Italian sculptor born in Rome, one of the five children of Giacomo, Count Lovatelli, and his wife, Ersilia Caetani-Lovatelli. After his father’s death in 1879, Lovatelli was raised by his mother, an art historian, cultural historian and archaeologist who, from 1870 to 1915, ran a twice weekly salon from the family home, the Palazzo Caetani-Lovatelli, where guests included Frans Liszt, Emile Zola and Gabriele D’Annunzio. It is not known whether Lovatelli underwent any formal training and he certainly had no need to earn a living. However, despite being described by one who knew him as a ‘gentleman artist’ and by another as someone who practised sculpture as a ‘hobby’, he was clearly serious about his craft and his surviving works are evidence of considerable skill. Like his mother before him, he was intensely sociable, his studio in Rome attracting not just sitters but the artistic elite of the day, including the Futurist painter and poet, Giacomo Balla; the scenery and costume designer, Leon Bakst; theatre director-designer, Edward Gordon Craig; dancer, Isadora Duncan; and jewellery designer, Anna Bachelli. Lovatelli seems to have established his reputation as a modeller in clay for bronze in the first decade of the twentieth century, one of his more prestigious works being a bronze statuette of an Irish hunting horse owned by the King of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele III. From c.1911 to 1914 he was in Argentina, where he married Adelaida Keen Vargas. Shortly before his return to Italy he won the competition for the national monument to Lieutenant-General Luis María Campos. He took the winning maquette back to Rome with him, modelled the full-size version in his studio and sent it for casting in bronze in a local foundry; the finished bronze was then shipped back to Argentina and erected in Buenos Aires in 1915. During his stay in Argentina, Lovatelli had executed a number of portrait busts (notably of members of his wife’s family). In Rome he modelled a half-length figure of Countess Magda Gaetani, his widowed sister-in-law, recently remarried to the British diplomat, Edward Allis Keeling; the finished marble, presumably translated from his plaster model by specialist carvers (scalpellini), was illustrated in a full-page photograph in the society magazine, The Sketch, in its issue of 5 August 1920. Two years later, Lovatelli was badly wounded in a sword duel with Marino Torlonia, Duke of Poli and Guadagnolo, the dramatic culmination of a dispute over the sculptor’s fee for a bas-relief portrait of the Duke’s American wife, the Connecticut heiress, Elsie Moore. In 1924, Lovatelli made his one appearance in London’s annual Royal Academy exhibitions, with a marble bust (again half-length) of Virginia Courtauld (the bust is now in the former home of the Courtaulds, Eltham Palace, south-east London). In the mid-1930s, Lady Evelyn Adela Kennedy, the sister of Lovatelli’s aunt-in-law, Ada, commissioned from him a mural monument commemorating the three of her four sons who were killed in the First World War. The Kennedy War Memorial was unveiled in Holy Trinity, Cuckfield, West Sussex, on Sunday 9 May 1937, the Mid-Sussex Times (11 May 1937) carrying the curious report that it was ‘modelled … from a panel tombstone in the old church at Chelsea’. How Lovatelli came to know Chelsea Old Church is not known, but there are compelling similarities between the architecture of his tripartite arcade setting and that of the bipartite arcades on two Elizabethan mural monuments within the church, to Thomas Hungerford and to Sir Thomas Lawrence.
Bibliography: Art UK Art Detective: ‘Can you tell us more about the sculptor Filippo Lovatelli?’; The Philadelphia Inquirer, 4 June 1922, p. 81; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 134–35.
Terry Cavanagh, April 2025