VALLE, Filippo della

Cametti’s monumental Annunciation altarpiece in Turin remained a touchstone of late Baroque reliefs, and when the younger Florentine sculptor Filippo della Valle created the large relief of Annunciation for the altar opposite Le Gros’ St Aloyzius Gonzaga in Glory, he paid Cametti the compliment of revising his work in line with mid-eighteenth-century expectations. Della Valle had previously essayed this new, restrained style in his first great Roman work, the Temperance in the Corsini Chapel at StJohn Lateran, a statue which was one of the clearest harbingers of the changed taste in late Baroque sculpture. His Annunciation stands in relationship to Cametti’s Annunciation much as Cametti’s work did to the relief sculpture of the late seventeenth century. The accent is less on histrionics than sentiment, and the pictorial comparison would be with fashionable contemporary painters such as Pompeo Batoni or the Frenchman Pierre Subleyras.

The Bust of Pope Clement XII was long attributed to Pieter Antoon Verschaffelt (1710-1793) from Ghent, who lived and worked in Rome during the papacy of Clement XIII and Benedict XIV and performed a number of important commissions. The portrait is now believed to be the work of Filippo della Valle, one of Rome’s leading sculptors in the mid-18th century. The marble version of this terracotta bust is now in the Palazzo Braschi in the Italian capital.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, a cycle of founders of the religious orders was intended to complete the sculptural decoration of the nave of St Peter’s. Della Valle’s St Teresa of �vila belongs to the series.

This statue remains in thrall to the example of Rusconi (the greatest name among the sculptors participating in the project), and its similarity to his master’s Lateran statues is evident. More significant, however, is the sculptor’s careful avoidance of any detail which could bring to mind Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Teresa; even the angel with the fiery dart has been reduced to a harmless cherub with a token heart.

Cardinal Neri Corsini, the nephew of Pope Clement XII (Lorenzo Corsini), commissioned Filippo della Valle and nine other sculptors to decorate the Corsini Chapel in the San Giovanni in Laterano. The allegorical figure of Temperance was executed in 1732 for the chapel.

The Temperance casts more than one glance back to a much admired statue of the early seventeenth century, Duquesnoy’s St Susanna, but it is worth looking at the ways in which Della Valle departs from his model since they indicate a change in taste. A striking sinuosity dictates every aspect of the figure from her coiffure and spiraling pose to the syncopated folds of drapery and magnificent ewer at her feet.

The papal tomb remained the most important sculptural task in Rome right to the end of the eighteenth century. Its history is a touchstone not only for assessing the contributions of the leading sculptors, their style, and the quality of their work, but also for the appreciation of the profound spiritual development that occurred at this period.

Filippo della Valle’s tomb of Innocent XII repeats the structure of the papal tombs, by then conventionalised from the type created by Bernini at the height of the Catholic Restoration as an adequate expression of papal power. Filippo della Valle’s work shows an almost Rococo elegance. His figure f the pope shows a fragile old man rather than the symbolic head of Christianity.