sculptures. Finally, in 1976, again at the Palazzo dei Priori municipal building in Perugia, Mancini presented the great Cattedrali in acrylic to the public.

This series culminated in 1984 with an exhibition at the Rocca Paolina in Perugia.

"Deeply honest, gentle and sincere as a man, and as an artist, even at times when his language seemed to turn towards more detached and abstract forms, Mancini never lost touch with the great social and existential dramas of our time. The synthesis of a lifetime of sincere creation, his mechanical Cattedrali, beautiful and menacing on a large canvas, or glittering dangerously in metal, document an increasingly inhuman reality that Romeo Mancini saw as a perverse fate, even if he could perhaps not escape an admiring glance at the extraordinary technological capacity of modern man"

Artworks in Museums, Public and Private institutions

National Gallery of Umbria, Perugia, Scultura dedicata ad Aldo Capitini, 1982

Rome, Camera dei Deputati, Palazzo Montecitorio, Due pescatori con lampare, olio su tela, 1964

Spain, Flix, Monumento alle Brigate Internazionali, 1990, ferro,

http://www.diarideguerra.com/fitxa-3-24-72-46-f211/guerra-civil-a-catalunya/batalla-de-lebre/ribera-debre/flix/el-monument-dels-brigadistes-a-flix.html#.VgKIIZeU8yO

Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava, I pescatori notturni, olio su tela, 1965, http://www.webumenia.sk/dielo/SVK:SNG.O_3200

Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus Ohio, Due pescatori con lampara, inchiostro e tempera su carta, 1964,

https://www.columbusmuseum.org/

Galleria di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Repubblica di San Marino, Pesca Notturna, olio su tela, 1956

Galleria di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Repubblica di San Marino, Composizione senza titolo acrilico su tela, 1976

Ex Ente Autonomo per il soggiorno dell'Umbria, Regione Umbria, Perugia, Pescatore Notturno, olio su tela, anni '60.

Palazzo della Provincia di Perugia, Apocalisse, olio su tela, 1964

Museo di Palazzo della Penna di Perugia, Buoi, olio su tela, 1952

Collezioni del Comune di Perugia, Il Picconiere, olio su tela, 1950

Museo Regionale della Ceramica, Deruta (Perugia), scultura in ceramica smaltata, 1963 e un rilievo plastico rappresentante Perugia per “Italia '61 a Torino”, 1961, ceramica.

Fondazione Ceramica Contemporanea d'Autore Alviero Moretti, Deruta, (Perugia), ceramiche

http://www.fondazionemoretti.it/artisti/mancini-romeo/

Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, Perugia, Composizione di figure (senza titolo), olio su compensato, datata tra gli anni '50 e '60 del '900

http://www.culturaitalia.it/opencms/museid/viewItem.jsp?language=it&id=oai%3Aculturaitalia.it%3Amuseiditalia-work_14562

Rocca Paolina, Perugia, Monumento Ai Democratici Umbri Vittime dello squadrismo fascista 1921-1922, 1985, bronzo

Complesso di Santa Giuliana, Perugia, Fontana dedicata al lavoratore, 1962

Perugia, Via Cortonese (già in Piazza Partigiani), Scultura dedicata all'infanzia, per l'anno internazionale del bambino, 1980, acciaio

Pietralunga (Perugia), Monumento ai Caduti, 1948, travertino e bronzo

Passignano (Perugia), Monumento ai Caduti di tutte le guerre, 1955-56, pietra e ceramica policroma

Castiglione del lago (Perugia), Monumento ai Caduti di tutte le guerre, 1956, bronzo e pietra

Montebuono (Perugia), Monumento al Partigiano, 1958, pietra

Agello (Perugia), Monumento ai Caduti Partigiani di Agello, 1958, acciaio

Passignano sul Trasimeno (Perugia), Scultura Istituto Comprensivo Dalmazio Birago, 1964-66 c., ceramica policroma

Bova Marina (Reggio Calabria), Scultura in metallo, 1965, conservata all'interno di una scuola media.

Città della Pieve (Perugia), scultura in acciaio, 1967, andata distrutta.

Passignano sul Trasimeno (Perugia), Monumento agli Aviatori Caduti nel Trasimeno, 1967, acciaio

Pozzuolo (Perugia), Scuola Media Gino Galeotti, Cattedrali per la conquista dello spazio, 1968, ceramica

Umbertide (Perugia), scultura,1970, acciaio. Conservata presso lo spazio verde della Scuola Media di Umbertide.

Mugnano (Perugia), Monumento al Lavoro, 1986, bronzo

Mugnano (Perugia), Elementi nell'artigianato, 1987

Castiglione del Lago (Perugia), Monumento alla Vita, 1989, bronzo

Foligno, Palio per la Giostra della Quintana, cm 200 x 104, 1990, conservato presso il Rione Pugilli che vinse la giostra in quell'anno.

Rome, Collezione CGIL, Minatori del Bastardo, 1950, olio su tela, cm 100 x 70

http://www.cgil.it/arte/Artista.aspx?COD=ROMEO_MANCINI

Rome, Collezione CGIL, Pescatore, (senza titolo) 1951, olio su masonite, cm 70,4 x 50

Perugia, Unicredit Banca, ex Cassa di Risparmio di Perugia, Onda Rossa, 1974, olio su tela, cm 149 x 129

Perugia, Corso Vannucci, ex sede Olivetti, ora divenuta sede di un negozio della Perugina, affresco scialbato e allo stato attuale non visibile, Operaie, 1950 circa.

Perugia, Società del Mutuo Soccorso fra gli artisti e gli operai di Perugia, sede di Corso Garibaldi, Bassorilievo per lapide dedicata a Guglielmo Miliocchi, 1987

http://rete.comuni-italiani.it/w/images/Perugia_-_GUGLIELMO_MILIOCCHI_-_MAZZINIANO_COMBATTENTE_GARIBALDINO_-_ABITAZIONE_-_CORSO_GARIBALDI.jpg

Perugia, Manifesto per UmbriaJazz, 1990, http://www.umbriajazz.com/pagine/storia

External links

• https://romeomancini.wordpress.com/ shows pictures of his artworks.