Giosuè Bernardino Meli (1816–1893) was born in Luzzana, a small hilltop village in Bergamo, the son of a landed peasant. His talent for sculpture emerged very early: aged just sixteen he sculpted a dead Christ in wood, now preserved in the parish of Luzzana. Meli attended the Carrara Academy in Bergamo from 1836 to 1840. In 1838, on the death of his father, he sculpted a Carrara marble tombstone depicting a grieving female figure in the Canova style. Also around this time he produced a monumental visionary work titled 'Giant', a large bas-relief sculpted into the living rock of the Cavallina Valley in Luzzana, inspired by Michelangelo’s gigantism and Giambologna’s Mannerism.
In 1840 Giosuè Meli moved from his native Luzzano to Rome, thanks to the patronage of some prominent figures of Bergamo society, such as the noblewoman Lucia Prezzati, the count Leonino Secco Suardo and the cardinal Angelo Maj. In Rome he perfected his sculpture studies in the studio of Giovanni Maria Benzoni (1809–1873), an established sculptor of Bergamo origin. He went on to set up his own studio and home in Piazza Lancellotti. Meli was influenced by the Neoclassical style of Benzoni and other contemporary sculptors working in Rome, such as Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844) and Pietro Tenerani (1789–1869), but he also sought an expressive language between Neoclassicism and Romanticism.
In 1861 Meli's work achieved wider recognition when his sculpture titled Pompeian Mother was purchased by Lord Mitchell Henry, a wealthy financier and member of the British Parliament. Henry transformed his home Stratheden House, in Kensington, London, into an Italianate-style villa, and Meli's semi-colossal statue in Carrara marble formed the centrepiece in its own Pompeian-style temple within the house. Tsarina Alexandra, wife of Tsar Nicholas I, also purchased a marble work by Meli, Innocence and Fidelity (1854), on a trip to Europe, now exhibited at the State Russian Museum in the Stroganov Palace in St Petersburg. Other works by Meli include Bound Christ (1874) at the Scala Santa in Rome and the monument of Santa Francesca Romana (1869) in the church of Santa Maria al Foro. Today a number of his works are also kept at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Luzzana in Bergamo.
Giosuè Meli died in Rome in 1893 and was buried in the cemetery of Verano.
