This is the story of an exceptional Florentine whose influence spread throughout a country and culture thousands of miles away from his native land. Now, more than 60 years since his death, he is still revered because the citizens of his adopted home of Thailand regard him as a national hero and the “father of Thai modern art”.
Born in Florence on September 15, 1892, Corrado Feroci lived with his mother, anarchist father and two siblings in an apartment not far from the Duomo. His father, Arturo, who sold bulk wine, had spent time in prison for his political activities and his mother, Santina, was a seamstress. After his father died when Corrado was only 11 years old, his mother managed to enrol him in the Florentine art institute in Santa Croce. A year later, he became a modelist and, in 1908, he took his first sculpture classes. As part of the course, the students were apprenticed to a Florentine laboratory specialized in forging medals, where he became accomplished for the fine detail of his pieces. On completing the course, now a young man, Feroci created a bas-relief that was presented at the 1911 Turin Expo. He married Paolina Angelini in 1918 and completed one of his major works, the impressive Monument to the Fallen in World War I in Portoferraio, a war in which he did not fight due to his myopia. His marriage to Paolina was short-lived, however, as he had fallen in love with Fanny Viviani, the sister-in-law of the adopted daughter of Senator Marquis Niccolini, who had commissioned him to sculpt a marble bust of his two grandchildren. Having obtained a consensual separation from Paolina, he and Fanny began their life together in 1921. They would have two children, Isabella, born in Florence in 1922, and Romano, born in Bangkok in 1927.
Siam had entered an era of modernization in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1922, this gave Feroci an opportunity to respond to an international tender from the Siamese Royal Fine Arts Department, which was looking for someone to design the kingdom’s new currency. Feroci had applied for the post largely because of the salary and accommodation allowance, which far exceeded the earnings of a sculptor in Italy at that time. In 1923, he was informed his bid had won. With early support from the progressive Siamese king, Rama VI, who was a lover of the arts, he would continue to work for the department from early 1924 until his death in 1962, creating countless important statues of the royal family over the years as well as numerous significant Buddhist and national monuments. His first work for a royal was for the king’s brother, Prince Naris, who recommended Feroci’s work to other family members. This led to Feroci designing one of his major royal commissions: the bronze statue of King Rama I, which was completed between 1929 and 1932, and placed on the Phra Phutthayotfa Bridge in the centre of Bangkok. It was cast at Ferdinando Marinelli’s foundry in Florence, which provided Feroci with a chance to return to Italy in 1931 for the first time since his arrival in Siam.
In 1926, he had also begun teaching free courses for painters and sculptors, whose success encouraged the government to ask him to establish a training school for young artists, but it fell through because of internal opposition. After the Siamese revolution in 1932, the Royal Fine Arts Department passed to the Ministry of Education and Feroci was moved to the Architectural Department, whose director appointed him as head of an art school in Silpakorn, which Feroci modelled on the Santa Croce academy. It started out with only a handful of students in its first courses, whom he taught that originality was the foremost concept in contemporary art. The year after, it was reorganized as the Praneet Silpakam School. In 1939, Siam had changed its name to Thailand and, in 1942, it became the fine arts school before finally becoming Silpakorn University, the first fine arts university in the country the following year, with Feroci in charge of the painting and sculpture faculties.
During the Japanese occupation of Thailand during World War II, Feroci was interned in a detention camp as Italy had become an enemy of Japan after the armistice of September 8, 1943. This prompted Feroci to seek Thai citizenship, taking the name Silpa Bhirasri in January 1944. Although his spoken Thai was grammatically correct, his students and the locals found it difficult to understand him because of his strong Florentine accent. He also spoke English, which he learned in Thailand, also publishing the art books he wrote in English. He studied Thai art, culture, philosophy, Buddhism and archaeology, disseminating what he had learned in the west, for instance, by organizing the Exhibition of Thai Arts at the Thai Embassy in London in 1948 and promoting a nationwide open-call competition, which culminated in the National Exhibition of Art in Bangkok a year later.
In 1949, Feroci returned several times to Italy, and even worked at a Florentine medal workshop for nine months, since his Thai salary had never changed over the years and had been eroded by the high inflation there. Fanny had already left him and returned permanently to Florence with her son. In the pension where he lodged, he met the considerably younger Malini Kenny, the daughter of an Irish father and Thai mother, and would live with her for the last decade of his life after they arrived back in Bangkok once his salary had been raised. He married her in 1959.
Suffering from cancer, Feroci died of a heart attack following surgery on May 14, 1962 and was given a state funeral attended by the Thai king. His ashes were divided, half given to Silpakorn University, while Malini took the other part to Florence to be buried in his parents’ tomb at the Allori Cemetery, where Feroci had sculpted the marble headstone in his father’s memory.
A bronze statue of Corrado Feroci stands in the Silpakorn University courtyard, where students often leave garlands and incense, especially on the anniversary of his birthday on September 15, known as Silpa Bhirasri Day. Feroci’s studio situated near Bangkok’s Grand Palace became the Silpa Bhirasri National Museum in 1984 and, in 2018, the house where he had lived with Fanny and the children from 1929 to 1932 was restored and is now a museum and art gallery.
The post Corrado Feroci (or Silpa Bhirasri) appeared first on The Florentine.
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