Praying Girl by Roberto Ferruzzi

Praying Girl by Roberto Ferruzzi

Before the picture on the wall

A girl of perhaps eight or ten stands in profile, facing right, with her hands pressed together in front of her chest and her face turned up. Her lips are slightly parted and her eyes are fixed on something above her. Her brown hair is loose and falls down her back, a little untidy, with a strand across her ear.

What she is looking at is only partly in the picture. At the right edge hangs a large gilded frame, its carved border catching the light, and above it a small lantern hangs from an iron bracket on a chain. We see the frame and the lamp but not the image inside the frame; Ferruzzi leaves it to the girl's face to tell us that it is something she prays to. The arrangement is that of a small shrine: a wall, a framed image, a lamp, and someone who has stopped in front of them.

Everyday clothes

She is dressed for the day, not for church. She wears a pale blouse, open at the neck, with the sleeves pushed back at the wrists, and a dark skirt. A shawl printed with green and yellow flowers has slipped off her shoulders and hangs around her arms and back, its folds loosely painted in broad strokes. The background is a plain wall of dusty pink and grey plaster, worked with a dry, scumbled brush, and at the lower left the dark red top of a bench or ledge runs out of the picture.

The light falls on her forehead, cheek and joined hands, leaving the back of her head and her hair in shadow. Everything else is kept soft and muted so that the eye goes to her face and her fingertips.

What the records say

The picture is not the Madonnina, the painting of a young girl holding a sleeping infant that Ferruzzi showed at the second Venice Biennale in 1897 and that is now his best-known work. It is a different and much less documented picture.

The Fine Art Images collection, distributed through Heritage Images, lists it as Praying Girl, an oil painting in the M. Kroshitsky Art Museum in Sevastopol. It lists the artist as Roberto Ferruzzi, marked "attributed", and dates the work only to the nineteenth century. We have not found a museum catalogue entry that gives its date, size or history.

The painter

Roberto Ferruzzi was born on 16 December 1853 at Sebenico, now Šibenik in Croatia, then part of the Austrian Empire. After his father's death he studied classics in Dalmatia, and in 1868 he enrolled at the Liceo Marco Foscarini in Venice. He took a law degree at the University of Padua but chose to paint instead, and as a painter he was self-taught. He first exhibited in Turin in 1883, with figure paintings.

He painted at least one other child at prayer. His La prima penitenza of 1887, shown in Venice, is a genre scene of a boy saying the rosary as a penance for bad behaviour while his grandmother looks on, amused. Hush! won an award at the Palermo exhibition of 1891–92. He died in Venice on 16 February 1934.

About this print

Made from the available photograph of the painting, in its upright format, with the girl, her shawl and the edge of the gilded frame all in view.

Sources: Heritage Images / Fine Art Images, "'Praying Girl', Italian painting of 19th century. Artist: Roberto Ferruzzi" (image 2495282) · Wikipedia, "Roberto Ferruzzi"