Ettore Ferrari Biography
Ettore Ferrari was born in Rome in 1845. He was one of the main representatives of the Italian artistic movement that celebrated the new secular state created with the Unification of Italy. Ferrari studied at the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca and became a professor at the Istituto Superiore di Belle Arti. He was a passionate republican and served as a deputy in the Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy for three legislatures. Ferrari was also the Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy, furthermore, he was Honorary President of the Mutual Aid Workers' Society of Lendinara, where he created the statue of Alberto Mario. In 1900, he founded the Popular University of Milan. In 1904, he was one of the members of the group of artists known as "the XXV of the Roman countryside".
Ferrari's works are numerous and include the monument to Ovid, which he created for the city of Constanta in Romania in 1887. His monument to Giordano Bruno, located in the Piazza di Campo de' Fiori in Rome, was inaugurated in 1889. Among the statues of Garibaldi created by Ferrari, remember the one in Vicenza, in Piazza Castello, from 1887; the bronze one in Pisa, from 1892; and the equestrian monument in the square of the same name in Rovigo, inaugurated in 1896. The large monument to Giuseppe Mazzini on the Aventine Hill in Rome is considered one of Ferrari's most important works. Having become grand master in 1904, he gave the Grand Orient of Italy a clearer orientation of a radical and anti-clerical nature: in his inauguration speech he thus outlined the role that obedience should have covered: «Freemasonry must not keep itself constantly isolated and shadow, but to come into contact with life, to fight in the light of the sun the holy battles of his lofty mission for the protection of justice and for great education. As a convinced republican, for example, Ferrari, in addition to the traditional defense of the secularity of school and the usual anticlerical themes, he advocated greater commitment to issues relating to social legislation. The artist died in 1929.
