Orfeo Boselli was an Italian sculptor working in Rome. As with most Roman sculptors of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, a great part of his commissioned work was in restoring and completing fragmentary ancient Roman sculpture

Roman sculpture

The study of ancient Roman sculpture is complicated by its relation to Greek sculpture. Many examples of even the most famous Greek sculptures, such as the Apollo Belvedere and Barberini Faun, are known only from Roman Imperial or Hellenistic "copies." At one time, this imitation was taken by art...

s. A pupil of François Duquesnoy

François Duquesnoy

François Duquesnoy was a Baroque sculptor in Rome. His more idealized representations are often contrasted with the emotional character of Bernini's works, while his style shows greater affinity to Algardi's sculptures....

, whose classicising "Greek" manner was the antithesis to Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Gian Lorenzo Bernini was an Italian artist who worked principally in Rome. He was the leading sculptor of his age and also a prominent architect...

's, Boselli served as Principe at the Accademia di San Luca

Accademia di San Luca

The Accademia di San Luca, was founded in 1577 as an association of artists in Rome, under the directorship of Federico Zuccari, with the purpose of elevating the work of "artists", which included painters, sculptors and architects, above that of mere craftsmen. Other founders included Girolamo...

 in Rome.

Bosselli's 'Osservationi della Scoltura antica

Theories of proportions as exhibited in sculpture and dialogues on the relative merits of painting and sculpture were common enough in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, but they remained theoretical and rarely descended to the artisanal level. The treatise by Pomponius Gauricus, De sculptura offers a passage on bronze-casting by the lost-wax method. The Proemio of Giorgio Vasari

Giorgio Vasari

Giorgio Vasari was an Italian painter, writer, historian, and architect, who is famous today for his biographies of Italian artists, considered the ideological foundation of art-historical writing.-Biography:...

's Le Vite delle più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori presents some workshop information on the practices of the architect, the sculptor and the painter. Only two sculptors have left extensive written material detailing the practice of their art. One, well known, is Benvenuto Cellini

Benvenuto Cellini

Benvenuto Cellini was an Italian goldsmith, sculptor, painter, soldier and musician, who also wrote a famous autobiography. He was one of the most important artists of Mannerism.-Youth:...

's Trattato dell'Oreficeria e della Scultura, 1568. The other, not published until 1939 and known only to art historians, is Orfeo Boselli's manuscript Osservationi della Scoltura antica written in the 1650s. It is conserved in the Corsini library in Rome. The treatise is apparently a distillation of the lectures he gave at the Accademia.

Orfeo Boselli provided marble sculptures to designs made by Martino Longhi the Younger

Martino Longhi the Younger

thumb|300px|Detail of the façade of [[Sant'Antonio dei Portoghesi]] in [[Rome]].Martino Longhi the Younger was an Italian architect of the Baroque period active in Rome, in a milieu when the most prominent competition for commissions came from no less than Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Francesco...

 in 1642-43 for the high altar designed by Longhi in the church of San Carlo ai Catinari, 1643-51.

Among sculptures restored by Boselli, he mentions in the Osservationi the Colonna Claudius that is now in the Prado, Madrid.

Some other sculptors in Rome renowned for their restorations

• Carlo Albacini
  Carlo Albacini
  Carlo Albacini was an Italian sculptor and restorer of Ancient Roman sculpture, a pupil of Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, an eminent sculptor and restorer of Rome...
  
  
• Ippolito Buzzi
  Ippolito Buzzi
  Ippolito Buzzi was an Italian sculptor from Viggiù, near Varese, in northernmost Lombardy, a member of a long-established dynasty of painters, sculptors and architects from the town, who passed his mature career in Rome...
  
  
• Valerio Cioli
  Valerio Cioli
  -Works:His most famous work is the Fontana del Bacchino in the Giardino di Boboli, near the entrance to piazza Pitti in Florence. It shows a dwarf at the court of Cosimo I, ironically nicknamed Morgante , portrayed nuded and sitting on a tortoise like a drunken Bacchus...
  
  
• Giovantonio Dosio
• Ercole Ferrata
  Ercole Ferrata
  Ercole Ferrata was an Italian sculptor of the Roman Baroque.-Biography:A native of Pellio Inferiore, near Como, Ferrata initially apprenticed with Alessandro Algardi, and became one of his prime assistants...
  
  
• Francesco Nocchieri
• Francesco Fontana
  Francesco Fontana
  Francesco Fontana was an Italian lawyer and astronomer.He created woodcuts showing the Moon and the planets as he saw them through a self-constructed telescope...
  
  
• Bartolomeo Cavaceppi
  Bartolomeo Cavaceppi
  Bartolomeo Cavaceppi was an Italian sculptor who worked in Rome, where he trained in the studio of the acclimatized Frenchman, Pierre-Étienne Monnot, and then in the workshop of Carlo Antonio Napolioni, a restorer of sculptures for Cardinal Alessandro Albani, who was to become a major patron of...
  
  

Further reading

• Casadei, G. "Orfeo Boselli", Dizionario biografico degli Italiani
• Piacentini, M. "Le Osservationi della scoltura antica di Orfeo Boselli", Bollettino della Reale Isituto di Archeologia e Storia dell'Arte 9.1-6 (1939) pp 5-35. Gives a biography of Orfeo Boselli and a summary of other early sources on sculptural techniques.