Giuseppe Felici

Giuseppe Felici ( Cagli , 1839 - Rome , 12 March 1923 ) was an Italian photographer.

He is known to have been the official photographer of numerous Vatican events. Son of a wealthy landowner, he went to Rome in 1860 to study violin at the Santa Cecilia conservatory and then pursue a musical career; in the then capital of the Papal States he began to frequent the artistic circle of via Margutta where, driven by his curiosity for technology and science, he approached photography . The first rudiments for using the camera were given to him by a Parisian friend and his first subjects were the landscapes of the Roman countryside. The success of some portraits made to the papal Zouaves prompted him to open in 1863a study in via di Ripetta . In the early years the activity was mainly aimed at tourists with photographs of landscapes such as stereoscopic views of Rome. Later his activity was more oriented towards official occasions both as portraitist and through photographic campaigns. Among the first official documented occasions, there is the banquet offered to Giuseppe Garibaldi by the workers' societies at the Correa amphitheater on February 14, 1875 . In 1870 he made a series of photographs of drawings by V. Vecchi called the Historical Collection of Ecumenical Councils which was awarded the gold medal in 1888 on the occasion of theVatican World Exhibition . On the same occasion he was named "pontifical photographer".

Between May and 18 November 1892 Felici took a series of photographs to document the excavation and renovation of Ponte Sant'Angelo , commissioned by the Regional Office for the Conservation of Monuments in the Provinces of Aquila, Rome and Chieti. On these photographs there was later a contractual dispute as the Ministry of Education ordered him to deliver both copies and plates and forbid them to make copies for sale to the public.

A versatile artist, he manages to combine his original interest in music with his work as a photographer, continuing to compose and design an innovative photographic system called "Music in a Wallet", which consisted of reducing pages of music to the format of "visiting cards" . Some interesting examples of this new system are kept in the State Archives of Rome.

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Felici_(fotografo) EM 8/9/2019