Manetti Fernando
San Gimiggnano (Italy), 1899-Beirut, 1964
Fernando Manetti was born in San Gimignano, Italy, where he studied painting. A specialist in frescoes, he came to Jerusalem in the late 1930s to paint some religious scenes there. Confined in Palestine by the English authorities as an Italian citizen at the start of the Second World War, he ended up settling in Lebanon and teaching painting at ALBA, along with private courses.
Through the influence that Sienese painting and the works of Cézanne had exercised on him, and without being the herald of all-out modernity, Manetti introduced to Lebanon a different practice and approach to the canvas, where exuberant color was not required. At that time a pedagogic anti-Impressionism obliged to pursue a rigorous formal analysis and taste for strongly outlined structures. For before approaching the canvas, one must construct it.
In Manetti’s eyes, Cezanne had introduced honesty and captured feeling into History of Art. Structure before brilliance of color, disassembling before constructing, painting while drawing with the brush – such was his exercise. At the nascent moment, he wanted to surprise his audience not with feeling, but with the pictorial grasp of form. Those who succeeded him went to Paris to search for lessons in neo-Cubism, understood as an elaborated effort to construct the canvas in such a way that they had to deconstruct it at the intellectual level, before trying to understand it.
If he hardly contributed to give any answers, Manettie at least helped an entire generation of Lebanese painters to ask the questions. What he knew about the subject went beyond recipes. To him, theory was of no great use, when what was really needed was to learn how to paint. After devoting all his time to teaching, he exhibited at the Hotel Bristol in 1963, and was in the middle of preparing another exhibition, in Italy, when he died on 18th March 1964 in Beirut.
His painting revealed a poetic realism, a transposition of feeling alleviated by a transparency of support and touch. At ALBA, Manetti had represented the opposite camp to Gemayel – transparent colors with one, thick paint with the other. Gemayel quivered with color and form, while for Manetti, the exuberance of life was best expressed through rigor and a purification of form in the tradition of Italian painting, where enjoyment comes from the elision and the virtuosity in the allusion. Gemayel seemed the pale epigone of an Impressionist touch, of a painting that could not go beyond the pleasure of blending the impasto.
In his life, Manetti had the same taste for forms and women as he had in his art. His rigor was the requirement of a painting style that excluded any predictable and easy exuberance. There was the double influence of the Italian tradition, and of the apprenticeship of rigor which made him choose to be more rigorous so as not to return to disorganized Baroque. There was a certain ordering of the senses. This is undoubtedly what attracted the majority of his students towards him. Although he did not play the ascot-wearing artist, he wanted, like them, to order the visible elements of the world.