Downloading & Printing Portraits

I discovered some time ago that many of the castrati portraits (along with composers and others) are high enough quality to download and to print onto standard 8 1/2 X 11-inch photo paper. For those site members who may not have thought of doing so, you may enjoy making prints of your favorite portraits.

I have a large bulletinboard in my office where I have placed most of the portraits that I have uploaded to this site. A good number of my clients have inquired about them and have become quite interested in the subject for the very first time. This also has given me the opportunity of providing them with information about the MaleSopranos site as well as my own channel on YouTube.

I was even more delighted to discover that some common print-shop chains now have the technology to take digital data from my computer and to print in full color selected portraits onto canvas. I did this with two of my favorite Farinelli portraits as large as 30 inches high (although a third did not have a sufficient number of pixels to print so large.) I framed them with Baroque-style frames. I placed one in my study where I listen to my music and hung the other in my living room above my Bosendorfer grand. My visiting friends have found them to be very interesting.

Do you remember in the Castrato BBC show when Nicholas Clapton showed off ( his? ) castrato portraits? I don't remember completely how they were, but they were certainly something better than the framed poster of Farinelli I have ( although that one was very expensive ). 30 inches sounds quite nice. I'm sure I can have a local print shop do this, but I might have to import the frames. Where did you get yours from? Did the print shop have them?

It's very pleasing that you have been able to awake people's interest just with this. Some might become very enthusiastic.

I do not recall the program that you mention or the portraits shown there. If I saw the program, it must not have left much of an impression with me.

I had my Farinelli portraits professionally framed. I am fortunate in that regard in that I live in a large metropolitan area which has many framing shops. Done right, however, is expensive (even with their fake special sales.) I paid far more for the framing than I did for the canvas prints.

On occasion, and as I have had time and inspiration, I continue my search for additional castrati portraits. I shall upload good ones to the site along with whatever information I have.

I thought you had once told me that you had seen it but maybe I misinterpreted it.

The only television program about castrati that I recall having seen was a poorly conceived and produced one from Britain. (I actually have a DVD copy of it somewhere but never look at it.) It almost seemed to me that the producer(s) had a fascination with the topic but no real knowledge either about castrati or singing voices in general. They mentioned only a small percentage of the information that they could have covered.

Worse, they attempted to demonstrate the differences between the sounds of boy sopranos vs. female sopranos vs. falsetto sopranists vs. male sopranos. To accomplish a valid comparison, they should have chosen top-quality singers who also possessed voices similar to that of castrati as as accurately described in written works and medical texts. Instead, the boy soprano was not even of average quality. The female soprano's voice was distinctly feminine with heavy vibrato, the man who fancied himself to be a sopranist was so terrible that he never should have opened his mouth (any man or boy off the street could have produced similar noise), and lastly, they chose natural male soprano Michael Maniaci who does sing soprano but who has a very feminine voice with heavy vibrato. Perhaps the selection was meant to "stack the deck" in favor of Micheal, but it was worthless for comparisons.

There may be other castrati documentaries available, not always in English; however, I have no information about any.

We must be speaking of the same program. I didn't learn anything from it either but it was interesting to hear Maniaci's speaking voice. You could forward through it and take a look at the portraits and see if they are of equal quality to yours, although it doesn't really matter. I'm just curious. I cannot recall there being any sopranist in this program but I remember that they created an artificial voice using a combination of a male singer's chest and head voice or falsetto ( I think he strained and sang in head voice but I can't remember. The voice combination sounded like a robot ).

I was just watching that program, and you're right, the singers are all terrible. Clapton made the only sensible choice when he decided to spend more time as a historian and less as a countertenor.

By the way, the portraits in the documentary are the ones exhibited in the Handel Museum in London. They are probably originals or hand painted copies, so if yours can compare to them the printshop did an amazing piece of work!

Oh it was in a museum? I didn't recall it as one, I somehow remembered it as a personal room. Funny .

Well, you're right in a way; the Handel museum is just Handel's dusty home with a bit of extra stuff thrown in and the occasional odd exhibition. I really don't understand how they manage to keep that place running financially.