Pierre-Étienne Monnot

Pierre-Étienne Monnot (Orchamps-Vennes, Doubs, Franche-Comté, 9 August 1657 — Rome 24 August 1733) was a French sculptor working mostly in Rome in a late-Baroque idiom.

Raised at Besançon and trained at first by his father, he was apprenticed to a sculptor at Dijon, then developed his style during a decade in Paris in the studio of Pierre Le Gros the Elder (ca. 1677-87), before returning to his home region, where commissions for religious works on a small scale took him to Besançon and Poligny.

By about 1690 he was in Rome, where there was an established, tightly-knit community of Burgundian artists. Monnot was influenced by Domenico Guidi, to the extent that scholars have debated the attribution between Guidi and Monnot of the Burghley House "Andromeda" [Now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art] . Guidi, a pupil of Alessandro Algardi, had become a prominent Roman sculptor with Bernini's death in 1680. Monnot's first major commission was for two marble reliefs, a "Nativity" and a "Flight into Egypt" flanking Guidi's "Dream of St. Joseph" for the right transept altar in Santa Maria della Vittoria. [Touring Club Italiano, "Roma e dintorni" 1965:305.]

Monnot quickly intregrated into Rome's artistic circles and gained many commissions. With the award of the Saint Ignatius altar in the Church of the Gesù, to Le Gros the Younger in 1695, French sculptors in Rome became highly prized for decades to come. [Enggass 1976 provides the setting and outlines the patterns of patronage for Roman sculpture in this period; his section "The French in Rome" sets Monnot in the context of his compatriots.] He was among the select group who were commissioned to provide apostles of heroic scale for niches in the Basilica of Saint John Lateran.

Commissions arrived from the English visitor, the Earl of Exeter, and above all from Kassel, where Monnot was responsible for the "tour de force" of white marble sculptures and bas-reliefs set against richly-colored marble revetments of the "Marmorbad" (the "Marble Bath") in the Karlsaue, Kassel, which is considered his masterwork. Monnot went to Kassel in 1714, and began by executing marble portrait busts of Karl, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel (or Hesse-Cassel), and the Landgrafin. In January 1715 the first contracts were signed concerning the new "Appartement du Bain" with its statuary, ten sculptures that were already completed in Rome, some of them as early as 1692, and commissioned four white marble high relief panels for the outerwalls of the pavilion, eight further relief panels for the vaulting and the portrait medalion of Karl himself. Monnot established a studio with assistants in Kassel and to help him produce the works. Renewed agreements in 1718 increased the marble relief panels to the eight that were installed, and the ensemble was inaugurated in 1729. The final two statues, Minerva and Aurora, were announced as ready by Monnot in 1731, but did not actually reach Kassel until 1734.

The architect of the garden pavilion is unknown; Monnot's mythological sculptures occupy niches in the massive central pier, and his eight large white marble high relief panels of subjects from Ovid's "Metamorphoses" fill the piers between arch-headed windows.

Like all sculptors working in Rome, Monnot was called upon to restore fragmentary antiquities. Baroque restorations often took broader liberties of interpretation than eighteenth-century and later tastes permitted. Monnot restored a torso of a copy after Myron's "Discobolus" as a "Wounded Gladiator" who supports himself on his arm as he sinks to the ground; it was donated before 1734 by Pope Clement XII to the Capitoline Museums, where it remains. [Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, "Taste and the Antique: the Lure of classical Sculpture 1500-1900 (Yale University Press), pp 200, 227.] One of his pupils, Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (1716-1799), was a sculptor best known as a restorer of antiquities.

Works

*Tabernacle for the church at Vesoul.
*Retable for the chapel of Saint Laurent, Besançon.
*Works for the Priory of Vaux-sous-Poligny, Jura.
*Busts of Christ and of the Virgin, terracotta (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Besançon)
*Five reliefs of the Passion in lindenwood for the chapel of the Oratorians, Poligny (Hôtel de Ville, Poligny). One of them carried the date 1688, his earliest dated work.
*"Nativity" and "The Flight into Egypt", marble high reliefs for the Capocaccia Chapel, the right transept altar of Santa Maria della Vittoria, 1695-99. The main relief of the altar is Domenico Guidi's "Dream of Saint Joseph".
*"Angels" for the monument of Pope Gregory XV, Sant'Ignazio, Rome, 1697, designed by the Jesuit father Grassi. In association with Pierre Le Gros the Younger.
*"Monument of Pope Innocent XI", St. Peter's 1697-1704. Carlo Maratta presented the patron with designs for the tomb, who were revised in the execution by Monnot.
*Reliefs in Palazzo Odescalchi for prince Livio Odescalchi, nephew of Innocent XI, including his medallion portrait , 1695 (Louvre, "illustration, right")
*"The Holy Family", marble bas-relief, (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin)
*"Andromeda and the Sea Monster" 1700-04. Commissioned by John Cecil, 5th Earl of Exeter for Burghley House. (Metropolitan Museum of Art). On their last of four Grand Tours, the earl and his wife posed in Rome for Monnot, who executed their portrait busts. Monnot also produced the couple's tomb monument, which was installed in the family chapel at Burghley in 1704.
*"St Peter" 1708-13 and "St. Paul", 1708-18, San Giovanni in Laterano, Rome. Monumental figures in the series of apostles for Francesco Borromini's niches.
*"The Virgin Swooning over the Body of Christ at the Foot of the Cross", marble high relief, 1710. (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC)
*Sculptures and high relief panels for the "Marmorbad", Karlsaue, Kassel, 1718-1731.

Notes

References

*Bénézit, E. "Dictionnaire des Peintres" (1976)
*Bessone, Aurelj, "Dizionario degli scultori italiani" (1947)
*Fuchs, Thomas. 1997. "Tradition und Innovation im Werk des Pierre-Etienne Monnot: Das Marmorbad in Kassel" (Weimar)
*Fusco, Peter. "Pierre-Etienne Monnot's Inventory after Death", "Antologia de Belle Arti", new series 33/34, 1988.
*Walker, Stefanie. "The Sculptor Pietro Stefano Monnot in Rome, 1687-1713" (Ann Arbor, 1994)
*von Kopanski, Karlheinz, and Karl Weber, 2003. "Das Marmorbad in der Kasseler Karlsaue. Ein spätbarockes Gesamtkunstwerk mit bedeutenden Skulpturen und Reliefs von Pierre Etienne Monnot." (Regensburg)
*"Pierre-Etienne Monnot (1657-1733) : l’itinéraire d’un sculpteur franc-comtois de Rome à Cassel, au XVIIIe siècle,". Exhibition catalogue, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lons-le-Saunier (June-September 2001)
*(Touring Club Italiano) 1965. "Roma e dintorni", 6th ed.

Further reading

*Enggass, Robert. 1976. "Early Eighteenth Century Sculpture in Rome, an Illustrated Catalogue Raisonné" (Pennsylvania State University Press)

External links

* [http://www.achwir.net/sehensw/marmorbad.php Marmorbad, Kassel] (German). Fully illustrated.