Sculptor born in Iseo, Ticino, Switzerland, of an Italian father, the sculptor Gaetano Matteo Monti (1776–1847) of Ravenna. Raffaele studied with his father, and under the sculptor Pompeo Marchesi at the Accademia de Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, which was then part of the Austrian Empire. His earliest successes were with two classically inspired groups: Alexander Training Bucephalus (now Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan), for which he was awarded the Imperial Academy’s gold medal, and Ajax Defending the Body of Patroclus (exhibited 1838), which resulted in an invitation to Vienna where he made portrait busts of various members of the imperial family. He also collaborated with the Munich sculptor Ludwig Schaller on a pedimental sculpture in zinc, The Apotheosis of Pannonia, for the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest.

Monti returned to Milan in 1842, and in 1845 carved the figures of St Theodulus and St Tarbula for Milan Cathedral. In October 1846 he received a visit from William Spencer, 6th Duke of Devonshire, who commissioned from him a Veiled Vestal. Monti arrived in England with the completed statue in spring 1847; after a showing at Colnaghi’s, in Pall Mall East, it was installed in the Duke’s London villa, Chiswick House (the Duke’s descendants relocating it to Chatsworth House in 1999). Following his return to Milan, Monti became involved in the uprising against Austria, the defeat of the insurgents at Custoza in 1848 precipitating his relocation to London in the same year. He seems to have immediately secured commissions for two funerary monuments, to Barbara, Lady de Mauley, for St Nicholas, Hatherop, Gloucestershire, and to William Poyntz, for St Mary, Easebourne, West SusSєx. In November 1850, his wife, Adele, and infant daughter, Maria, joined him in London.

In 1851, he established his reputation with nine sculptures at the Great Exhibition. His female ɴuᴅᴇ, Eve after the Fall, elicited positive reviews and a Prize Medal, but it was his Veiled Vestal (lent by the Duke) which attracted the most attention, the deft carving of the marble creating the appearance of a face partially glimpsed beneath a transparent veil. However, what drew gasps of admiration from the general public provoked only condemnation from the critics who saw the end result as nothing more than showy illusionism, a learnable display of virtuosity. But regardless of the views of the critics, the veiled face remained a Monti speciality.

Immediately after the close of the Great Exhibition, Monti was elected an ᴀssociate of a new (and short-lived) venture, the Royal Panopticon of Science and Art, which opened in Leicester Square in 1854 (and closed in 1857). The Panopticon’s council commissioned its own veiled figure, for permanent display within its building. Known variously as The Houri and The Peri, it has recently been identified by Gabriel Williams as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Veiled Woman (signed and dated 1854).

In the same period, Monti won a major contract from the Crystal Palace Company, working on historical reconstructions within Sir Joseph Paxton’s Great Exhibition building and creating original sculptures for the grounds of its new site at Sydenham. Unfortunately, he over-extended himself, miscalculating the costs of materials and labour, and losing money on his experiments with a new process for making the galvano-plaster casts he had intended to use for some of his fountains. Although he was declared bankrupt in 1855, the court, in recognition of his good character and his manifestly genuine efforts to honour his contracts, allowed him to complete the greater part of his work for the company instead of ordering the immediate sale of his stock-in-trade. At least three of Monti’s artificial stone fountain figures from the Crystal Palace grounds survive: two were erected at outdoor sites in c.1958 – Pacific at Dacres Road, Forest Hill, south London, and The Thames at the head of the River Thames, Trewsbury Mead (relocated in 1974 to St John’s Lock, Lechlade, Gloucestershire); a third, Atlantic, was sold at Phillips auction house in 1985 and is now in a private collection.

In 1857, Monti worked again with Paxton, on the decorative scheme for the grand hall of the architect’s Mentmore House in Buckinghamshire. In the following year he created the plaster relief, Orpheus and Ossian as embodiments of Music and Poetry, over the proscenium arch of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In 1861, his equestrian statue of Charles Stewart, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry, cast by Monti himself in electro-plated copper after several years of experimentation, was unveiled in Durham.

The 1862 International Exhibition at South Kensington saw not only the culmination of his explorations into veiled-face effects with his The Sleep of Sorrow and the Dream of Joy (Victoria and Albert Museum), but also the first major example of his involvement in the applied arts: an elaborate silverware group, The Poetry of Great Britain, designed and modelled by Monti but shown under the name of the manufacturer, C.F. Hancock. In addition to further work for Hancock, he also went on to design and model numerous Parian ware statuettes and busts for mᴀss production by Copeland and by Wedgwood. Despite his involvement in such commercial activities, he fell increasingly into poverty, and in his final years was living in a boarding house for artisans at 90 Bolsover Street, Marylebone.

In 2009, the Crystal Palace Foundation were alerted by Fieldings Auctioneers that an archive of Monti’s drawings, correspondence and other material from c.1830–1881 had become available. Wishing to save it for the nation they placed a successful bid and subsequently sold it on to the Victoria and Albert Museum.