Pierre Le Gros (12 April 1666 Paris – 3 May 1719 Rome) was a French sculptor, active almost exclusively in Baroque Rome where he was the pre-eminent sculptor for nearly two decades.Gerhard Bissell, Pierre le Gros, 1666–1719, Reading, Berkshire 1997.

He created monumental works of sculpture for the Jesuits and the Dominicans and found himself centre stage of the two most prestigious artistic campaigns of his era, the Altar of Saint Ignatius of Loyola in the Gesù and the cycle of the twelve huge Apostle statues in the nave of the Lateran basilica. Le Gros' handling of the marble attracted powerful patrons like the papal treasurer Lorenzo Corsini (much later to become Pope Clement XII) and Cardinal de Bouillon, as Dean of the Sacred College the highest ranking cardinal. He also played a prominent role in more intimate settings like the chapel of the Monte di Pietà and the Cappella Antamori in San Girolamo della Carità, both little treasures of the Roman late baroque not known to many because they are difficult to access.

Le Gros was the most exuberant baroque sculptor of all his contemporaries but eventually lost his long battle for artistic dominance to a prevailing classicist tendency against which he fought in vain.

Name and family

While he himself always signed as Le Gros and is referred to in this way in all legal documents, it has become common practice in the 19th and 20th centuries to spell the name Legros. Scholars frequently add a suffix like 'the Younger' or 'Pierre II'François Souchal, French Sculptors of the 17th and 18th Centuries. The Reign of Louis XIV, vol. II, Oxford (Cassirer) 1981, vol. IV, London (Faber) 1993. to distinguish him from his father, Pierre Le Gros the Elder, who was also a sculptor of renown to the French king Louis XIV.

Le Gros was born in Paris into a family with a strong artistic pedigree. Jeanne, his mother, died when he was 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.Thomas Hedin, The Sculpture of Gaspard and Balthazard Marsy, Columbia (University of Missouri Press) 1983, pp. 232–233. His initial training as a sculptor lay in the hands of his father while he learned drawing from the engraver Jean Le Pautre, the uncle of his stepmother, Marie Le Pautre. His half brother Jean (1671–1745) was to become a portrait painter.Legros (Le Gros), Jean, in: Ulrich Thieme, Felix Becker (editors): Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXII, Leipzig (E. A. Seemann) 1928, p. 575.

Student

As a student of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture Le Gros was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome to study at the French Academy in Rome, where he arrived in 1690. There, he renewed his close friendship with his cousin Pierre Lepautre, also a sculptor, and struck a friendship with the academy's other fellow, the architect Gilles-Marie Oppenordt.Anatole de Montaiglon and Jules Guiffrey (eds.), Correspondance des directeurs de l’Académie de France à Rome avec les surintendants des bâtiments, vol. I-XVIII, Paris 1887–1912. His time there from 1690 to 1695 was fruitful but not untroubled. The academy was plagued by a constant financial crisis, and the premises at the Palazzo Capranica were also a rather ramshackle affair, far from the grandeur the academy would later enjoy after a move in the 18th century to the Palazzo Mancini under the directorship of Le Gros' friend Nicolas Vleughels, and eventually to the Villa Medici.

Keen to prove himself by carving a marble copy of an antique statue, after much lobbying Le Gros was eventually granted permission to do so by the director of the academy Matthieu de La Teulière and his superior in Paris, Édouard Colbert de Villacerf. His model was the then so-called Vetturie, an ancient sculpture then in the garden of the Villa Medici in Rome (today in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence), chosen by La Teulière as a good example for female Roman dress – which Le Gros, nevertheless, improved upon following La Teulière's instructions, by introducing dress details found in engravings after Raphael. Finished in 1695, she was finally shipped to Marly some twenty years later and came to Paris in 1722 where she was placed in the Tuileries Garden.

Early independence

The chapel of Saint Ignatius 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.Pio Pecchiai, Il Gesù di Roma, Rome 1952, pp. 139–196 (in Italian). 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.

Religion Overthrowing Heresy

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) was spot on from the outset.

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. 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. 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. 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.

Silver statue of St. Ignatius

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.

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.

Other early works for the Jesuits and Dominicans 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.

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, who was a friend of Le Gros' at the Académie Royale in Paris. 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 by a flap made of gilded bronze which bears his effigy in very shallow relief.

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.Olivier Michel, L’Accademia, in: Le Palais Farnèse, Rome 1981, Vol. I/2, pp. 567–609, in particular pp. 572–579 (in French).

High hopes

All his work so far as an independent master had a clearly defined deadline: the celebrations of the Holy Year 1700.

Married life 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.

Pope Clement XI

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.

Antonin Cloche as patron

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 in the Biblioteca Casanatense (1706–08).Gerhard Schuster, Zu Ehren Casanates. Père Cloches Kunstaufträge in der Frühzeit der Biblioteca Casanatense, in: Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, Vol. 35, 1991, pp. 323–336.