Dwight Frye: Film History Series

Photographer Unknown, “Dwight Frye”, circa 1930s, Studio Photo, Gelatin Silver Print, Universal Pictures, Private Collection

Born in the central Kansas city of Salina in February of 1899, Dwight Frye was an American stage and screen actor who appeared in over sixty films during his career.

Born into the farming family of Charles Fry and Ella Dodd, a deeply devout member of the Christian Scientist church, Dwight Frye at an early age relocated with his family to Denver, Colorado where he spent his formative years. Already showing signs as a career musician, Frye gave his first solo recital on the piano at the age of fifteen. However by his senior high school year, he had developed a love for the theater and made the decision to pursue acting.

While working as a secretary in a Denver business firm, Frye spent his free time at the acting academy founded by stage and film actress Margaret Fealy. Recognized for his acting skill, he joined the Denham Stock Company and performed primarily in comedic and musical productions. Frye began touring with the company as its juvenile lead; however he soon became an actor much in demand. In 1918 during the influenza outbreak, Frye performed with the Woodward Players at theaters in Spokane, Washington where he was lauded as the local celebrity.

Dwight Frye relocated to New York City to seek success on its Broadway theater circuit. He played a romantic role in Hubert Osborne’s 1923 adaptation of Julian Street’s novel “Rita Coventry” at the Bijou Theatre. In 1924, Frye received recognition for his role in the production of Luigi Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author” at the Princess Theatre. This was followed by the role of Melville Tuttle in Patrick Kearney’s 1925 three-act play “A Man’s Man” at the 52nd Street Theatre.

Frye’s acting career in Hollywood began with several uncredited roles in films produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Brothers Pictures, and Fox Film Company between 1926 and 1930. With the advent of sound films, he became known for his portrayal of villains and unbalanced characters. Frye’s first role of note was the madman R. M. Renfield in Tod Browning’s 1931 “Dracula”, a Garrett Fort adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel for Universal Pictures.

In the 1930s, Dwight Frye had supporting roles within thirty-eight movies; he alternated his characters between horror, drama, adventure, and crime films. In 1931, Frye performed two of his better-known roles: Fritz, the hunchbacked assistant in James Whale’s “Frankenstein” for Universal Pictures, and gunman Wilmer Cook in Roy Del Ruth’s directorial film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon”. Frye also portrayed the suspected killer in “The Vampire Bat” and a reporter in “The Invisible Man”, both 1933 Universal Pictures productions. He later took the role of Dr. Thomas, playing opposite Erich von Stroheim’s Dr. Crespi, in John H. Auer’s 1935 horror film “The Crime of Dr. Crespi” produced by Liberty Pictures.

In 1935, Frye returned to Universal Pictures to take the supporting role of Karl in what became another Universal Pictures classic, James Whale’s “The Bride of Frankenstein”. Other films in the 1930s included two with James Cagney: the 1930 crime drama “The Doorway to Hell” and the role of Mr. Easton in the 1937 musical “Something to Sing About”. Other films include the 1937 action movie “Sea Devils”, the 1938 crime films “Invisible Enemies” and “The Night Hawk”, the 1938 South Seas adventure film “Sinners in Paradise”, and director James Whale’s 1939 historical drama “The Man in the Iron Mask”.

In the early 1940s, Dwight Frye performed in both film roles and stage productions that ranged from comedies to musicals; he also made an appearance in a Broadway stage production of “Dracula” with Bela Lugosi. In the early stages of World War II, Frye made a contribution to the war effort by working at night as a tool designer for the Lockheed Aircraft Company.

In the early 1940s, American screenwriter and producer Lamar Trotti was working on a screen play for a biopic about Woodrow Wilson, aided by the assistance of Wilson’s daughter Eleanor and journalist Ray Stannard Baker. After the role of President Wilson was cast, Frye was chosen for the role of Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. A few days before his scheduled filming, Dwight Frye died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four on the seventh of November in 1943. His funeral service was held at the Utter-McKinley Mortuary and his body was buried at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park.

Notes: Produced by 20th Century-Fox, the 1944 “Wilson” received critical acclaim and earned ten nominations at the 17th Academy Awards, wining five including Best Writing and Original Screenplay.

Live Journal, a community publishing platform, has an excellent memorial article on Dwight Frye at its site: https://vintage-gold.livejournal.com/1366.html

Tales from the Border has a 2015 article entitled “What a Character! Blogathon: The Ballad of Dwight Frye” that has information not available on other sites: https://talesfromtheborder.com/2015/11/21/what-a-character-blogathon-the-ballad-of-dwight-frye/

Top Insert Image: Film Shot, “Dwight Frye as Flandrin”, 1933, “The Circus Queen Murder”, Director Roy William Neill, Cinematography Joseph H. August, Columbia Pictures

Second Insert Image: Film Shot, “Dwight Frye as Renfield”, 1931, “Dracula”, Director Tod Browning, Cinematography Karl Freund, Universal Pictures

Third Insert Image: Film Shot, “Dwight Frye as Jessop”, 1931, “The Black Camel” (Charlie Chan Series), Director Hamilton MacFadden, Cinematography Joseph August and Daniel B. Clark, Fox Film Corporation

Bottom Insert Image: Film Shot, “Dwight Frye as Wilmer Cook”, 1931, “The Maltese Falcon”, Director Roy Del Ruth, Cinematography William Rees, Warner Brothers Pictures

Stéphane Bouquet: “One of Those Vibrations in the Air”

Photographers Unknown, One of Those Vibrations in the Air

His look and it took maybe 3
hello / seconds
only his head underneath the blue hoodie
he takes off
because the rain is stopping look here’s
the planner’s confirmation and
someone’s holding an imaginary map of the conversation we’ll say
that and that
the streets wil be all orderly
if I stay close inside
the zones he surveys
but it isn’t easy
imagining that the table and the lamp and the evening
sound like his breathlessness when he uncovers me and cleans

Stéphane Bouquet, The Next Loves I, The Next Loves, September 2019, Translations by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Bed t-shirt and husky voice
we do yoga together much less strong
than I am but so much more beautiful
at the end in savasana when we’re supposed to become
one of those vibrations in the air and the ritual bell
sets us
almost behind absence I can only
think like an animal to live oh oh
oh that long slim desire
stretched out a meters away if I
rolled over on him really would that from now on be the only
hope of slowing
because of the sweetness in your bones
the quickness of death against which I recite a rose
is a rose is a rose is a rose

Stéphane Bouquet, The Next Loves V, The Next Loves, September 2019, Translations by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Born in Paris in October of 1967, Stéphane Bouquet was a French poet, author, actor, screenwriter, choreographer, film critic and an established translator of works from the New York School of Poets..

Born to a French nurse and an American soldier, Stéphane Bouquet studied at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris from which he graduated with his Master of Arts in Economics. After his studies, he was employed as a culture journalist and writer for the renowned “Cahiers du Cinéma”, the oldest French-language film magazine in publication. As a longtime film critic, Bouquet published books on such directors Gus Van Sant, Clint Eastwood and Sergei Eisenstein, as well as a work on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 epic neorealist biblical drama “The Gospel According to St. Matthew”.

Bouquet published his first collection of poems, “Dand l’Année de cet Âge (In the Year of this Age)”, in 2001 through Champ Vallon Éditions. Taken from the inscription “in anno aetatis” engraved on Roman tombs, the series of poems follow the day to day life of a man as he ponders life and death. Bouquet wrote seven more collections of poetry among which are “Vie Commune” (2016) and “Les Amours Suivants” (2013). These two works, later translated into English by Lindsay Turner, were reprinted as “Common Life” and “The Next Loves”.

As a screenwriter, Stéphane Bouquet, in collaboration with French director Sébastien Lifshitz, wrote the screenplay for the 2001 autobiographical feature film “La Traversée (The Crossing)”. With Bouquet in the lead role, the film followed the real-life search for the father Bouquet never met. Continuing his collaboration with Lifshitz, he wrote several screenplays for both short and feature LBGTQ films; these include “Les Corps Ouverts (Open Bodies)”, “Les Vies de Thérèse (The Lives of Thérèse)”, “Presque Rien (Come Undone)”, and “Côté Sauvage (Wild Side)”, a winner of four film festival awards. Bouquet also wrote screenplays for French directors Valérie Mréjen, Yann Dedet, and Robert Cantarella.

Bouquet was awarded a 2002-2003 fellowship at the Villa Medici in Rome. During this time, he participated as a dancer in contemporary choreographer Mathilde Monnier’s 2002 production “Déroutes” at the Festival d’Automne de Paris. Bouquet served as both dancer and screenwriter for Monnier’s “Frère & Soeur” that premiered at the Centre Pompidou during the 2005 Avignon Festival. He also conducted workshops for choreographers at the Centre National de la Danse in Paris as well as workshops for actors and stage directors at La Manufacture in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Stéphane Bouquet translated into French the works of such American poets as James Schuyler, Paul Blackburn, and Peter Gizzi. He served as literary critic for the daily French newspaper “Libération” and contributed articles to the evening “Le Monde”. Bouquet was a featured speaker at international residencies and festivals including the 2018 Toronto Festival of Authors and the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair. A recipient of a 2003 Prix de Rome and a 2007 Mission Stendhal Award, Stéphane Bouquet died at the age of fifty-seven in Paris on the twenty-fourth of August in 2025.

Notes: Stéphane Bouquet’s poem “Light of the Fig” can be found at the World Literature Today site: https://worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/poetry/light-fig-stephane-bouquet

The Poetry Society of America has an article on Stéphane Bouquet’s style of poetry in its Visiting Poet section by the University of Denver’s Assistant Professor of English and Literary Arts Lindsay Turner: https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/visiting-poet/bouquet

Top Insert Image:Photographer Unknown, “Stéphane Bouquet”, 2018, Color Print, Eon Magazine, Number 54, Association for the Promotion of Culture, Art, Education and Scientific Research, Sibiu, Romania

Second Insert Image: Stéphane Bouquet, “The Next Loves (Les Amours Suivants)”, English Translation Paperback, September 2019, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Stéphane Bouquet, “Clint Fucking Eastwood”, January 2012, French Edition, Capricci Publishing Limited, London

Cornel Brudașcu

The Paintings of Cornel Brudașcu

Born in the Sălaj County village of Tusa in 1937, Cornel Brudașcu is a Romanian painter who began his career under the his country’s former Communist regime of the 1960s. He studied painting at the Universitatea de Artă şi Design in the north-western city of Cluj-Napoca. Over the course of his career, Brudașcu’s work gradually progressed into gestural compositions that melded figurative forms with abstraction.

After his university graduation in 1962, Brudașcu began to establish an impressive body of work. However, while there were opportunities for exhibitions in the 1960s, there was no established art market in Romania. In the 1970s, the only decade in which the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu allowed cultural exchange with the West, Brudașcu and other artists became acquainted with contemporary American art through Western magazines, reading rooms, and informal networks. Publications, such as Germany’s “Popcorn” and London’s “Oz”, offered images of counter-culture music and art movements beyond the Iron Curtain.

As a member of Romania’s 1970s avant-garde painters, Brudașcu experimented with solarized photography and created a series of Pop Art paintings, photo- based portraits of friends as well as figures appropriated from magazines. These works gained him international recognition in 2015 due to their inclusion at the Tate Modern’s “The World Goes Pop” in London. Both the Centre Pompidou and Musee d’Art Moderne at the Ville de Paris have works from this series in their collections.

Following his Pop Art images, Cornel Brudașcu made a radical shift away from his previous work. This change was the result of new visual elements and a more personal approach to his paintings’ themes and genres. At unspecified times over a period of fifteen years, Brudașcu created a collection of simple graphic sketches and small, untitled paintings with dark burgundy hues. He interwove those works with male figurative paintings of a post-impressionist style that were tinged with a distinct homoeroticism. This painterly series of figurative works bear witness through their dream-like compositions to his slow, poetic journey of gay affirmation.

As with many other Romanian artists, the subject of hero and anti-hero is a dominate theme in Brudașcu’s paintings. Influenced heavily by the works of El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos) who reached his artistic maturity in Spain, Brudașcu’s fluid expressionist style inspired the many master-class students who attended his studio to be independent in their thinking and work. Throughout his career, Brudașcu’s oeuvre has maintained a balance of intimacy and cultural commentary that has united local Romanian histories with broader art movements.

Cornel Brudașcu has continued to exhibit his work since 2005. Among his solo exhibitions were shows at Galeria Plan B in Berlin, the VNH Gallery in Paris and Spatiu Intact in Cluj, Romania. His paintings have been presented in group exhibitions in Berlin, Hong Kong, London, Paris, Bucharest, New York, Ostrava, and Leipzig, among others. Brudașcu continues to live and work in Cluj-Napoca as a teacher at the internationally renowned Fine Arts School of Cluj.

Notes: Galleria Plan B has a biography and a selection of Cornel Brudașcu’s work at its website: https://www.plan-b.ro

The online Frieze Magazine has an article on Cornel Brudașcu by art and culture writer Kristian Vistrup Madsen at its site: https://www.frieze.com/article/cornel-brudascu

A second article on Cornel Brudașcu by Kristian Madsen, that includes several images from various stages of his work, is located at The Clavert Journal site: https://www.plan-b.ro/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Cornel-Brudascu-The-Calvert-Journal-2017.pdf

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Cornel Brudascu”, Color Print, The Calvert Journal 2017, United Kingdom

Second Insert Image: Cornel Brudașcu, Untitled (Faces on Red Field), 2024, Oil on Canvas, 50 x 40 cm, Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris

Bottom Insert Image: Cornel Brudascu, Untitled (Figure/Blue Lines), 2019, Oil on Canvas, 51.8 x 47.9 cm, Allison Jacques Gallery, London

Alfred Kinsey: “The Living World Is a Continuum in Each and Every One of Its Aspects”

Photographer Unknown, (The Living World)

“Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.”

-Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, January 1, 1948, First Edition, W.B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia

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James Owen Mahoney

James Owen Mahoney, “The Etruscans”, Circa 1932, Oil on Canvas, 208.3 x 167.6 cm, Private Collection

Born in Dallas, Texas in October of 1907, James Owen Mahoney was an American artist noted for his canvas paintings and contributions to the revival of mural painting in the United States. He majored in art at Southern Methodist University from which he graduated in 1928. Mahoney continued his education at the Yale University School of Fine Art where he studied under painter Eugene Savage, a muralist who was trained in Early Renaissance techniques. The acquisition of these formal and technical Renaissance practices resulted in Mahoney’s mastery of tonal gradations and figurative modeling.

In 1932, Mahoney’s impressive work earned him the Prix de Rome and fellowship at the American Academy; he occupied a studio at the Academy’s palazzo on the Janiculum Hill in western Rome. This opportunity gave Mahoney direct exposure to the grandeur of Italy’s art, architecture and culture, an experience that remained with him throughout life. After returning to New York in 1936, he made the decision to focus on the genre of mural painting, an art style supported by the Federal Arts Project and favored by the public.

James Owen Mahoney eventually emerged as one of the leading muralists in the country. He received many commissions, among which were several murals to be displayed at the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition, two murals for the New York World’s Fair of 1939, and murals for private residences in New York, Connecticut, and Texas. After winning a national competition, Mahoney painted a third mural for the 1939 World’s Fair: a painting, measured one hundred by thirty-four feet, for the Building of the Government of the United States.

In 1939, Mahoney accepted an invitation from Dean Gilmore Clarke to become a member of Cornell University’s faculty at its College of Architecture. During the next three years, he regularly traveled between his Ithaca studio and his New York City apartment. In 1942, Mahoney joined the U.S. Army Air Corps and was stationed, after an officer training course, with a British military unit where he specialized in interpreting aerial photographs of enemy positions. After the war, Mahoney returned to Cornell University, took residence at the campus Faculty Club, and renewed his teaching responsibilities.

Although he maintained his ideals from Yale University, James Own Mahoney adapted his art teachings on theory and methods to a form of modified surrealism that combined trompe l’oeil elements, i.e. visual illusions, with real found objects, a characteristic of mid-twentieth century American art. Mahoney continued his mural work, albeit on a smaller scale as public favor for grand-scale murals had fallen, as well as his verre églomisé (reverse glass paintings) for sites in Baltimore, Atlanta, Ithaca and other cities. All these works were distinguished by their impeccable craftsmanship, Art Deco opulence, and suitability to the site.

Mahoney served as chairman of Cornell University’s Department of Art, during which he fostered a program that brought contemporary artists to Cornell. These artists presented their views and participated in critiques of student art. An individual with a complex personality, Mahoney was an avid and perceptive reader with strong literary opinions; his interests ranged from aesthetic theory to the latest fiction. Although trained in Renaissance traditions, he had high regard for the bucolic images of Samuel Palmer, the neo-primitive works of Henri Rousseau and the simple small-scale paintings of Giorgio Morandi.

James Owen Mahoney died at the age of eighty on the nineteenth of October in 1987 in Ithaca, New York. He left his library of approximately seven-thousand five-hundred volumes to the Cornell University Libraries, all the paintings in his possession to Cornell University’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum, and his house and furnishings to the Unitarian Church of Ithaca.

Notes: James Owen Mahoney’s “The Etruscans=, painted in 1932 during his tenure in Italy, is a powerful work. Imbued with grandeur, it captured Mahoney’s attention to line, sculptural forms, tonal gradations, and Art Deco flamboyance. Equally conscious of the art of composition, he filled the large-scale canvas with a surprisingly intimate and engaging scene.

Verre églomisé refers to the process of applying both a painted design and gilding onto the rear face of glass. In this process, the artist’s natural methodology is reversed, with highlights applied first and background applied last.

Top Insert Image: James Owen Mahoney, “The Red Bird”, Oil on Canvas, 195.9 x 182.6 cm, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

Second Insert Image: James Owen Mahoney, “Legend”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 160 x 2223.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: James Owen Mahoney, “Allegorical View of South Texas”, 1936, Mural Oil on Canvas, Hall of State, The State of Texas Building, Dallas, Texas

Bottom Insert Image: James Owen Mahoney, “Sunday Afternoon”, Oil on Canvas Stretched on Hardboard Panel, 121.9 x 152.4 cm, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

Jules Aarons

The Photography of Jules Aarons

Born in the New York City borough of The Bronx in October of 1921, Jules Aarons was an American space physicist and photographer. He is recognized for his scientific studies of radio-wave propagation as well as his documentary photography of Boston’s mid-twentieth century ethnic neighborhoods.

The son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Jules Aarons was raised in a working-class environment during the economic challenges of the interwar period, which included the Great Depression era that affected many families in the manufacturing trades. He studied at City College of New York and graduated in May of 1942 with a Bachelor Degree in Education. After serving in the Army Signal Corps during World War II, Aarons studied physics at Boston University, where he earned his Master of Science in Physics in 1949.

As a Fulbright scholar, Aarons completed his Doctorate in Science at the University of Paris in 1954. He specialized in the study of ionospheric scintillations, the rapid fluctuations in radio wave amplitude and phase caused by irregularities in the ionosphere’s electron density, and their effects on communication and navigational systems. From 1948 to 1981, Arrons worked as senior scientist at the Air Force Geophysics Research Laboratory at Hanscom Field in Massachusetts; his research led to improvements in satellite and global positioning technology.

In 1957, Jules Aarons formed the Joint Satellite Studies Group, an international collective that studied atmospheric effects on satellite signals. This group expanded to become the Beacon Satellite Studies; its ionospheric monitoring stations proved useful in designs for the Air Force’s space-based communication and navigation systems. In 1981, Aarons became a research professor in Boston University’s astronomy department and helped establish the university’s Center fo Space Physics in 1987. Throughout his decades-long research, he published over one hundred scientific papers and authored three books on such topics as radio astronomy, magnetic storm phases and ionospheric scintillations.

Aarons’s interest in photography began in his youth and continued through his college classes and later scientific work. His many travels around the world for seminars and studies offered opportunities for his photography. Interested in a social documentary approach to photography, Aarons was influenced by the work of Sid Grossman, a co-founder of New York’s Photo League; Austrian-born humanist photographer Lisette Model; French humanist photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson: and the Hungarian-French photographer and filmmaker Brassaï who captured the essence of Paris in his work.

Jules Aarons is known primarily for his late 1940s and early 1950s street-photography of Boston’s ethnically diverse West End and its predominantly Italian North End neighborhoods. During the process of developing his own unique style, he initially began taking photographs of the West End in 1947 to document Boston’s streets and people. Using a double-lens Rolleiflex, Aarons tried to capture the West End’s social environment without being intrusive. To avoid any formal posing, he shot informal photos of ordinary people in public settings, mostly without their knowledge.

After retiring from Massachusetts’s Hanscom Field Laboratory in 1981, Aarons became a professor at Boston University where he led projects on space physics. It was at this time that he ceased his photography, not for lack of time, but due the fact that his eyes had grown too irritated by darkroom chemicals. A research professor emeritus of astronomy and space physics as well as an acclaimed photographer, Jules Aarons died at the age of eighty-two in Boston on the twenty-first of November in 2008.

Jules Aarons’s work is in the permanent collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Bibliotheque Nationale and Bibliotheque Historique in Paris, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, among others. In addition to his scientific works, he published six volumes of photographs and essays, the most recent being the 2006 “Public Spaces/Public Moments: The Photographs of Jules Aarons” published through Boston’s Kayafas Gallery.

Notes: All images, unless noted, are from the Jules Aarons Estate/ Kayafas Gallery, Boston

The Jules Aarons website is located at: https://www.julesaarons.com

The Red River Paper Blog has a 2020 article by Arthur H. Bleich entitled “Jules Aarons: Mind of a Scientist, Eye of an Artist” on its site: https://www.redrivercatalog.com/blog/jules-aarons-mind-of-a-scientist-eye-of-an-artist.html?srsltid=AfmBOorECX90BByO-Zo1RQ895pqACtLGBdKeknSDhM6yu9isuMmSzD9K

Award-winning author William Landay has a 2010 article on Jules Aarons entitled “The Street Photography of Jules Aarons” on his website: https://www.williamlanday.com/2010/02/02/the-street-photography-of-jules-aarons/

Top Insert Image: Kalman Zabarsky, “Jules Aarons”, circa 2001, Gelatin Silver Print, Brown University Bridge, Vol 5 No. 10, October 2001

Second Insert Image: Jules Aarons, “Self Portrait”, “West End, Boston” Series. Gelatin Silver Print, Jules Aarons Estate/Kayafas Gallery, Boston

Third Insert Image: Jules Aarons, Untitled (Group Photo of Nine Boys), “West End, Boston” Series, Gelatin Silver Print, Jules Aarons Estate, Kayafas Gallery, Boston

Bottom Insert Image: Jules Aarons, Untitled (Lounging). 1947-1953, “North End, Boston” Series, . Gelatin Silver Print, Jules Aarons Estate/Kayafas Gallery, Boston

Astolfo Petrazzi

Astolfo Petrazzi, “Still Life of Flowers and Winged Animals in a Landscape”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 182.5 x 223 cm, Private Collection

Born at the city of Siena in November of 1580, Astolfo Petrazzi was an Italian painter and draftsman of the Baroque period. The Baroque style of art, encouraged by the Catholic Church as a counter force to the austerity of Protestantism, was a flamboyant style with deep color, grandeur, contrast, movement and dramatic detail.

The son of Lazzaro di Giovan Francesco da Modena, a hatter by trade, and his wife Lucrezia, Astolfo Petrazzi was raised in a family of modest means with connections to local artisan circles. His artwork was firmly rooted in Siena’s artistic traditions. Unlike the art of Florence, Siena’s artists preferred a more decorative style with rich colors and figures that were elegant and dignified. Sienese paintings favored scenes of miraculous events often executed with dreamlike coloration; allegories, classical myths and portraits were not depicted in their work.

Petrazzi was predominantly a student of Late-Mannerist painters and printmakers Francesco Vanni, who had received commissions from Pope Clement VIII, and Ventura Salimbeni, the half-brother of Vanni and fresco painter for Pope Sixtus V. He also studied under Pietro Sorri, a Sienese painter known for his portraits and historical scenes. Petrazzi was influenced by other artists from Siena including painter Alessandro Casolani and Vincenzo Rustici whose “Virgin with Child and St. Catherine of Siena” was known to him.

In the second decade of the 1600s, Astolfo Petrazzi traveled in Italy and developed a new style, influenced by the various artworks he encountered. Petrazzi’s work became a blend of naturalism, a derivative of Caravaggio’s work, that was evident in paintings by late-Mannerist artist Francesco Rustici, and the direct realism exhibited in the paintings of early-Baroque Florentine artist Mateo Rosselli.

In the 1620s, Petrazzu traveled to Rome where he studied the classical trends that had emerged in contemporary Roman art. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, classicism had gradually departed from its earlier course of simplicity and emphasis on form. By the first quarter of the seventeenth-century, classicism had adopted an overly strong sense of orderliness, predictability, and an emphasis on rigorous teaching methods and discipline.

After his return to Siena in 1624-1625, Astolfo Petrazzi’s work changed, particularly influenced by the work of two Baroque painters: Guido Reni who had worked for many years under Pope Urban VIII, and Domenico Zampieri who, although not as successful as Reni, received many commissions from the Vatican and wealthy patrons over the course of his career. The influence of both painters’ work can be seen in Petrazzi’s 1631 “Last Communion of St. Jerome” and the 1639 “Young John the Baptist Comforted by Angels”.

In his later life, Petrazzi painted a great number of works; however, they were increasingly repetitious in genre and composition with a progressive decline in quality. His last documented commissions were dated to 1648; these included frescoes from the life of Job for Siena’s Church of Saint Rocco..

Through his life, Petrazzi maintained a productive workshop in Siena, established a drawing academy, and contributed significantly to Siena’s artistic life through both frescoes and murals. Astolfo Petrazzi died on the eleventh of August in 1653 at the age of fifty-two at the Parish of Saint Martino of his native Siena. He was entombed in the Siena Cathedral.

Notes: A more extensive biography of Astolfo Petrazzi can be found at: https://grokipedia.com/page/astolfo_petrazzi

The Stephen Ongpin Fine Art site has a short biography on Astolfo Petrazzi: https://www.stephenongpin.com/artist/241205/astolfo-petrazzi

Top Insert Image: Astolfo Petrazzi, Title Unknown (Standing Figure Placing Scapular(?) on Kneeling Figure), Pen and Brush with Brown Ink, 31,3 x 22.2 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Second Insert Image: Astolfo Petrazzi, “Madonna of the Rosary with the Blessed Saints”, 1640-1660, Oil on Canvas, 254 x 151 cm, Museum of Sacred Art of Val d’Arbia, Buonconvento, Italy

Third Insert Image: Astolfo Petrazzi, “The Figure of Justice Flanked by Two Figures”, circa 1630, Pen and Brown Ink on Paper, 22.3 x 15.4 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Astolfo Petrazzi, “A Shepherd Playing the Catera”, Early 1600s, Oil on Canvas, 122.2 x 93 cm, Private Collection