Benvenuto (Riccardo) FERRAZZI Castel Madama, 1892-Roma, 1969

The painting is signed and dated 1940 at the bottom of the poem written in the book bottom left. We may consider this version to be later than another now in the collections of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome (GNAM) and, like that version, to be exemplary both for its lofty artistic quality and for the complexity of the theme addressed. In other words, it is a pivotal work in which the artist expounds a veritable compendium of his thought.
On the back of our picture we can clearly make out the dedication to a lawyer named Alfredo Piccone, a Ferrazzi family friend whose name crops up in a folder of documents kept with Ferruccio’s papers, entitled “corrispondenza avv. Piccone – Gasperini”, containing a number of letters concerning the division of Stanislao Ferrazzi’s inheritance among his four children, a long drawn-out tussle that was only resolved in around 1941.
This painting differs from the version in the GNAM in the poem penned in the open exercise book, almost certainly a poem composed by Benvenuto himself, it goes: “oh sommo Iddio che la scorza frale/ della vita mortal a me donasti,/ schiavo del mondo del denaro; / conturbato dal sesso che ci atterra./ Stanco di vita grama e gli occhi fisso / sull’infinito ciel nero e perlaceo! / vorrei volare e celarmi al mondo….”.
A photograph of the painting in the Ferruccio Ferrazzi Archive has a handwritten note in the artist’s own hand on the back stating: “Castelmadama maggio 1941 – proprietario l’autore IXX (sic!)” (1) , and shows how that part was repainted, probably in the wake of his decision to make a gift of it to Piccone.
The picture’s composition is interesting inasmuch as it is divided into three opposing planes symbolising lies and truth through the contrast created by the area of shade and light, from which the artist’s face rises to the surface. He almost appears to emanate his own glow, together with the doll, the umbrella and the open book – and together with a vase of almost wilted flowers, possibly to remind us that “sic transit gloria mundi”. It is as though these objects had been the recipients of divine grace. This is the new awareness that has struck the painter who, with his calm, pensive face, looks out at us while adopting the same pose as in Melancholy (1514), Dürer’s most enigmatic work which, among the scholastic depictions of the virtues, symbolises the intellectual virtues (2).
Behind the artist we see an area of shadow defined below by a piece of the frame and a fragment of lettering which should be read from right to left – almost a warning: “ad haec mors” – and it is almost as though it is reflected in an imaginary mirror displaying the traditional depiction of Death pointing to a group of objects surmounted by a skull. Earthly goods, “that which is vain and transitory” (to use Sinibaldi’s words cited above) represent “vanitas”. The objects are a fan, an inkwell and a violin, assembled alongside other objects in a doubtless far from chance arrangement associated with Masonic iconography, such as a book, a compass, a set square and a ruler, emblematically juxtaposed with the lettering that we can just make out on the wall bearing the date: 15 March 1939 and a bare list of the artist’s earthly possessions: camicia 1/fazzoletti 4/ asciugamani 1 [shirt, 1 / handkerchiefs, 4 / towels, 1].
Placed symmetrically across from the figure of Death, we see a lantern. It does not illuminate anything; rather, it symbolises the search for Truth and it is here to indicate the real presence of God, a fact underscored also by the votive aedicula with the Sacred Heart of Jesus surmounted by a dove, a bird traditionally used to represent the Holy Spirit and the Resurrection, a concept highlighted also by the olive branch framing it. And finally, we have a stuffed owl whose wings have been nailed to the wall, an animal symbolically associated with the goddess Athena and with knowledge, bolstering the interpretation of this work as an ode to rebirth, an event that occurred for Ferrazzi under the banner of the faith, without which he considered even knowledge to be pointless.
Benvenuto Ferrazzi painted and showed a number of self-portraits from 1931 onwards. In addition to the picture under discussion in this essay, we know of at least four other small self-portraits and of two large and complex compositions with the same subject: Self-portrait in the Study (1942) in which the painter portrays himself as a full-figure reflection in the mirror, formerly in the Sinibaldi collection but now lost; and a Study with Self-portrait or Chimera (1958) now in the collections of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Rome. We know for certain that the painting called Meditation, often also termed Self-portrait with Death, though dated 1931, was shown at the 6th Quadriennale in Rome in 1951 and that it was purchased on that occasion for the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna(3). Also, a Self-portrait was certainly shown at the 4th Quadriennale in 1943 and subsequently also at one-man exhibitions held at the Galleria Fiorani in 1952 and at the Galleria di Roma in 1958, but the paltry nature of the iconographic documentation relating to the works that he showed prevents us from stating with any certainty exactly which works they were.
We know little regarding the artist’s formative years, other than that he trained in the workshop of his father Stanislao Ferrazzi. The younger brother of the better-known Ferruccio, he travelled to Paris in 1913, where he is listed among the copyists in the Louvre (4). On his return to Rome, after changing his name from Riccardo to Benvenuto as a tribute to Cellini, he began to show his work at the exhibitions organised by the “Casa d’Arte Bragaglia” gallery in the aftermath of World War I.
In the course of the 1920s, after abandoning his initial stylistic debt to Futurism, Benvenuto developed an enchanted, dreamlike, fairy-tale kind of “realism” that has an elective affinity with the painting of Henry Rosseau (and like the Douanier’s work, so Benvenuto’s, too, is far from simple to interpret), a personal painterly style of which our picture is a perfect example, the artist becoming the bearer of a complex and unique poetic message in the panorama of Italian art that places him closer, if anything, to the final throes of European Symbolism – a fact deftly pointed out by Moreschini in the exhaustive monograph that she has recently devoted to the painter, thus restoring him to his rightful place on the international art scene(5).
Benevenuto’s painting is characterised by the definition of areas of colour using a firm outline, a feature not always readily understood by the critics of his own day but which shows a certain affinity with the paintings of his contemporaries Riccardo Francalancia and Antonio Donghi, particularly with the paintings rich in atmosphere, in suspended reality, that echo the mood of Magic Realism.
Rightly considering him to be a solitary, reserved painter, critics grasped his creative independence from the outset, describing him as an artist who paints without imitating any master(6). He was the painter of disappearing Rome, which he set himself the task of painting with almost monastic devotion and with a wealth of detail, and of the down-and-outs(7), an approach to society that drew him close to the experiments that had been conducted in Rome by Balla and by other artists since the early years of the 20th century, to the mood of so-called “Humanitarian Socialism”. This cultural proximity is borne out also by the rediscovery in the Archivio Randone(8) of three photographs reproducing works by Benvenuto Ferrazzi, dedicated to the good Master Randone as a mark of esteem, thus further confirming the areas of interest of this as yet little-studied artist – areas of interest which prompted him to address issues associated with man’s deepest spirituality and to reflect, in particular, on the eschatological aspects of the human condition(9).
“A painter who is painfully aware of the voices of the things that surround him, and he allows his spirit to be dominated and devastated by them…” (10), is the description offered by Alfredo Sinibaldi, the artist’s patron and benefactor who, in his essay entitled Benvenuto Ferrazzi pittore macabro two years earlier, had also called him: “...A simple man without expectations, without ambitions, a man who loathes praise. He lives a simple life because he considers that man needs few things and that it is not worth becoming a slave to possessions. In fact, he wonders why men labour so much to possess that which is vain and transitory…”(11)

Note:

1. The minor discrepancy in the dating can probably be explained by the fact that in 1926 it became compulsory to indicate not only the current year but also the year in the so-called “Fascist Era”: XIX stretched from 28 October 1940 to 27 October 1941.
2. Stefania Massari, Francesco Negri Arnoldi, Arte e scienza dell’incisione, La nuova Italia Scientifica, Rome 1994, p. 56
3. It differs from our picture in the detail of the signature in the open exercise book, which simply bears the words: maggio 1931/Ferrazzi.
4. Archivio Ferruccio Ferrazzi, Rome
5. Laura Moreschini has detected an affinity with American Symbolist painter Elihu Vedder (New York 1836 – Rome 1923) (see Laura Moreschini, Gli anni Venti. L’art Noveau e il Socialismo Umanitario, in Benvenuto Ferrazzi (1892 -1969) Il realismo fantastico tra le avanguardie del Novecento, catalogue of the exhibition curated by Laura Moreschini and Valerio Rivosecchi, Musei della Scuola Romana, Casino dei Principi Villa Torlonia, Rome 25 May – 25 September 2016, Artemide editore 2016, p. 51), while in 1986 Mario Quesada detected an affinity with Swiss painter Felix Vallotton (1865 – 1925) (see Mario Quesada, Benvenuto Ferrazzi, Roma 1934 exhibition catalogue, ed. Giuseppe Appella and Fabrizio D’Amico, Modena 1986, p. 176)
6. Alfredo Sinibaldi, Benvenuto Ferrazzi pittore macabro, Cortona 1928, s.p.
7. Cipriano Efisio Oppo, Benvenuto Ferrazzi pittore della povera gente, in “La Tribuna” 14 March 1934
8. Francesco Randone, known as “The Master of the Walls” (Turin 1864 – Rome 1935) was the father of Ferruccio Ferrazzi’s wife Orizia. A painter, ceramicist and educator, we know that Randone was close both to the Theosophic Society and to Free Masonry; the photographs include a reproduction of the painting entitled My Dead Grandmother (1922), formerly in the collection of Angelo Signorelli.
9. It may be no coincidence that the draft of a letter discovered in the “Piccone – Gasperini” file is written on the back of a communication from the Secretariat of the Italian Theosophic Society.
10. Alfredo Sinibaldi, L’opera di Benvenuto Ferrazzi, Rome 1930.
11. Alfredo Sinibaldi, Benvenuto Ferrazzi pittore…op. cit. (1928), s.p.