Pierre Le Gros the Younger

In the same year 1695, Le Gros took part in a competition for a marble group to be placed on the altar of Saint Ignatius of Loyola which the Jesuit Order was erecting to its founder in their Roman mother church Il Gesù. The enterprise turned out to be the most ambitious and prestigious sculptural project Rome saw in decades.[10][note 5] The altar's architecture was designed by Andrea Pozzo who also provided oil paintings of the sculptures and reliefs as guides to their composition while leaving the details to the individual sculptors.[note 6]

Side groups on the Altar of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, 1695-1697/98

Jean-Baptiste Théodon
Triumph of Faith over Idolatry

Pierre Le Gros
Religion Overthrowing Heresy and Hatred

Le Gros' participation was mediated by the French engraver Nicholas Dorigny and was to be kept strictly secret. Only after being firmly commissioned (his contract is also signed by Dorigny as a witness) was Le Gros allowed to tell the French Academy's director. La Teulière took the news with surprise, told him off for his disloyalty to his benefactor, the French king, and saw no other choice than to dismiss him from the French Academy, but did continue to support him. At the same time, La Teulière could not help being a little proud of his protégé who managed to beat the cream of sculptors in Rome. In particular he stressed that the models the much older Jean-Baptiste Théodon submitted for the pendant group had to be corrected several times while Le Gros' model (today in Montpellier, Musée Fabre[note 7]) was spot on from the outset.[6]^{: II, 173–175}

Le Gros' subject was Religion Overthrowing Heresy, a dynamic group of four over-lifesize marble figures on the altar's right hand side. With her cross and a bundle of flames, the towering Religion, meaning Catholic religion, drives out heresy, personified by an old woman tearing her hair and a falling man with a serpent.[note 8] To leave no doubt as to who specifically are considered heretics, three books bear the names of Luther, Calvin and Zwingli, whose book is torn apart by a putto. Le Gros based the facial expressions on examples for the passions developed by Charles Le Brun.[1]^{: 38, n. 4} While the figure of Religion appears like a statue, the old woman melts into the wall decoration, the man tips over the edge of the architectural framework towards the spectator and the snake, an anecdotal detail very typical for Le Gros, hisses directly at the viewer.

This work has always been compared to Théodon's counterpart Triumph of Faith over Idolatry, carved in a much more classicising, rigid style.[note 9] The rivalry between the two Frenchmen was to play out repeatedly over the next few years. The sheer panache and virtuosity of this group launched Le Gros' career. He was in great demand and, indeed, the busiest sculptor in Rome at the time.[1]^{: Cat. 4}

In 1697, with his group nearly complete, he won the competition for the altar's main image, the silver statue of St. Ignatius. It was a peculiar competition as the twelve sculptors taking part had to decide the winner themselves by pointing out the best model of their competitors. When Le Gros' victory was announced his compatriots were ecstatic and carried him through the streets in triumph.[10]^: 180-181

The statue was cast in silver by Johann Friedrich Ludwig and finished in 1699. A century later it fell victim to an act of barbarism when, in 1798, it was dismantled and the head, arms and legs as well as the accompanying angels melted down for their material value during the Roman Republic. Le Gros' chasuble was left intact and the missing parts remade with slight variations in silver coated plaster from 1803 to 1804 under the supervision of Antonio Canova by one of his assistants.[note 10]

At the same time, Le Gros was already busy with another major Jesuit commission for the monumental altar relief of the Apotheosis of the Blessed Luigi Gonzaga in the church of Sant'Ignazio (1697–99). This altar was also designed by Pozzo, and Le Gros again had a great deal of freedom to elaborate on the composition. Building on an early idea of Pozzo's, which envisages a statue instead of a relief, Le Gros carved the figure of the saint nearly fully in the round. A superbly fine polish brings out the whiteness of the statuesque saint and gives it emphasis in the centre of the elaborately detailed relief.[1]^{: Cat. 10}

He also started his extensive work for Antonin Cloche, the Master of the Dominicans. Apart from also being a Frenchman, Cloche was probably introduced to the sculptor by his secretary, the painter and Dominican friar Baptiste Monnoyer,[note 11] who was a friend of Le Gros' at the Académie Royale in Paris.[6]^{: II, 137} With the canonisation process initiated, Cloche commissioned the Sarcophagus for Pope Pius V (1697–98) of verde antico marble which was to be integrated into the existing papal tomb monument in the Cappella Sistina in Santa Maria Maggiore. Its main function is to contain the saint's body and make it visible to the faithful for veneration on limited occasions. Usually, however, it was to be hidden[note 12] by a flap made of gilded bronze which bears his effigy in very shallow relief.[note 13][1]^{: Cat. 9}

To fulfil all these concurrent commissions Le Gros required assistants and a suitable workshop. With the help of the Jesuits, he had found an ideal space in 1695 in a back wing of the Palazzo Farnese which he was to occupy for all his life.[12]

In 1701, Le Gros married a young woman from Paris, Marie Petit. She died in June 1704 leaving Le Gros with his first son (a second son only lived for a week) who was in need of a mother. So he immediately married again in October 1704. His bride was another French woman, Marie-Charlotte, daughter of the outgoing director of the French Academy in Rome, René-Antoine Houasse. Witness to this wedding was Vleughels who at the time lived at Le Gros' studio. The couple was to have two daughters and a son (Filippo Juvarra was his godfather in 1712) who lived to be adults while his first son with Marie Petit died as a child in 1710.[1]^: 13[12]

At the end of the year 1700, it fell to Cardinal de Bouillon as the longest serving cardinal to consecrate his friend, the art loving Giovanni Francesco Albani, as Pope Clement XI. The many years of papal frugality were over, and Le Gros decided that this was the time to be ambitious.

Elected a member of the Accademia di San Luca in 1700, he presented the terracotta relief The Arts Paying Tribute to Pope Clement XI as his reception piece in 1702. The iconography of this flattering scene was telling and unmistakably expressed the high hopes Le Gros had for the patronage of the newly elected pontiff.[1]^{: Cat. 17}

He also remained the sculptor of choice for Cloche who was eager to promote the status of the Dominicans. Following the death of Cloche's friend Cardinal Girolamo Casanate, who left his substantial collection of books and an endowment for expanding his library to the Dominicans, Le Gros was commissioned to create the cardinal's tomb in the Lateran Basilica (1700–03) and subsequently the Statue of Cardinal Casanate[note 14] in the Biblioteca Casanatense (1706–08).[13]

When the new pope offered the many niches in Saint Peter's to the religious orders to erect an honorary statue to their founders, Cloche jumped at the opportunity and commissioned the Statue of Saint Dominic from Le Gros (1702–06). It epitomises his dynamic mature style.[14] Since no other religious order saw the necessity to hurry, Saint Dominic was the very first and for decades the only monumental statue of a founder in Saint Peter's.[1]^{: Cat. 21}

Le Gros also continued to be employed by several branches of the Jesuit order for work such as the statue of St Francis Xavier (1702) in the church of Sant'Apollinare, Rome, "a marvel of delicate marble work".[15] It shows the saint reunited with his beloved crucifix which was brought back to him by a crab after it had been lost in the sea. The terracotta model in St. Petersburg, Hermitage Museum, presents an alternative idea in which the Jesuit missionary appears much fiercer, probably preaching, with the right arm raised. For the mellower mood displayed in Sant'Apollinare, Le Gros decided on a mirror image of that pose. [1]^{: Cat. 16}

Also in 1702, the board of the Monte di Pietà in Rome, presided by the papal treasurer Lorenzo Corsini, continued the steady embellishment of their chapel which already boasted an altar relief by Domenico Guidi and had in time for the Holy Year 1700 found its architectural completion with the dome by Carlo Francesco Bizzaccheri. They were now looking to commission two large reliefs for the side walls and made a list of sculptors currently in the limelight. Their choice was to stage another head to head of Le Gros, who was to carve the relief of Tobit Lending Money to Gabael, and Théodon, creating its companion piece, Joseph Distributing Grain to the Egyptians, on the opposite wall (both 1702–05).[1]^{: Cat. 19}[note 15]

External video
Stanislas Kostka on his Deathbed, 1702–03, Novitiate of the Jesuits Video from Smarthistory

The polychrome statue of Stanislas Kostka on his Deathbed (1702–03) is today Le Gros's best-known work. Since his normal practice was to evoke naturalistic impressions by an extraordinarily fine surface treatment of a monochrome white marble, this multi-coloured tableau-like depiction is quite untypical for Le Gros. But it would be untypical for any sculptor because it is unique in the history of sculpture on the whole.[note 16]

Unapologetically, the statue was created to emotionally move the visitor in the room where the blessed (soon to be canonised) Jesuit novice died, next to a chapel in the Jesuit novitiate at Sant'Andrea al Quirinale. The pope honoured the new devotional site with his visit – on foot – the day following its inauguration in 1703.

The figure still moves to this day, and much of the effect is due to the aura created with the staging. The site is not something one would stumble across by accident like a chapel in a church, one has to seek it out. A visitor would enter the quiet, dimly lit rooms carefully with a sense of apprehension and awe, and then see the striking silhouette of a motionless life size figure on a bed, approachable without a barrier.[note 17]

It is astonishing that one of the first things a first time visitor mentions is that Kostka looks so lifelike when, in fact, the statue couldn't be more artificial. Head, hands, feet and pillows are of white Carrara marble, the thin shirt is of a different white stone and the habit is of a black stone at the time known as "paragone". The saint's head would originally have been emphasised by a nimbus, he held an image of the Madonna in his left hand and a large crucifix would have extended from his right hand into the crook of his right elbow. Stanislas would be looking at the crucified Christ with eyes already delirious. With the large crucifix missing, an important iconographic dimension is lost today, i.e. the connection between Stanislas and Christ (similar to the statue of St. Francis Xavier of the same time) which would also round up the composition.[note 18] The mattress, bed cover with bronze fringes and bed step are from coloured ornamental stones common to Roman baroque art but used in a highly original and effective manner.[1]^{: Cat. 20}

Le Gros' project for the Tomb Monument for the duc de Bouillon and his family. Detail of an engraving by Benoît Audran the Elder after a drawing by Gilles-Marie Oppenordt, published 1708.

At some point after 1697, Le Gros was employed by Emmanuel-Théodose de La Tour d'Auvergne, cardinal de Bouillon to create the dynastic monument for his family to be erected in a funerary chapel in Cluny Abbey, of which the cardinal was the abbot. Apart from being a compatriot, Bouillon might have known the sculptor through the Jesuits as he habitually lived as their guest in the Jesuit novitiate at Sant'Andrea al Quirinale. Le Gros's work was completed by 1707 and sent to Cluny, where it arrived in 1709. He worked on this project in as much a French manner as he ever would and invented a spectacular sepulchral monument, at once continuing in the French baroque tradition as well as opening up new formal and iconographic avenues.

The chapel was meant to receive several family members, including the cardinal himself, but first and foremost his parents, Frédéric Maurice de La Tour d'Auvergne, Duc de Bouillon and Éléonor de Bergh, Duchesse de Bouillon. Depicted as the main characters in the centre of the monument their grouping and gestures allude to the fact that Éléonor was instrumental in converting her husband to catholicism. Another important component was the heart of the duke's brother, the national hero Turenne, enclosed in a heart shaped container of gilded silver and carried towards heaven by a youthful angel who rises from a heraldic tower of white marble which links the family name La Tour to the biblical tower of David. Together with some other sculptures outside the chapel (not planned to be made by Le Gros and, in fact, never executed), the iconographic message was the postulation of a royal rank and sovereignty of the family dating back to the 9th century, the same message Cardinal de Bouillon tried to support by commissioning a written history of his ancestry from the historiographer Étienne Baluze,[note 19] published in 1708 and containing an engraving of the envisaged funeral chapel with an idealised view of Le Gros's monument.

None of this highly original concept influenced the development of monumental funerary sculpture. Apart from a thorough inspection by royal officials to determine whether they expressed any pretentious dynastic claims, the sculptures were not even unpacked in Cluny due to the fact that Cardinal de Bouillon so completely fell out with his cousin, the Sun King, that he was declared an enemy of the state and all construction stopped. Le Gros' marbles and bronzes were stored, undisturbed in their sealed crates, for nearly 80 years. In the aftermath of the French Revolution they were in danger of being sold as stone material together with Cluny abbey but saved by Alexandre Lenoir who wanted them for his Musée des Monuments français.

The animated marble figures of the Duke and Duchess de Bouillon together with the angel (minus Turenne's heart) and a finely detailed relief showing the duke as a battle hero never made it to Paris and are today installed at the Hôtel-Dieu in Cluny.[note 20] A fragment of the heraldic tower is kept in the granary of the abbey.[1]^{: Cat. 11}[16]

Apostle Thomas by Le Gros

Terracotta model, 1703–04
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Marble, 1703–11
San Giovanni in Laterano

At the end of 1702, Pope Clement XI announced his intention to finally have Borromini's colossal niches in the Lateran basilica filled with twelve heroic-scaled figures of the Apostles.[note 21] Clement's idea was very similar to filling the niches of St. Peter's initiated at the same time: get your church embellished but find others to pay for it. So, he called on prelates and princes to sponsor individual statues but handed the task to choose sculptors to a committee created to run the project. The statue of St. Peter he intended to finance himself and had Théodon commissioned.

Like Théodon, Le Gros was given not only one but two statues:[17]^: 109 Saint Bartholomew (1703–12)[1]^{: Cat. 23} who displays his own flayed skin,[note 22] sponsored by the pope's treasurer Lorenzo Corsini,[note 23] and Saint Thomas (1703–11), sponsored by King Peter II of Portugal.

From the outset it was recognised that the overall unity of all the Apostle statues was of paramount importance. The architect Carlo Fontana acted as a consultant to work out an appropriate size of the proposed sculptures and, more importantly, the ageing painter Carlo Maratti, the pope's favourite artist, was given the task to achieve a stylistic unity by preparing drawings for each statue which were then given to the sculptors as a guideline.[17]^: 98-105 This forced submission enraged many of them who, in 1703, voiced their discontent,[17]^: 263 Théodon even resigned because of it, eventually returning to France in 1705.[note 24].

Le Gros went one step further and decided to challenge Maratti's authority by submitting a model which was radically different from the latter's sober, classicising style. With his model for Saint Thomas from around 1703–04, the most intricate and detailed terracotta he ever produced, he harked back to the highly emotional baroque of Gianlorenzo Bernini's St. Longinus. He was undoubtedly aware that, if he prevailed and his model was accepted by the pope's committee, all the other sculptors would have to follow suit stylistically. So this, in effect, was Le Gros' attempt to establish himself as the artistic leader of the Eternal City.[1]^: 14-15

His model was not approved and the Late Baroque classicism, as Wittkower[18] calls it, prevailed. While Le Gros was the only sculptor who was not held to work from drawings by Maratti,[note 25][17]^: 218 he must have been forced into an act of self-censorship. While essentially the same figure, each and every exuberance was ironed out in his monumental marble figure: the drapery is more ordered, the head lost its visionary vigour, the unruly pages of the book gave way to a carpenter's square, the naturalistic rock became a flat plinth, the weathered tomb stone turned pristine and, of course, the putto vanished. A dynamic group of a saint with a putto in the landscape became a solid statue in a niche.[1]^{: Cat. 22}

While Le Gros was put in his place, he was not down and out. When it transpired that the undistinguished Florentine sculptor Antonio Andreozzi would not finish his Saint James the Greater, efforts were made in 1713 to win over Louis XIV to take on the patronage and employ Le Gros, but to no avail.[6]^{: IV, 230, 240}[17]^: 123

In order to have an operation done and also to settle his inheritance, in 1715 he travelled to Paris, where he stayed with his great friend Pierre Crozat who managed to arrange his travel on a royal ship. Very rich, but with humorous irony nicknamed Crozat le pauvre (Crozat the poor) because his brother Antoine was even wealthier, he was a renowned collector and patron of the arts. His house was at the centre of artistic life for connoisseurs and established as well as up and coming artists. There, Le Gros would certainly have met the ageing Charles de la Fosse who lived with Crozat but also his young protégé Antoine Watteau. In addition Le Gros renewed his friendships with Oppenordt and Vleughels. Crozat had Le Gros decorate a cabinet in his Parisian house and the chapel in his magnificent country retreat, the Château de Montmorency (both destroyed).

Both Crozat and Oppenordt were on good terms with the Regent, so Le Gros would have had a good start had he decided to stay in Paris. He also acted as a go-between in Crozat's long negotiations (1714–21) to acquire the art collection of Queen Christina of Sweden for the regent. But he had great trouble with the art establishment, and the Académie royale would not admit him easily into their ranks despite his status as an internationally acclaimed artist. Rebuffed, Le Gros returned to Rome in 1716.[1]^: 16-19

Back in Rome, the last sad chapter of his life unfolded. His absence had been a great excuse to give the last Lateran apostle to Rusconi. The reason given was that de' Rossi was dead, Le Gros abroad, and therefore Rusconi the only good sculptor available.[17]^{: 123, 332}

It was, however, of far greater consequence what happened at the Accademia di San Luca. Lead by Marco Benefial and Michelangelo Cerruti (both non-academicians), a protest arose in 1716 against newly introduced rules of the academy which subjected non-members to financial injustice. Francesco Trevisani and three other academicians (Pasquale de' Rossi, Giovanni Maria Morandi and Bonaventura Lamberti) distanced themselves from subscribing to these new rules, and Le Gros sided with them on his return. As a result, all five were unceremoniously expelled. This meant that they were then unable to carry out any more public commissions in Rome in their own right.[1]^: 18-19

The rich Roman art market was effectively closed to Le Gros, and he had to settle for a few works outside. After being first approached by the Benedictine abbey of Montecassino in 1712, in 1714 he gave in and took on three statues for the abbey's Chiostro dei Benefattori at a bargain price. These now became his main focus. At the time of his death, the statue of Pope Gregory the Great was finished and Emperor Henry II only needed finishing touches. The third, Charlemagne, was hardly started and subsequently taken on by Le Gros' loyal assistant Paolo Campi as his own work. During the heavy bombing of Montecassino in World War II, Pope Gregory was nearly completely destroyed and is now heavily restored while Henry II suffered less damage and remains recognisable as a work by Le Gros.[1]^{: Cat. 40–41}

Without doubt due to the intervention of Juvarra, who was by then architect to the Duke of Savoy, Le Gros created two female saints for Juvarra's facade of the church of S. Cristina in Turin (c. 1717–18). Upon their arrival, the statues of Saint Christina and Teresa of Avila were considered too beautiful to be exposed to the elements and brought into the church's interior (1804 transferred to Turin Cathedral) and to be replaced on the facade by copies by a local sculptor. This flattery was probably intended to be a reminder of a similar honour which was bestowed on Bernini half a century earlier with regards to his two angels for Ponte Sant'Angelo.[1]^{: Cat. 45}

In a letter from 6 January 1719 to Rosalba Carriera, hoping to introduce the two on her planned visit to Rome, Crozat described Le Gros as "without question the best sculptor there is in Europe, and the most honest man and the most endearing there is."[23]

While Le Gros' great achievement was appreciated elsewhere, he would wait in vain for a similar adulation in Rome. Rusconi received a knighthood from Clement XI for his contribution to the Lateran project in late 1718 while Le Gros went empty handed.[17]^: 123

Pierre Le Gros died from pneumonia half a year later on 3 May 1719 and was buried in the French national church in Rome. If we believe Pierre-Jean Mariette, disappointment advanced his early death:

"If he was indisposed against the Parisian academy, he was even more piqued by the honours conferred on Camillo Rusconi for the figures this able sculptor has made for Saint John Lateran. He expected to at least share them with him, and that would have been right; ... one more miserable cross[note 28] might have preserved him for us, because one suspects that the chagrin has advanced his days."[24]

Only in 1725, with the painter Giuseppe Chiari being its principe, were the five dissenters rehabilitated and reinstated as members of the Accademia di San Luca, four of them posthumously as only Trevisani was still alive at the time.[1]^: 18

Medallion of Ludovico Ludovisi, c. 1709–1713, detail of the Ludovisi Monument in Sant'Ignazio

According to Gerhard Bissell, Le Gros was a sculptor of brilliant technical ability:

The most virtuoso marble worker of his time, he excelled in convincing the eye to see the depicted materials rather than stone. His surfaces are so nuanced they nearly appear as different colours. And yet, he achieved that very rare feat of integrating these fine details into monumental sculptures without appearing grotesque.[15]

He always tended to compose his sculptures like a relief. For his picturesque approach, an expansive shape mattered more to him than the distribution of mass and space. While the detail as well as the large form are very three-dimensional, their volume is usually tied into a system of layers. This leads by no means to a single point of view. Quite the contrary because Le Gros developed all his composition into space and entices the viewer to go around the figure. While a classicist like Rusconi linked a spatial development closely to the anatomy of the figure, Le Gros achieved this with an abundance of highly malleable drapery and extrovert gestures. In addition, he showed a keen sense for nuanced effects of light and shadow, whether it was to make the heavily polished, white as snow figure of Luigi Gonzaga stand out, or to cast Filippo Neri into a mystical shade. All of Le Gros' work is characterised by a dynamic of far and near view. It is worth getting close up to even his most heroic-scale figures.[1]^: 21-30