La cappuccina

Signed top right: ‘Ferrazzi Tivoli 1928’.

Exhibitions: Rome, I Quadriennale d’Arte Nazionale, 1931, p. 61, no. 5

Bibliography: C. L. Ragghianti, J. Recupero, Ferruccio Ferrazzi, Rome, Officina Edizioni, 1974, illustr. p. 146-147; Il Novecento di Ferruccio Ferrazzi (1891 -1978), exhibition catalogue curated by A. Imbellone (Rome, Galleria Berardi, 10 October – 23 November 2019), Rome, Galleria Berardi 2019, tab. 96.

La cappuccina, a work exhibited by Ferruccio Ferrazzi at the I Quadriennale in Rome in 1931, perfectly expresses that condition of serene idyll lived in the ‘sacred’ dimension of family affection and those symbolic customs that characterise the artist’s entire maturity. In the portraits of the 1920s, from the intimate prismatic visions to the portrait of Herta Ottolenghi with her son Astolfo of 1924, Ferrazzi arrives at a solid measure, at a highly personal return to order that is registered in the modern decodification of a 15th-century tradition reworked through subtle material, formal and luministic research.

This portrait of his wife Horitia with their daughters Fabiola and Ninetta was painted between the late 1920s and early 1930s at Casalaccio, the bucolic country house so dear to the artist, converted from a former convent near Tivoli, which Ferruccio’s father, Stanislao, had chosen as his elective place of retreat and work as early as 1917. The figures, depicted from a close-up viewpoint, appear solemn and almost hieratic, Masaccio-like in their size and volume, particularly Horitia, who, welcoming little Ninetta between her draped legs, recalls the Madonna of Masaccio’s Saint Anne Metterza in the Uffizi.

And the background, an elegiac opening onto the cultivated hills, is a vivid declaration of the predilection for country life, for an innate bond with nature, which develops into a true ruralist poetics, identifiable in all of Ferrazzi’s production from the 1920s onwards. A tendency confirmed by the artist’s words in the presentation published in the catalogue of the 1931 Quadriennale in Rome, where Cipriano Efisio Oppo assigned him a personal room: ‘I built a life as I needed it: free and serene and simple. From my family origins I have drawn a taste for the land and for long periods of isolation and tenacious work […]. I feel I have harmoniously composed in me the moved and solemn human vision: the love of nature and the impetus of imagination’[1]. 1] The visions of this period, interwoven with solid rural and family memories, are all brought together in the 1931 exhibition, from which the approach to the genuineness of form, to the purity of colour, to the luminosity of the atmosphere that makes things solid and envelops them in a single micro-universe shines through. An aspect that is fully grasped in Roberto Papini’s review in ‘Emporium’, where the painting La Cappuccina is illustrated on page 338: ‘The construction of his paintings has an inner logic that is architectural: lines, masses, tones have a correspondence between them dictated by a counterpoint that is both instinctive and meditated’[2]. The allegory of a modern Arcadia is translated into the simple and balanced image of a woman dressed only in a long white robe beside her daughters, just as it appeared in the earlier 1925 portrait Horitia and Fabiola at Casalaccio.

[1] F. Ferrazzi, Room VIII. Mostra personale di Ferruccio Ferrazzi, in Prima Quadriennale d’Arte Nazionale, exhibition catalogue (Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, January-June 1931), p. 59.

[2] R. Papini, Prima Quadriennale. Arte nazionale esposta a Roma, ‘Emporium’, LXXIII, 438, p. 339.

Elena Lago