He became one of the most successful ornamental carvers and plasterers in Georgian Britain.
[1] He is likely to have been related to the ornamental plasterer Bernardo or Bernato Bernasconi, "a poor man with a large fameley in the town of Buckingham".
[2] His more distant cousins of the same Lugano dynasty included various architects, sculptors and stuccatore active in Italy, Germany, Spain and Russia.
[3] He had two children, a son Bartholomew and a daughter Frances, both of whom survived him.
He died on 1 January 1841 from asthma at his home of 19 Alfred Place in Bloomsbury, London.