Michael Rizzello's Putney home of 30 years is a house with a history. It's a Victorian villa which was radically adapted in the 1960s to include a large "clean" studio on the top floor, and a vast detached sculpture studio in the garden - designed by Coventry Cathedral's architect, Sir Basil Spence.

When Rizzello made it his own in 1976, it was destined not only to be a home for his family, but to display his work and help him build on a career which was already flourishing. For thirty years he created sculptures at an astonishing rate, and slowly filled his home and studio with them.   Today it looks just as it was when he died suddenly last September, aged 78.  

On every wall and on every surface, portraits appear in relief, on medals and as busts. The place is peopled by his subjects: among them Darcey Bussell; Lord Sainsbury; generations of the Irvings, a Canadian oil family; Sir Thomas Beecham, elbows akimbo as if striking up the Royal Philharmonic; Princess Margaret in profile relief; Nelson Mandela.

Not all of his portraits could be from life and he often used photographs. His first big commission had been the Welsh national memorial to David Lloyd George in 1960, but by then he was already making a speciality of reliefs for coins and medals - no sculptor can be more familiar with the features of the Queen and the Prince of Wales, and as one of his last commissions he was chosen to make the memorial plaque of the Queen Mother for the royal chapel at Windsor Castle.

Although his order book was never empty, Michael Rizzello couldn't always wait for a commission to make a portrait sculpture. And often it meant working from the scantiest reference material.

Twenty years ago Mandela's passion and plight caught his imagination.   Despite the fact that the future President of South Africa had at that time not been seen by anyone save his jailers, his fellow inmates and his closest family for two decades, Rizzello put aside other work and followed his muse. With the help of ancient and blurred photographs of the young Mandela, he created a powerful representation in bronze.

When it was finished he sent photographs of it to the subject, still behind bars on Robben Island, who replied effusively, enclosing the photograph signed and beautifully framed. The bust now has pride of place in the African National Congress's headquarters in Johannesburg and its training college in Tanzania.

The son of Italian immigrants, Rizzello graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1950 with the Drawing Prize and a travelling scholarship, which enabled him to study in Italy where he won the Prix de Rome for sculpture and was for ever stamped by classical forms.

He was an artist whose relationship with his subject was the vital factor, even when the subject was on the other side of the world. His Who's Who entry had as his recreation, simply, "people".

In 1999 Sir Christopher Benson's retirement gift from Boots, where he had been chairman, was to be a sculpted portrait, and the painter Michael Noakes put him in touch with Michael Rizzello.

"I went to his house, rather than his studio as such, and we sat in his kitchen, drank tea and talked", Sir Christopher recalls. "And when we eventually went into the studio, we still did nothing but talk. He walked around, working a piece of clay between his thumb and fingers, talking, while I sat surrounded by the other sculptures he had on the go - I fell in love with the little figure of Darcey Bussell, and I eventually persuaded him to let me have a copy. I suppose he was putting me at my ease."

Actually he was doing more than that, says his friend and collaborator for 30 years, John Ravera. "It was his own way of working" he says. "He was familiarising himself with the subject, getting to know the shapes but the personality as well. He was punctilious in this kind of research." And in this case, he made no drawing from start to finish, going straight away to the clay to create the likeness.
Rizzello left one major piece unfinished, a multi-figure piece for the writer and publisher Felix Dennis, Battle of Thermopylae , and Ravera is putting the finishing touches to it. "Our way of working was different but our styles were close enough so that we found a way of combining my slightly untidy way and his attention to detail" Ravera says.  "But I couldn't have finished a portrait of his. That would be too personal, too much a part of him."

Sir Christopher Benson had two or three sittings before Rizzello actually put any clay on the armature, and altogether there must have been at least ten in all. "I was sorry when the sittings ended. They were truly delightful, and we remained friends until he died" he says. "He touched people's lives, you see, so there was always something left behind, not just the sculpture."