Annuciation

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.