Giuseppe Alessandro Furietti

Giuseppe Alessandro Furietti (24 January 1685 – 14 January 1764) was a Roman Catholic cardinal, an antiquarian and philologist, and a collector of antiquities whose ambitious excavations at the site of Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli rewarded him with the Furietti Centaurs and other Roman sculpture.

Furietti was born at Bergamo, the son of Giovanni Marco Sonzogni Furietti, noble, of a local branch of the Sonzogni. He was educated at the Almo Collegio Borromeo, Pavia, then at the University of Pavia, where he received his doctorate in canon and civil law (utroque iure). In spite of his distinguished service to the Apostolic Camera, the cardinal's hat was withheld from him by Pope Benedict XIV, although Furietti dedicated to him his book on mosaics, partly in pique for Furietti's refusal to part with the famous marble centaurs for the Museo Capitolino, which had opened in 1734. Furietti was eventually created cardinal priest, by Clement XIII in the consistory of 24 September 1759.

For a sum, Furietti obtained rights to excavate the section of Hadrian's Villa that belonged to Simplicio Bulgarini. As early as 1724, Conte Giuseppe Fede had been buying up parcels of land in the extensive villa, which had become divided up among a multitude of owners, forming the nucleus of one of the outstanding recently formed and non-papal collections of antiquities in Rome. After only a few days Furietti's crews found the famous statues of Centaurs signed by Aristeas and Papias, the "Furietti Centaurs", which quickly became two of the most celebrated sculptures in Rome, in part through the engravings of them made in 1739 and 1740 under Furietti's supervision. Charles de Brosses saw them displayed in Monsignor Furietti's apartments in the Palazzo Montecitorio in 1739-40, and Francesco de' Ficoroni described them in Furietti's collection in 1744. Furietti habitually employed Bartolomeo Cavaceppi as a restorer, hence some of the pieces that had passed through Cavaceppi's studio were illustrated from Furietti's former collection in Cavaceppi's self-promoting volume of plates, Raccolta d'antiche statue, busti, teste cognite ed altre sculpture antiche, 1768.

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