Study For A Family Portrait, Oil On Paper Applied On Canvas, Signed Fracassini

He was born in Rome to Paolo Serafini of Orvieto and Teresa Iacobini of Rome. His father later took the surname of his godfather Domenico Fracassini, becoming Paolo Serafini Fracassini, as Cesare recalls in his Memoirs[1]. He studied at the Accademia di San Luca and soon became a very active painter, whose academic-naturalist style was much appreciated in papal Rome and in the provinces, dividing his time between religious commissions and works for the theatre. Among his works, the decoration of the Teatro Mancinelli in Orvieto, with the creation of the majestic curtain depicting Belisarius freeing Orvieto from the Goths and the ceiling where he depicts the twelve hours in an allegorical manner. A triumph of the neo-sixteenth-century taste that was very widespread in the 19th century[2]. He died at the age of thirty of typhoid fever, leaving the frescoes in the basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le mura unfinished, to the great regret of the artistic world for his early death. The city of Rome dedicated a bust to him on the Pincio and a street, in 1920, in the Flaminio district.