Pierre Le Gros

Place: Paris

Born: 1666

Death: 1719

Biography:

Pierre Le Gros was a French sculptor, active almost exclusively in Baroque Rome. Nowadays, his name is commonly written Legros, while he himself always signed as Le Gros; he is frequently referred to either as 'the Younger' or 'Pierre II' to distinguish him from his father, Pierre Le Gros the Elder, who was also a sculptor. The "ardent drama" of his work and its Italian location make him more an Italian, than a French, sculptor. Despite being virtually unknown to the general public today, he was the pre-eminent sculptor in Rome for nearly two decades, until he was finally superseded at the end of his life by the more classicizing Camillo Rusconi.
Le Gros was born in Paris into a family with a strong artistic pedigree. Jeanne, his mother, died when he was only three, but he stayed in close contact with her brothers, the sculptors Gaspard and Balthazard Marsy, whose workshop he frequented and eventually inherited at the age of fifteen. His artistic training, though, lay in the hands of his father, from whom he learned to sculpt, and his stepmother's father, Jean Le Pautre, who taught him to draw.
Le Gros was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome to study at the French Academy in Rome, where he renewed his close friendship with his cousin Pierre Lepautre, also a sculptor and fellow at the Academy. His lodging there from 1690-1695 was a fruitful time but not untroubled, since the academy was plagued by a constant financial crisis due to the high cost of Louis XIV's wars. The premises then were also a rather ramshackle affair and far from the grandeur the academy would later enjoy after a move to the Villa Medici in the 19th century.
Keen to prove himself by carving a marble copy after the antique, Le Gros was eventually granted permission to do so by the director of the academy and his superior in Paris. His model was the so-called Vetturia, an ancient sculpture then in the garden of the Villa Medici in Rome (today in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence). Finished in 1695, it was finally shipped to Paris some twenty years later and now stands in the Tuileries Garden. (Long after Le Gros' death it elicited a discussion among academics, whether a modern copy could surpass an antique original — a consciously-expressed aim since the 16th century. This debate relates back to the literary Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns of the late seventeenth century. It was also suggested that a sculptor ambitious to exceed the ancients might improve his chances by selecting a mediocre antiquity, as Le Gros had done. His version was greatly admired in the later 18th century and still rated a "copie valant presque un original" in 1852 by Edmond Texier, who then called it a Vénus silencieuse. )
The same year 1695, Le Gros was ejected from the Academy after secretly preparing a model for a marble group on the altar of Saint Ignatius of Loyola in the Gesù, the Roman mother church of the Jesuit Order. In this most prestigious sculptural commission in Rome for decades, Le Gros was chosen to depict Religion Overthrowing Heresy and Hatred on the right hand side of the altar, using a dynamic ensemble of four over-lifesize marble figures (according to an overall design by the Jesuit painter and architect Andrea Pozzo). In the group, a towering young robed female figure of Religion wielding a cross scatters the aged personifications of the vices Hatred (represented by an old woman) and Heresy (a man falling over the edge of the architectural framework into the viewer's space). To one side, a putto tears apart a volume by the heretic Swiss reformer Zwingli, while a tome beneath the figure of Heresy bears Luther's name. In 1697, with his sculptures nearly complete, he won a competition for the altar's main image, the silver statue of St. Ignatius. (Ready in time for the Holy Year 1700, all this work remains on the site for which it was intended.)
These, and other commissions he carried out concurrently, secured Le Gros's reputation, and further patronage led to the requirement for assistants and a larger workshop, which he found in a back wing of the Palazzo Farnese. Indeed, he was the busiest sculptor in Rome at the time, working for the Jesuits on the monumental relief of the Apotheosis of the Blessed Aloysius Gonzaga (1697–99; Cappella Lancelotti, church of Sant'Ignazio, Rome) while at the same time starting his extensive work for the Dominicans with the Sarcophagus for Pope Pius V (1697–1698) in Santa Maria Maggiore. In fact, he became (and was to remain for the rest of his life) the sculptor of choice for Antonin Cloche, the Master of the Dominicans, carving first the tomb (1700–1703), and later the honorary statue (1706–1708) of Cardinal Casanate (in the Lateran Basilica and the Biblioteca Casanatense respectively) and embarking on the task to produce with his Saint Dominic (1702–1706) the very first (and for decades the only) monumental statue of a founder of a religious order to adorn a niche in the nave of Saint Peter's. It epitomises his dynamic mature style: "the saint's ardour and authority are well conveyed, emphasized by the ample, skilfully handled sweep of his draperies" (Levey).

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