BRACCI, Pietro

Bernini was fond of saying that portraiture consisted in finding the unique feature of the sitter and reproducing it; he added that the feature should be beautiful and not ugly. This approach often presented problems with busts of pontiffs, who tended to be old and sometimes uninspiring to look at, none more so than the monkish Pope Benedict XIII, who reigned from 1724 to 1730. Several representations of Benedict XIII were produced by Pietro Bracci, and we are fortunate in having an early terracotta study to compare with the official version in marble.

The terracotta does not hesitate to convey the unheroic, slightly dyspeptic expression of the sitter and would have been used for reference whenever Bracci was called upon to produce official portraits. In the marble, although one cannot say that the sculptor completely remade his sitter, he has certainly regularized the features and conveyed a more benign expression. A greater scale and the upward tilt of the head also contribute to a more positive image in Bracci’s marble, which seems as much concerned with representing the office as its individual holder.

Bernini was fond of saying that portraiture consisted in finding the unique feature of the sitter and reproducing it; he added that the feature should be beautiful and not ugly. This approach often presented problems with busts of pontiffs, who tended to be old and sometimes uninspiring to look at, none more so than the monkish Pope Benedict XIII, who reigned from 1724 to 1730. Several representations of Benedict XIII were produced by Pietro Bracci, and we are fortunate in having an early terracotta study to compare with the official version in marble.

The terracotta does not hesitate to convey the unheroic, slightly dyspeptic expression of the sitter and would have been used for reference whenever Bracci was called upon to produce official portraits. In the marble, although one cannot say that the sculptor completely remade his sitter, he has certainly regularized the features and conveyed a more benign expression. A greater scale and the upward tilt of the head also contribute to a more positive image in Bracci’s marble, which seems as much concerned with representing the office as its individual holder.

The central sculptural group of the Trevi Fountain, Neptune on a Chariot of Shells Drawn by Tritons, is the thematic and formal focus of the ensemble. It was commissioned from Giovan Battista Maini, sculptor of the monument to Cardinal Corsini, who made the plaster model. However, after Maini died in 1759 Pietro Bracci was appointed, who sculpted it in marble.

The monument bears a clear affinity with Bernini’s tomb of Alexander VII.

Pietro Bracci perpetuated the memory of the princess Maria Clementina Sobieska who married to James Stuart, the Old Pretender, who was living in exile in Rome. Her crusade for the Catholic faith earned her the extreme honour, one usually reserved to popes, of being buried in St Peter’s at the Vatican. Bracci’s work is a gaudy example of the Italian passion for polychromy and composite materials. The medallion contains a portrait of the defunct in mosaic; and in the midst of an orgy of coloured marbles, gilt bronze and stucco, the lovely figure of Charity (or the Love of God) holding a flaming heart in her hand is carved in pure white marble.

In 1744 Bracci executed the sculptural groups for the tomb of Maria Clementina Sobieski, conceived of by the architect Filippo Barigioni. The tomb can be considered to be one of the most beautiful works of its kind, with the use of a painted portrait, in accordance with the typology that was gaining popularity in those years, and which Bracci himself reused in the tomb of Cardinal Leopoldo Calcagnini in Sant’Andrea della Fratte (1746), returning to the motif of pyramid, the symbol of eternity.

In the Clementina Sobieski tomb, what is striking is the balance between the different materials (the great alabaster cloth, the white marble of the figures, and the gilded bronze of the crown and flame), which compete in forming the compositional unity held together by the Berninian type of invention of Barigioni.

Pietro Braci was - together with Filippo della Valle - the pupil of Camillo Rusconi. He applied more painterly effects than his master and the other pupils by using multi-coloured marble.

The tomb of Pope Benedict XIII was designed by Carlo Marchionni and carried out in collaboration with Bartolomeo Pincelotti (died in 1740), who was responsible for the figure of Humility. The tomb takes after the by now established Algardian model due to the ways Rusconi worked. Bracci sculpted the statue of Purity and, above all, the statue of the pope, clearly configured as an eighteenth-century reinterpretation of Bernini’s figure of Alexander VII at prayer, realized for the funerary monument of the pontiff. Bracci’s choice is, however, much more theatrical: Benedict XIII, seated on a throne, holds his hand to his breast in a gesture partly of Christian submission, and partly as an eternal promise of faith.