Raffaello Romanelli – Sculptor

Raffaello Romanelli was born in Florence on May 13, 1856.

A prolific sculptor, he worked both in Italy and abroad.

Raised in the studio of his father, who was also a sculptor, he went to Rome in 1880 to perfect his technique.

He was entrusted with and completed countless commissions. Among these, the tomb of Donatello, in San Lorenzo in Florence (1896) and the bust of Benvenuto Cellini for the Ponte Vecchio (1900-01).

His greatest plastic expressions in Italy are however the equestrian monuments to King Carlo Alberto, (1900) in Rome, Quirinale garden, and to Giuseppe Garibaldi (1896) in Siena.

In 1892 he directed the restoration of Giambologna's Rape of the Sabine Women, carried out by the director of the Opificio delle pietre dure Edoardo Marchionni, an operation that would be repeated in 1907 for another work by Giambologna, the Ocean, of which he would later make a marble copy to place the original in the Boboli Gardens (1911) and then a reproduction of the entire fountain for the garden of the Rockefeller villa north of New York (1913).

 

The success he achieved was notable. During his stay in Florence in 1897, Rama V, King of Siam, purchased three of his marble works with erotic subjects, now preserved in Bangkok.

Romanelli participated in the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900 with a group of works that included the bust of Giacomo Puccini.

In February 1905, the rejection of his proposal to nominate Domenico Trentacoste as an academician caused him to resign from the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, to which he returned in December 1908.

He also worked extensively for Romania, becoming the official sculptor of the royal family, making numerous trips there and creating around forty works.

Among his numerous international commissions, we remember The Fountain of the Angel (1902), which, awarded in 1904 in Saint Louis, was later replicated for the Botanical Garden of Kansas City (1928), a city that dedicated a park to the artist, called Romanelli Gardens.

At the beginning of 1912, he was in Saint Petersburg to participate in the competition for the monument to Tsar Alexander II, winning over 142 competitors in the summer of 1913. The contract was signed in 1914, the year in which the sculptor portrayed Tsar Nicholas II, but the construction of the monument was interrupted by the October Revolution.

In 1915 he was in Rome to portray Pope Benedict XV in two statuettes later cast in bronze, who posed for him between January 29 and February 1.

In the same year he presented a group of works at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, including the statue of Christianity emerging from paganism, and was hailed in the United States as the Italian Rodin.

On July 6, 1919 he was unanimously appointed academic of merit corresponding to the sculpture class at the Accademia di S. Luca.

Among his last important works are also the so-called Romanelli Fountain in the Tamerici Plant and The Fountain of the Frog and the Heron placed in front of the Regina Plant (1925).

In 1926 he won the competition for the monument to General Louis Botha in Cape Town, South Africa, later built by his son Romano.

He died in Florence on April 3, 1928.