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Ferrazzi, Ferruccio
(b Rome, 15 March 1891; d Rome, 8 Dec 1978). Italian painter and sculptor. He began as an assistant to his sculptor father, Stanislao Ferrazzi (d 1943), and attended the Scuola Libera del Nudo (1905–8) and from 1908 studied under Max Roeder (1866–1947) at the Istituto di Belle Arti in Rome. Success came early when The Hearth (1910; Rome, G.N.A. Mod.), influenced by Giovanni Segantini, was bought by the state at the Esposizione Universale, Rome (1911). He assimilated French influences in Paris in 1913, adopting freer brushwork and shaped canvases and roughening his sculptures’ surfaces (e.g. The Lovers, clay, 1915; destr.; see Ragghianti, pl. 30). In 1916 he visited Montreux, where he discovered the work of Cézanne. Ferrazzi subsequently destroyed many early works and embarked on a rich period of classicism, with such Ingresque nudes as Merry Life No. 2 (1922; Rome, Pal. Braschi). Mannerist fantasy infused the portrayal of his wife as a Madonna in Nocturnal Festival (1921–3; priv. col., see Ragghianti, pl. 107), which established Ferrazzi’s maturity within the Scuola Romana. A series of psychologically piercing portraits followed, introducing a crystalline symbolism, while he won international recognition when Tragic Voyage (1925; Pittsburgh, PA, Carnegie Mus. A.) was exhibited in New York in 1926. In the later 1920s Ferrazzi painted increasingly frenzied and disturbing symbolic animal subjects at Casalaccio di Tivoli. Official commissions followed his appointment as Professor of Decoration at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome in 1929. These included the lengthy Apocalypse mosaic project (1933–54; Acqui, Ottolenghi Mausoleum). The horrors of World War II and his father’s death sparked a psychological crisis that resulted in nightmarish images (e.g. Years of Horror—The Room, 1943–6; priv. col., see Ragghianti, pl. 200), but he subsequently resumed mural painting, producing, for example, encaustics for S Benedetto, Rome (Life of St Benedict; 1949).
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