Pierre Le Gros the Younger

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. 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. 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' 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.