(between the late artists Omar Onsi & Rachid Wehbi)

Né à San Giminiano (Italie) en 1899, Fernando Manetti y avait fait des études de peinture. Spécialiste de la fresque, il était venu à Jérusalem, à la fin des années trente, pour y réaliser des peintures religieuses. Interné en Palestine par les autorités anglaises en tant que sujet italien au début de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, il finit par s'installer au Liban et enseigna la peinture à l'Académie libanaise des beaux-arts, ainsi que dans des cours privés.

Michel Fani – Dictionnaire de la Peinture au Liban – Edition de l’escalier 1998

Manetti Fernando by William MATAR

Fernando Manetti was born in 1899 at San Giminiano, Italy, and took up the study of painting there, specializing in fresco. Towards the end of the ‘thirties he came to Jerusalem to execute religious works. During World War II, being an Italian, he was interned by the British authorities and afterwards settled in Lebanon, teaching art at the Académie libanaise des beaux-arts and giving private lessons. Influenced by the Siennese school and by Cézanne, without being a whole-hearted modernist, Manetti introduced a different approach where exuberant color was demanded. Reaction to impressionism implied a strictly formal analysis and clear structures.
For Manetti, honest art and sensation ended with Cézanne. Structure was primordial to color, dissection preceded construction, and outline was to be done with the brush. He looked not for sensation but for expression of form. His successors went to Paris to learn a kind of neo-cubism to construct the canvas, while in fact they were intellectually trying to deconstruct the western canvas in an effort to understand it.

Manetti at least helped Lebanese painters to find the appropriate questions, even if he did not help provide the answers. For learning to paint, no particular theory seemed to him of much use. After having devoted all his time to teaching, he exhibited in 1963 at the Bristol Hotel and was preparing another show in Italy when on March 18th, 1964 he died in Beirut.

In the work of Manetti there is a poetic realism, with the feeling lightened by the transparency of the support and the touch. At ALBA he had represented a style contrasting with that of Gemayel, transparent color with one and thickness of the oils with another. Gemayel delighted in color and form while for Manetti the exuberance of life was set off by the deliberate desire for purification of forms and for fidelity to the Italian tradition of painting, where joy comes from blending and skill in intimation. Gemayel appeared as the ultimate in impressionism in an art that could not go beyond the simple pleasure of painting and of mixing colors.

Manetti showed the same taste for forms and for women in his own life. His exactitude came from the demand for an art that excluded any exuberance that was foreseeable and largely facile. He had behind him the twofold tradition of Italy and of training in rigor and sought to avoid plunging into an ill-ordered baroque, preferring order. This was no doubt what attracted most of his pupils to him, both sides wishing to put order into the visible world.