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Guelfi [Guelphi], Giovanni Battista
( fl 1714–34). Italian sculptor, active in England. According to Vertue, he trained in Rome under Camillo Rusconi, a leading practitioner of late Baroque sculpture, before coming to England c. 1714 to work for Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington and 4th Earl of Cork, for whom he may have executed garden statuary at Chiswick House, London. Shortly after his arrival he restored the Arundel Marbles (Oxford, Ashmolean), the collection of antique marbles assembled by Thomas Howard, 2nd (14th) Earl of Arundel, and then in the possession of Thomas Fermor, 1st Earl of Pomfret (1698–1753), at Easton Neston. He may have been responsible for the busts of the Earl and Countess of Pomfret (marble; Oxford, Ashmolean); if so, they are his finest works. Guelfi’s known work is distinguished in design, perhaps owing to his association with such architects as James Gibbs and William Kent, but dull in execution. He carved a number of funerary monuments, among which that to James Craggs (terracotta model, 1724, London, Soane Mus.; marble, erected 1727, London, Westminster Abbey), designed by Gibbs, was very influential; the cross-legged stance of the standing effigy of the deceased, which leans on an urn, was adapted by other sculptors in 18th-century England, most notably by Michael Rysbrack. Guelfi himself used the composition again for his monument to Thomas Watson Wentworth (d 1723) (marble, c. 1731; York Minster), having already employed a variant of it in 1730 for that to Edward Greville, 7th Earl of Warwick (d 1727) (marble; London, St Mary Abbot’s, Kensington). He also produced portrait busts for smaller monuments, including that to Anne, Duchess of Richmond (marble, 1734; Deene Park, Northants), also designed by Kent. The terracotta model (London, V&A) for this bust has the elongated form, blandly modelled features and vacuous expression common to all Guelfi’s portraits. Around 1732 he was commissioned to carve a series of portrait busts of eminent Englishmen for Queen Caroline’s Hermitage at Richmond Palace; the authorship of the surviving busts is debated, but those of Sir Isaac Newton, John Locke, Samuel Clarke and William Wollaston (all stone; London, Kensington Pal., Royal Col.) have been attributed to Guelfi on stylistic grounds. By 1734 he had fallen out of favour with Lord Burlington and his circle and returned to Italy, settling in Bologna.
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