Information
about 34 x 26 cm each
Provenance
Among the 150 portraits, performed directly freehand in ink on album sheets, without preparatory drawings, personalities from the world of entertainment, politicians, poets and composers stand out, returning a fresco of society in the 1920s. Lazzari signed the portraits for the pages of Il Messaggero, where they appeared in support of the articles (and sometimes in fact written in pencil with directions for printing appear on the sheets).
Among the personalities portrayed we remember in particular: the US actors Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks; the sportsmen Gene Tunney, heavyweight boxer, the great cyclist Costante Girardengo; the aviator Mario de Bernardi, the first Italian to shoot down an enemy aircraft in the First World War, and the Italian aeronautical engineer Giuseppe Mario Bellanca, designer of the first closed cabin monoplane in the United States; the French poets Paul Fort and André Rivoire and the Italians Luciano Folgore, Cesare Pascarella; the actresses Dina Galli, Anna Fougez, Marta Abba and Cele Abba of the Pirandelliana Company; circus performers such as the Swiss clown Grock and the French riders Jean and Marcelle Houcke; protagonists of opera singing such as the tenors Tito Schipa and Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, the soprano Bianca Scacciati and the conductor and composer Gaetano Bavagnoli; leading figures of Roman life of the time such as Alfredo Del Pelo, who at the Taberna Ulpia played the guitar and sang Roman and Neapolitan folk songs, and the founder of the Tango Academy Enrico Pichetti.