Giuseppe Ceracchi

Who was Giuseppe Ceracchi?

Giuseppe Ceracchi was an Italian sculptor, active in a Neoclassic style in Italy, England and the nascent United States, who was a passionate republican during the American and French revolutions. He is remembered for his portrait busts of prominent British and American individuals.

He initially trained in Rome with Tommaso Righi and then continued his studies at the Accademia di San Luca. He went to London in 1773, armed with a letter of introduction from Matthew Nulty, an English antiquarian and amateur sculptor in Rome, and worked under Agostino Carlini, a founding member of the Royal Academy. Ceracchi exhibited busts at the Academy 1776-79 and was proposed for membership but received only four votes. His bust of the Academy's president Sir Joshua Reynolds, is in the collection of the Royal Academy of Art. Living in Carlini's lodgings near Soho Square, Ceracchi modelled architectural ornament and bas-relief panels for Robert Adam, most notably a grand bas-relief of a Sacrifice to Bacchus, fourteen feet long and six feet high, in Adam's patent mastic composition, for the rear façade of Mr. Desenfans' house in Portland Place. In 1778, Ceracchi sculpted the statues of Temperance and Fortitude cast in Portland stone for the Strand façade of Sir William Chambers' Somerset House, London; Carlini, who modelled the other two classical virtues for the project, was occupied with architectural sculpture for Somerset House over several years and doubtless recommended Ceracchi. As well as the portrait busts he executed in London is a full-length portrait of Anne Seymour Damer, herself a sculptor and to some extent his pupil, in antique robes, with her tools at her feet.