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

Contents

Biography

References

Further Reading

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, completed with the help of his pupil Gaspare Sibilia. The third tomb, also at St Peter's commemorates Maria Clementina Sobieska (1742), wife of James III Stuart, one of the catholic Stuart pretenders to the crown of England. 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.

References

★ Web Gallery of Art: Pietro Bracci

★ Italian Baroque Sculpture, Bruce Boucher, , , Thames & Hudson, World of Art, 1998,

★ Pietro Bracci and Eighteenth-Century Rome: Drawings for Architecture and Sculpture in the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Other Collections, Elisabeth Kieven and John Pinto, , , , 2001,

Further Reading

★ Kieven, Elisabeth and John Pinto., ''Architecture and Sculpture in Eighteenth-Century Rome: Drawings by Pietro and Virginio Bracci in the CCA and Other Collections'', Penn State Press, 2001 ISBN 0-271-02008-3

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