FERRUCCIO FERRAZZI
Rome, 1891 - 1978

Portrait of little girl
Encaustic, 32,5 x 24 x 3 cm
Signed lower right: Ferrazzi

BIOGRAPHY: His father, Stanislao, is a sculptor who initiates him into art. Ferruccio is the elder brother of three other children: Riccardo (who will become a painter with the name of Benvenuto, in memory of Cellini), Adele and Maria. Between 1904 and 1905 he attended the studio of Francesco Bergamini, a pupil of Michele Cammarano; while between 1906 and 1908 he enrolled at the same time at the Free Nude School and at the evening school of the French Academy. . He surprised the Roman artistic environment by making his debut in 1907, at the age of sixteen, in the LXXVII Exposition of Fine Arts, where he exhibited a self-portrait in which the color is freely applied with the palette knife. The following year he won a scholarship at the Catel Institute, which finally allowed him to devote himself completely to art. It is in fact placed under the artistic protection of Max Roeder, a landscape painter of Boecklinian ancestry, who introduced him to the colony of German artists. In 1910 he was admitted to the 9th Venice Biennale, where his work was placed in the "Youth Room". In 1911 the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome bought him the painting Focolare exhibited in the international exhibition in Rome. Finally at the end in the same year he won the National Artistic Pension. At the beginning of the new year he is already in Paris with his father to study the rotations of light in the ancient and modern painters in museums, among them Georges Seurat. . In this period the artist thus alternates works of Futurist ancestry (he is a friend of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti) with others of Cézannian influence. . Experiment with new pictorial recipes and frequent the Prints and Drawings Department. He also appears well inserted in the artistic and intellectual milieu of the capital: he is very close friends with Federico Tozzi, a soldier in Rome, with Luigi Trifoglio, Roberto Melli, Giacomo Balla and Mario Broglio. Between August 1915 and February 1916 he enrolled in the music institute.
The results of his efforts can be seen as early as 1916 at the LXXXV Exhibition of the Society of Amateurs and Cultors of Fine Arts, where he personally sets up the room that is assigned to him as the interior of a prism, where the paintings and pictorial fragments show irregular shapes, skewed, linked to the complex perspective concepts of the same works. While the Roman environment cries out to scandal and the Pensionato is removed from him, whose regulations prohibit him from exhibiting, the Signorelli spouses, patrons of Armando Spadini, buy him some works, including a sculpture, Pietà. He then obtained a new studio where he already lives with the whole family, in the archaeological area of