Reflections

This painting featured with 19 others in the solo show of Antonio Mancini’s work held in Venice within the framework of the 12th Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia in 1920. This proved such a success that all the canvases were sold, including the one now in the Cariplo Collection, purchased together with 15 others by a group of anonymous art dealers. Mancini had in fact been going through a period of great artistic significance since 1911 as the guest of the entrepreneur, art collector and patron Fernand Du Chéne de Vère at Villa Iacobini in Frascati. Set in an evocative wooded landscape, probably inspired by the countryside between Narni and Amelia in the region of Umbria, where the artist often spent time, the painting bears similarities, in terms of subject and format, to Music (whereabouts unknown), a work painted during his stay in Frascati. The presence of the young models, most probably to be identified as his nephews Alfredo, Enrica and Domenico, suggests that this painting was instead produced after the artist’s return to Rome in 1918. A young woman is playing the violin in a woodland setting under the eye and possibly the guidance of a figure visible on the right. In the foreground, two little girls seem to be looking at themselves in a mirror, the reflection of which is captured on the canvas. The title of the work refers to this pictorial device, alluding with a certain degree of ambiguity both to the play of reflected light animating the painting and to the Symbolist idea of the canvas as a mirror, where images stored in the memory can be made visible. Mancini uses thick layers of paint and freely arranged patches of colour to orchestrate a composition that develops from the sculpturally defined figures in the foreground towards a landscape that glows in the sunlight penetrating between the trees, but offers no points of reference in terms of perspective, so that the young musician is seen more as a dreamlike apparition than a real figure.