a) Large maneuvers

On the back, another drawing with soldiers and cannon.

b) Stop of soldiers near Foligno, 1892

dated and titled lower left: 4 - 9 - 92 / near Foligno

On the back, another drawing by the artist's hand depicting soldiers near a field hospital.

The sheet is part of a series of four fine ink drawings depicting soldiers encamped in Torre of Montefalco, a locality near Foligno, carried out in 1892. In this of the Great maneuvers two groups of soldiers on horseback approach the large medieval tower that gives the place its name, manned by an armed guard and by a guard on horseback, with a long staircase resting on the main facade. Two sides of the square-plan tower are faithfully represented, with a corbels and machicolation or "piombate" roof and the stump of a top casemate, which can be glimpsed beyond the silhouettes of four soldiers fumbling around a sighting telescope. Sculptor, painter from 1870 following Onorato Carlandi and then co-founder of "I XXV della Campagna Romana", deputy of the extreme radical left from 1882 to 1892, councilor of the Municipality of Rome (1877-1907), started in Freemasonry since 1881 until he became Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy (1904-1917), director of the Industrial Art Museum, member of many artistic societies and associations and republican circles, Ettore Ferrari was one of the most complex personalities of the milieu Italian culture and politics at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The design Grandi manovre attests his close relationship with Umbria, also documented by his election as deputy in 1882, in the college of Spoleto, a college that confirmed him for the two successive legislatures, in 1886 and in 1890. His only parliamentary intervention during the fifteenth legislature, moreover, was against the removal of a plaque to Garibaldi decided by the authorities of Foligno. Republican, Mazzinian, democratic, anticlerical, anti-colonialist but convinced interventionist, Ferrari at the beginning and throughout the seventies experienced a sort of historical romanticism personalized by the use of the baroque lexicon, preferring the theme of the rebel. In the same year of the victory of the first prize at the National Exhibition of Turin in 1880 with the group Cum Spartaco pugnavit, he won the competition for the equestrian monument to Vittorio Emanuele II in Venice, becoming from then on one of the greatest authors of public monuments to politicians and heroes of the Risorgimento throughout Italy. The monuments to which his fame is linked are the monument to Mazzini on the Aventine, inaugurated posthumously twenty years later without remembering the architect, and the Giordano Bruno of Campo de' Fiori (1887 -89), a monument par excellence of Italian anti-clericalism which was the subject of bitter controversy. Ferrari had in fact to modify the first sketch of Bruno with his arm raised to incite a revolt, rejected by the City Council, in favor of a severe 'Bruno philosopher'.