Ferraù Fenzoni

The third of five children, Ferraù Fenzoni (also known as Ferraù da Faenza) was born to parents who were natives of Brisighella, though where and how he trained is still a mystery. The earliest
records show him working far from home. Moving to Rome in the late Mannerist era of Pope Gregory XIII, he decorated the Benediction Loggia in the Cathedral of St. John Lateran in 1587, but
the work that earned him the greatest praise and a number of public commissions at this time was his Moses and the Bronze Serpent in the Scala Sancta, for which he painted several frescoes in
1588.

After completing his work in the Lateran, he went on to decorate the Chapel of St. Francis in Santa Maria in Trastevere, the Vatican Library and the Apartment of Pope Pius V, and by the turn of the 1580s he was working with others on frescoes with Stories from the Life of the Virgin in Santa Maria Maggiore.

In the last decade of the 16th century he settled in Todi, where he was commissioned by Bishop Angelo Cesi to fresco the Last Judgment (1594) on the inner façade of the city’s cathedral.
Returning to his home town for good in 1599, he frescoed the Chapels of St. Charles, the Madonna del Popolo and St. Sabinus in Faenza Cathedral between 1612 and 1616. Achieving solid bourgeois status, he was awarded the posts of Vicar and Castellan of Granarolo by the City Council in 1634, and he was made a Knight of the Golden Spur thanks to a recommendation from Cardinal Colonna in 1640.