Pietro Bracci
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Pietro Bracci (1700 — 1773) was an Italian sculptor working in the Late Baroque manner.
[edit] Biography
He was born in Rome.
He sculpted the figures for the tomb of Benedict XIII (1734) in Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome, which was designed by the architect Carlo Marchionni, and for the tomb of Benedict XIV (1763-1770) in the Basilica of Saint Peter. The third tomb, also at St Peter's commemorates Maria Clementina Sobieska; it was conceived by the architect Filippo Barigioni, who provided preliminary sketches. Bracci designed and sculpted the polychromatic tomb of Cardinal Giuseppe Renato Imperiali (1741) in Sant'Agostino in Rome.
His most familiar work is the colossal Neptune (after 1759) of the Trevi Fountain, Rome, where he was constrained to follow a plaster modello by Giovanni Battista Maini, who died before he could execute the marble.
There are several official busts of Benedict XIII by Bracci, and a terracotta (1724), conserved in Palazzo Venezia, Rome. The aged glare of the pope in the marble portrait was an image difficult to beautify.
Bracci died in Rome in 1773.
[edit] References
- Web Gallery of Art: Pietro Bracci
- Bruce Boucher (1998). Italian Baroque Sculpture. Thames & Hudson, World of Art, 126.
- Elisabeth Kieven and John Pinto (2001). Pietro Bracci and Eighteenth-Century Rome: Drawings for Architecture and Sculpture in the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Other Collections, 126.
