Bracci, Pietro

Italian late Baroque sculptor. Born, Rome 1700. Died, Rome 1773. Among his most prominent works are the colossal Oceanus (or Neptune) of the Trevi Fountain and the sculptures of four funerary monuments in Rome: the tomb of Pope Benedict XIII in the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the tomb of Pope Benedict XIV in the Basilica of Saint Peter, the tomb of Maria Clementina Sobieski, wife of ‘The Old Pretender’ James Francis Edward Stuart, also in the Vatican, and the tomb of Cardinal Giuseppe Renato Imperiali in the Basilica of Sant’Agostino. He is also renowned for a group of busts and a significant number of drawings which are now dispersed among numerous museums and collections around the world, including the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the Musée des Beaux-Arts, both in Montreal, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. According to historical inventories, he was also author of several manuscripts, most of them now lost, on a variety of subjects, including architecture, military engineering and sundials.

• Kieven, E. and J. Pinto, <i>Pietro Bracci and Eighteenth-Century Rome: Drawings for Architecture and Sculpture in the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Other Collections</i> (2001), esp. 9-24.