LOTSCH, Johann Christian

German sculptor, active in Italy. He trained as a painter and a sculptor before moving from Karlsruhe to Rome in 1818. There he made sought-after works on paper which satirised life in the Eternal City by grotesquely caricaturing its inhabitants and, at the same time, created some of the most refined and lucidly composed Romantic marble carvings of the first half of the 19th century.

In sculpture alone his influences were opposing too: on the one hand he was a dedicated student of Berthel Thorvaldsen, the great Danish Neoclassical sculptor, and on the other a prominent member of the Nazarene movement, which spoke out against classicism and sought to revive honesty and spirituality in art.

Lotsch’s multiple affiliations did not affect his popularity among fellow artists and patrons. If anything they enabled him to become an infamous catalyst in the social life of the German colony of artists in Rome. The artist’s eccentricity and love for the bottle are immortalised in several drawings by him and his colleagues, including a sadly destroyed self-portrait which shows the artist with an enormous wine jug and Hieronymus Hess’s 1823 allegorical watercolour which features Lotsch and his friends making merry in fancy dress around a table.