Antique Drawing Signed Antonio Mancini Mixed Technique XIX Century

Mixed media on cardboard. Signed lower left. Antonio Mancini was a painter of realist inspiration, trained in the Neapolitan school of Morelli and Palizzi and later in Paris. He devoted himself primarily to portraiture and genre scenes of a popular or anecdotal nature, but while initially he was close to 19th-century naturalism, which led him to portray popular figures imbued with sadness (his street urchins), he later began to experiment with different techniques, using vivid flashes of light, applied to the canvas in clumps of violent color and vibrant drips, even employing non-pictorial materials, such as stained glass, and depicting agitated figures, sometimes in imaginative disguises, an expression of his profound psychological distress. In this drawing, likely a preparatory sketch, the female face is not emphasized in its physiognomic features, but rather in the explosive personality of the woman's body, whose half-bust seems to soar upward in a lateral twist, making it emerge from the blurred and undefined features surrounding it. This work is presented in a frame.