Sculptor and potter born in Turin. He trained as a sculptor and may have been the G. Manzini who exhibited a marble statue entitled Spring at the 1885 Royal Academy. He exhibited a wide variety of fine and applied art at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society of 1889 and a marble medallion of St Cecilia at the 1894 Liverpool Autumn Exhibition from the Birkenhead address of Conrad Dressler. In that year Harold Rathbone asked him to join the staff of the Della Robbia Pottery. He declined and established his own Granville Pottery (or Minerva Art Pottery) in Hanley, Staffordshire. He seems, however, to have been designing some pieces for Della Robbia by 1895, and in 1897 his joint design with Rathbone for some window boxes for Liverpool Town Hall was exhibited in the Leeds City Art Gallery Spring Exhibition. He settled in Birkenhead in 1898 or 1899, despite appeals from Conrad Dressler for him to become a partner in Dressler’s Medmenham Pottery in Great Marlow, Buckinghamshire. He was the leading figure at the Della Robbia Pottery after Harold Rathbone from then until the Pottery’s closure in 1906, producing a wide range of ceramic wares, especially vases, often described as ‘Manzoni vases’. They are rarely signed and his contribution to the Pottery is difficult to assess. At first he employed geometric designs similar to his work for his Granville Pottery but later preferred art nouveau patterns. He was also responsible for the architectural department at the Pottery. He made a very classical frieze for the Roxy Cinema in Birkenhead and a doorway for the Wayfarers Café in Liverpool (both destroyed). He may also have been responsible for the glazed polychrome relief plaque (c.1900), representing a grotesque male figure with a foliate lower body flanked by two leaping stags, which was presented to Birkenhead Central Library by Harold Rathbone. He exhibited portrait medallions at the Liverpool Autumn Exhibitions of 1905 and 1906. After the closure of the Della Robbia Pottery, he moved to 141 Bridge Street, Birkenhead, where he remained until his death, working principally on headstones and crosses for cemeteries. He was a good linguist and taught both languages and anatomy.
Bibliography: Mapping Sculpture; E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, pp. 16–17, 21, 224; Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Della Robbia Pottery, Birkenhead, 1894–1906, Birkenhead, 1981, pp. 9–12, 35–36; Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, The Della Robbia Pottery, Birkenhead, 1894–1906: An Interim Report, Birkenhead, 2004, n. p.
Emma Roberts, 2012
