Italian school (XX) - Fanciulla con Angelo

Renato Ferrini was born in Orbetello in 1910. At only eighteen, he held his first solo exhibition, and the following year he moved to Florence to attend the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1936 he settled in Rome, where he began portraiture within the film industry. His extraordinary ability to capture the likeness of faces soon made him one of the most highly regarded Italian film poster artists.

He collaborated with the major American film studios present in Italy, including Warner Bros., Fox Film, and Paramount, producing posters and promotional portraits of Hollywood's great actors. He also worked for important Italian directors such as Fellini, Visconti, Rossellini, De Sica, Pasolini, Monicelli, and Comencini.

In 1955 he began a long collaboration with the Italian Post Office as a stamp designer, and from 1962 he was invited by the United Nations as the Italian representative for stamp issuance design, a role he held for life.

Works kept in America

Ferrini did not mount a solo exhibition in the United States that left extensive documentary records, but many of his works entered important American private collections. Today the artist’s paintings and drawings are present in New York and Miami, as well as Montevideo, Stockholm, and Paris.

Among the works most known and sought after by American collectors are:

* the portraits created for Warner Bros. in 1937 dedicated to great Hollywood performers such as Edward G. Robinson, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Paul Muni, and Joan Blondell;
* the Italian film posters for famous American movies;
* the original lobby cards of films that became iconic, such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Bullitt;
* the stamp designs created for the United Nations, today present on the international collectibles market.

His painting

Ferrini’s artistic production is less well known than his advertising work but of great interest. His paintings often feature:

* idealized female figures;
* allegorical and symbolist subjects;
* lyrical landscapes;
* sacred and mythological themes;
* refined portraits executed with a high-level academic technique.

The works he created between the forties and sixties are generally considered the most interesting from a collectible point of view. They combine the precision of the cinematic portraitist with the sensibility of a painter from the Roman school.

If your painting Fanciulla con Angelo is authentically by Renato Ferrini, the allegorical subject of the young woman with the winged putto perfectly aligns with his privately held mid-twentieth-century painting output.

He died in Rome in 2005, at the age of 94, in his home near Via Margutta, leaving an artistic corpus ranging from painting to film posters, from advertising graphics to international philately.