Pietro Bracci

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Neptune of the Trevi Fountain, executed by Bracci.

Pietro Bracci (1700 — 1773) was an Italian sculptor working in the Late Baroque manner.

[edit] Biography

He was born in Rome and became a student of Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari and Camillo Rusconi.

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, completed with the help of his pupil Gaspare Sibilia. The third tomb at St Peter's on which he worked commemorates Maria Clementina Sobieski (1742), wife of the "Old Pretender", James Stuart, one of the Catholic Stuart claimants to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland. It is one of three monuments in St. Peter's dedicated to the deposed royal line of Stuart. The sculpture in polychrome with an image of Maria Clementina in mosaic held aloft by Charity. The monument 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.