Studio: international art (77.1919)

STUDIO-TALK

ANIMAL DRAWINGS
BY ROMANO DAZZI

ROME.—There is in Rome a fourteen-
year-old boy, Romano Dazzi, who is
always drawing, drawing. He is the son
of a sculptor, Arturo Dazzi, a Carrarese,
who, however, removed from Carrara to
Rome years ago, and it was at Rome that
Romano was born, as is testified by his
name and accent, 0000
Romano has studied in no academic
school, drawn from no classic models;
though, had his tastes lain that way, his
father's studio would have afforded him
all the opportunity of doing so at his ease.
It is life that he has looked at, the move-
ment all around him, and then set down
from his own impressions in his own way.

Writing in the “ Illustrazione Italiana ”
(April 1918), Ugo Ojetti, the well-known
critic, records having seen the little fellow
when only four years old on the beach at
Viareggio trying to set down in lines a
horse which was leaping and prancing as
it felt the sand give way beneath its hoofs
in the water ; working away with a stump
of blue pencil and a scrap of paper torn
from his father's album : but from that
time onwards he always preferred to draw
from memory rather than from the objects
before him, and to draw direct with the
pen. He drew before he could write—
“ lines instead of letters "—on anything
that came his way : sheets of fine paper

if he could lay hands on them ; failing that,
on any rag of waste or packing paper, or
even on the marble-topped kitchen table
before the cook had unloaded on it her
morning's marketing of provisions. 0
Ojetti relates that, when the child was
but three years old, a sculptor friend of
his father's, incredulous as to such preco-
cious talent, finding him at work by the
marble-topped kitchen table, asked him to
draw a horse. The small Romano, pencil
suspended above the marble, inquired, “ Do
you want a Greek horse, or a race-horse,
or the omnibus horse i " and proceeded to
draw all three. 0000
Thus, continually drawing from memory,
continually filling his mind by observation
and setting down his impressions, the boy
has in these ten years accumulated a wide
and vivid store of knowledge as to men
and animals, their movement and expres-
sion. But, while he usually draws from
memory, he also continually corrects and
verifies his impressions by drawing from
life as well, from the objects and scenes
before his eyes—in class, the professors
and scholars; in the street, the workmen
and soldiers and horses; in the zoological
gardens of the Villa Borghese, the animals.

The habits and movements of these
captive animals afford him endless studies,
since in them all the play of bone and

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