Ninetta – The Prayer (1941)

Signed and dated in the top centre “Al caro don Giovanni Fallani / Ferr. Ferrazzi 1941”.

On the back, label of the “Pontifical Central Commission for Sacred Art in Italy, Rome Piazza della Cancelleria”.

Exhibitions: LXIII Exhibition of the Rome Gallery, Rome 1943; Exhibition of Sacred Art, Milan-Bologna-Rome 1968.

1941, a crucial year of Ferruccio Ferrazzi’s full maturity, saw the artist design and work on the decoration of the Galileo Hall at the University of Padua, the result of a complex elaboration that was to end in one of his most important pictorial undertakings, executed in encaustic on plaster. Ninetta – La preghiera (Ninetta – The Prayer ) was executed in the same year and encompasses the same experimental fervour that Ferrazzi had been involved in since the early 1930s: after having studied Pompeian painting technique in the late 1920s, like an authentic old master, he threw himself body and soul into spasmodic research, spending ‘nights in the basement fiddling with combinations of enamels, varnishes and supports…’ he wrote in 1943: ‘… on the painting, still damp from the plaster, I would spread a veil of dissolved and liquid wax, to be penetrated by the flame, and after polishing it with irons, I would obtain the stone-like material, fixing the values of the tones of the wet colour. This was a far cry from an ancient craft that has now decayed…”[1].

1] The fruit of these experiments are not only the large murals of the 1930s and 1940s, but also small and precious encaustic paintings on different types of supports, even occasional ones such as tiles or fragments of terracotta, which mainly depict family portraits, exhibited for the first time at the Rome Quadriennale in 1939, including Fabiola piccola (with fruit), Donna velata, Autoritratto, Donna che cammina, Ninetta piccola and La bella Ninetta. Ninetta (Metella), Ferrazzi’s second daughter, his assistant for many years and an indispensable figure who kept her father’s archive and his entire impressive oeuvre and memory alive, is also the protagonist of the encaustic under examination, executed in 1941 and dedicated ‘To dear Don Giovanni Fallani’. Monsignor Giovanni Fallani, a humanist, scholar of Dantean literature and ancient and modern art, and convinced of the need for a renewal of the sacred arts, was close to many artists during the years of the regime, including Ferrazzi. Secretary of the Pontifical Central Commission for Sacred Art in Italy – whose plaque is preserved on the verso of the work – and of which the monsignor was later appointed president in 1956, Fallani dedicated several articles to Ferrazzi in ‘L’Osservatore Romano’, evidence of the bond between the two, along with correspondence. The work was exhibited in Ferrazzi’s important anthological exhibition at the Galleria di Roma in 1943, together with one hundred and forty-two other works, including several other encaustic paintings dedicated to the family. In Ninetta’s face and eyes, that lyrical, solemn and precious hieraticity returns that Ferrazzi had observed and studied in the Fayoum portraits kept at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1937, when he was a member of the jury of the Carnegie Prize in Pittsburgh. An erudite and exciting mixture of ancient and modern, in the ancestral memory of Roman painting, both in the choice of encaustic and in the memory of those young faces with deep, expressive eyes, like those of his daughter Ninetta.

Ferruccio Ferrazzi, born in Rome in 1891, acquired his first rudiments of drawing from his artist father, but between 1904 and 1905 he attended the studio of genre painter Francesco Bergamini. In the same years, he completed his training at the Scuola Libera del Nudo (Free School of the Nude), before making his debut at only sixteen years of age with a Self-portrait exhibited in 1907 at the Exhibition of Amateurs and Connoisseurs, where two years later he presented La calce, a Divisionist painting.

[1] F. Ferrazzi, Dell’ encausto, in L’encausto di Ferruccio Ferrazzi, exhibition catalogue, Pisa, 1971

Elena Lago