After the Duel

Mancini signed this canvas Mancini 72, the year he turned 20, while he was still working in Naples. The young man in the black suit and dazzling white shirt is Luigiello, a Neapolitan boy who posed for Mancini more than once, dressed up here in elegant middle-class clothes and set against a yellow-orange wall, with a dark shadow looming on the left. The museum describes the scene as a moment of theatrical drama, suspended between reality and fiction, and of the duel itself the picture shows only the anguish on his face. About five years later Luigiello put on the same lace-collared costume again for another of Mancini's pictures, Boy with Toy Soldiers, which belongs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This canvas entered Turin's civic collections in 1935, bought from Eugenio Ventura, a private owner in the city.