In 1915 the San Francisco Examiner described Raffaello Romanelli as ‘to Italy what Rodin is to France’ (11 June 1915). Professor Raffaello was the second generation of a dynasty of Florentine sculptors active from the 1820s. Like his father, Pasquale, and his son, Romano, he worked in a traditional style, making numerous public monuments as well as more commercial subject marbles and portrait busts. At the height of his career, around the turn of the century, Raffaello had an international reputation and was regarded by many as ‘Italy’s greatest living sculptor’ (The Anglo-American Gazette, Nice, 14 March 1908). His model for the equestrian monument to Czar Alexander II of 1914 received widespread acclaim.