( fl 1608-?1661). Italian sculptor, active in England. He was, by his own account, a Florentine, but is first recorded in Genoa, where he rented a house in 1608. In that year he carved a wooden figure of the Dead Christ (Genoa, S Luca) under the supervision of Giovanni Battista Paggi and Stefano Rezza, and in 1609 Giovanni Domenico Spinola contracted with him for a small bronze Crucifix (untraced). In 1620 he undertook to provide unspecified bronze decorative features for the chapel of the Virgin Mary in the church of S Maria delle Vigne, Genoa, and in a further contract, of 1627, he agreed to cast the capitals of the columns there. Fanelli is next documented in England, at the court of Charles I, who paid him a pension in 1635; he later described himself as 'Sculptor to the King of Great Britain', a title that may have been officially conferred. Joachim von Sandrart wrote that the King had summoned him to his service mainly on the strength of an ivory figure of Pygmalion (untraced), but Fanelli's chief attraction for Charles probably lay in his talent as a maker of bronze statuettes, there being apparently no artist in Britain at the time with a particular skill in this type of sculpture.
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