L'ultima casa di Ferruccio Ferrazzi

• Autores: Livia Spano
• Localización: Prospettiva: rivista di storia dell'arte antica e moderna, ISSN 0394-0802, Nº. 137, 2010, págs. 51-85
• Idioma: italiano
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • This study aims to illustrate the sculptures that populate the last home of Ferruccio Ferrazi and the design of the shrine made by the artist who, after having made a name for himself in Roman artistic circles, escaped to a voluntary exile on Argentario.it is here, in the silence of the natural vegetation, that the artist rediscovered his vocation as a craftsman of antiquity. In contact with the earth and raw materials, he lived and worked by carving the rocky spurs of the garden surrounding the little house. The production of the artist’s final years, almost all of it sculptural, is little known by critics who have always considered him a painter. On the contrary, Ferrazzi, inspired by a powerful constructive impulse, chose “perpetual art”, sculpture, to give expression to his spiritual testament. The rock animals animating the garden of Santa Liberata and the unfinished blocks of nenfro (tufa rock) stuck into the ground are, both in their subjects and in their style, a synthesis of his life and art. For these Tuscan sculptures Ferrazzi, a shrewd observer of the art of the old masters from whom he sought and drew a constant teaching, was inspired by medieval Romanesque sculpture and, even more, by the energetic force of the Gothic art of Giovanni Pisano, an artist he particularly admired and studied.

    The years during which ferrazzi lived on Argentario are the same years in wich he contemplated and designed the family shrine, the ‘last home’, as he liked to call it. The long genesis of this monumental work, examined for the first time in the second part of the essay, demonstrates – in the evolution of the drawings and sketches, in the long development and elaboration of the mosaics that decorate it – the artist’s concept of death and life: both never unconnected from art. A tomb that is a material realization of his concept of death as a return to mother nature, to the Cosmos, to the Solis rota: an entirely pantheistic idea which Ferrazzi comes to through the study of Lucretius and the ancient Veda texts. Studying and understanding how the artist’s concept of death evolved and how it was expressed in the elaboration of his shrine has made possible the certain attribution to him of a small sculpture found not far from his tomb in the cementery of Orbetello.