Pierre Le Gros the Younger

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' 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. 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. ==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. 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. 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. ==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. 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. Lateran Apostles 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. 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: Saint Bartholomew (1703–12) who displays his own flayed skin, sponsored by the pope's treasurer Lorenzo Corsini, 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. This forced submission enraged many of them who, in 1703, voiced their discontent, Théodon even resigned because of it, eventually returning to France in 1705.. 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. His model was not approved and the Late Baroque classicism, as Wittkower calls it, prevailed. While Le Gros was the only sculptor who was not held to work from drawings by Maratti, 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. 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. ==Later works==

Le Gros thrived on playful invention. When, some time between 1706 and 1715, he was asked by the Portuguese ambassador to add heads, hands and legs to a fragmented antique group of Amor and Psyche, he deliberately turned the love story on its head and transformed it to the tale of Caunus and Byblis in which Caunus vehemently defends himself against the amorous advances of his sister. Le Gros' creation quickly became popular and triggered a rafter of drawings, reproductions and copies by for example Pompeo Batoni, Francesco Carradori, Martin Gottlieb Klauer and, best known of all, Laurent Delvaux who carved two marble versions. Le Gros' work soon ended up in Germany where several plaster casts were made. Some time later it was purified back to Amor and Psyche but later destroyed in a fire. The most faithful impression of what it looked like is the plaster cast in Tiefurt House near Weimar. In 1708–10 Le Gros collaborated with his close friend, the architect Filippo Juvarra, in the creation of the Cappella Antamori in the church of San Girolamo della Carità, Rome. His statue of San Filippo Neri is set against a large backlit coloured glass window and seems to dematerialise in the warm yellow orange glow. Drawings by both Le Gros and Juvarra demonstrate that each of them contributed to finding the right composition for the sculpture and tried a number of different poses. Le Gros also made many putti and cherubim and two plaster reliefs for the ceiling showing scenes from Neri's life. The exquisitely crafted chapel is one of the very few traces of Juvarra's activities in Rome. With the vast, lavish Monument to Pope Gregory XV and cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi in Sant'Ignazio, Le Gros conceived his last work for the Jesuits between about 1709–14. It singularly combines the tombs of both the pope and his cardinal-nephew and celebrates their merits from a pronounced Jesuit point of view as the inscription explains: ALTER IGNATIUM ARIS. ALTER ARAS IGNATIO (one raised Ignatius to the altars, the other erected altars for Ignatius). This alludes to the facts that Gregory canonised the saint and Ludovico built the church of Sant'Ignazio. The concept is highly theatrical with a large curtain (made from coloured marble) being drawn back by two Famae (both the work of Pierre-Étienne Monnot from designs by Le Gros) to reveal the protagonist. This curtain obscures the wall behind and creates the illusion that the monument has the rare quality of being free standing rather than attached to the wall as is the norm. The composition also makes use of the monument's location in the only chapel with a side entrance to the church (to the right of the monument) by turning several figures directly towards visitors entering from there and inviting them in – an effect which today is hard to appreciate as the door is no longer in use. From 1711 to 1714 followed the Cappella di S. Francesco di Paola in San Giacomo degli Incurabili, for which Le Gros was the architect – which basically means he was in charge of all its decoration – and the sculptor of a large relief showing the saint in adoration of an old venerated image of the Madonna and child, intervening to cure the sick. ==Decline==

In 1713, he managed to alienate the Jesuits by stubbornly repeating his proposal to transfer his own statue of Stanislas Kostka on his Deathbed into the church of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale as a centrepiece for the newly decorated chapel of saint Stanislas. At the same time, all efforts of deciding who should be commissioned with the last Lateran apostle were at a stalemate with, it seems, three serious contenders: Le Gros, Angelo de' Rossi and Rusconi. The latter had already produced three apostles and was by then clearly favoured by Pope Clement XI, but no decision was made. In 1714, Le Gros' father died in Paris and he himself was close to death's door, suffering from gall stones. Paris 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. Rome 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. It was, however, of far greater consequence what happened at the Accademia di San Luca. Led 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. 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. 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. 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." 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. 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 might have preserved him for us, because one suspects that the chagrin has advanced his days." 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. ==Importance==

Today, Le Gros is largely forgotten but shares this fate with almost all the artists working in Rome in his time. After a blanket condemnation of the Baroque period by critics from the 18th to well into the 20th century, Gianlorenzo Bernini, Francesco Borromini and a few other 17th century artists have now been given their rightful place in the pantheon of artistic geniuses. But even the great Alessandro Algardi, while certainly given his dues by art historians, is not anchored in the public consciousness, much less so the following generations of Maratti or Fontana, and then Le Gros and Rusconi. During their lifetime however, they were regarded throughout Europe as outstanding figures, valued as exemplary by generations of young artists. An impartial look shows Le Gros as a driving force in an international environment. While family life was very French, close friends included painters such as the Dutch Gaspar van Wittel, the Frenchmen Vleughels and Louis de Silvestre as well as the Italian Sebastiano Conca, architects such as the Italian Juvarra and the Frenchman Oppenordt, and the sculptors Angelo de' Rossi as well his loyal students and right-hand men Campi and Gaetano Pace. In addition, the need for assistants brought a bevy of young sculptors and painters from all over Europe to his studio over the years like the Englishman Francis Bird and the Frenchman Guillaume Coustou who frequented his workshop before 1700, both eventually becoming significant artists in their home countries. In the 1710s we find in his workshop the German painter Franz Georg Hermann and the still very young Carle van Loo who studied drawing with Le Gros. His French contemporaries would have heard about him but wouldn't have seen his works. His Vetturie, a student work, arrived in France 20 years overdue and the Bouillon Monument was not even unpacked until the end of the 18th century and, therefore, not known to anybody. 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. ==Gallery==

Chronological gallery of most of the major works by Le Gros not already illustrated - some dates are uncertain or overlap, therefore the sequence is only roughly chronological. File:S. Ignatius Le Gros Gesu Rome.jpg|Silver statue of St. Ignatius, 1697–1699, Rome, Il Gesù File:Pierre legros, gloria di san luigi gonzaga, 1697-99, 03.jpg|S. Luigi Gonzaga in Gloria, 1697–99, Rome, Sant'Ignazio File:Pius V Tomb.jpg|Tomb of St. Pius V, 1697–98, Rome, S. Maria Maggiore File:Pierre legros, sepolcro del cardinale girolamo casanate, 1707 cropped.jpg|Tomb of Cardinal Girolamo Casanate, 1700–1703, Rome, S. Giovanni in Laterano File:St Francis Xavier by Pierre Le Gros.jpg|St. Francis Xavier, 1702, Rome, Sant'Apollinare File:Sant'andrea al quirinale, stanze del convento, cappella di san stanislao kostka, statua del santo di pierre legros 00.JPG|Stanislas Kostka on his Deathbed, 1702–03, Rome, Jesuit Novitiate File:St Dominic by Pierre Le Gros.jpg|St. Dominic, 1702–06, Rome, St. Peters File:Duc de Bouillon in Battle.jpg|The Duc de Bouillon in Battle, finished by 1707, Cluny, Hôtel-Dieu File:Duc de Bouillon.jpg|''Frédéric Maurice de La Tour d'Auvergne, Duc de Bouillon'', finished by 1707, Cluny, Hôtel-Dieu File:Éléonore Duchesse de Bouillon.jpg|Éléonor de Bergh, Duchesse de Bouillon, finished by 1707, Cluny, Hôtel-Dieu File:San Pietro in Vincoli - Tomba del Card. Cinzio Passeri Aldobrandini 1.jpg|Tomb of Cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini, 1705–1707, architecture by Carlo Francesco Bizzaccheri, sculpture by Le Gros, Rome, San Pietro in Vincoli File:Biblioteca Casanatense cropped.jpg|Statue of Cardinal Girolamo Casanate, 1706–1708, Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense File:Bartholomaeus San Giovanni in Laterano 2006-09-07.jpg|St. Bartholomew, c. 1703–1712, Rome, S. Giovanni in Laterano File:Caunus bw.jpg|Caunus and Byblis, plaster cast after Le Gros, Schloss Tiefurt File:Rom, die Kirche San Giacomo in Augusta, Kapelle, Bild 1.JPG|Chapel of St. Francesco di Paola, 1711–1714, Rome, S. Giacomo degli Incurabili File:Capella di San Francesco di Paola in Chiesa San Giacomo in Augusta.jpg|St. Francesco di Paola intervening to cure the sick, 1711–1714, Rome, S. Giacomo degli Incurabili File:Heinrich II Montecassino.jpg|Emperor Henry II, 1714–1719, Montecassino, Chiostro dei Benefattori File:Duomo di Torino 4.JPG|Statues of St.Christina and St.Teresa of Avila, c. 1717–1719, Turin, Duomo File:St Agnese in Agone Rome interior 06 cropped.jpg|Angels and putti above the statue of Saint Sebastian by Paolo Campi, c. 1717–1719, Rome, Sant'Agnese in Agone == Notes ==