Leo Lentelli

When he was thirteen years old, Leo Lentelli began training as a sculptor at the Scuola Professionale per le Arti Decorative Industriali and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna, Italy. After his education, he opened a studio and worked in Rome before immigrating to New York City in 1903. From 1913 to 1918, he lived in San Francisco, where he taught at the California School of Fine Arts and carved exterior decorations for the Orpheum Theater. Returning to New York, Lentelli taught at the Art Students League and Cooper Union. He completed commissions at the Steinway Building at Rockefeller Center and the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine. In Washington, D.C., he completed a bronze memorial statue of James Cardinal Gibbons in Meridian Hill Park in 1932, and in 1933, he carved four reliefs for the U.S. Department of Justice building. Lentelli retired in 1955 and returned to Italy, where he remained until his death in 1961.