Pierre Legros II (1666 - 1719). Pierre Le Gros was a French sculptor, active almost exclusively in Baroque Rome. Nowadays, his name is commonly written Legros, while he himself always signed as Le Gros; he is frequently referred to either as 'the Younger' or Pierre II to distinguish him from his father, Pierre Le Gros the Elder, who was also a sculptor. The ardent drama of his work and its Italian location make him more an Italian, than a French, sculptor. Despite being virtually unknown to the general public today, he was the pre-eminent sculptor in Rome for nearly two decades, until he was finally superseded at the end of his life by the more classicizing Camillo Rusconi. Le Gros was born in Paris into a family with a strong artistic pedigree. Jeanne, his mother, died when he was only three, but he stayed in close contact with her brothers, the sculptors Gaspard and Balthazard Marsy, whose workshop he frequented and eventually inherited at the age of fifteen. His artistic training, though, lay in the hands of his father, from whom he learned to sculpt, and his stepmother's father, Jean Le Pautre, who taught him to draw. Le Gros was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome to study at the French Academy in Rome, where he renewed his close friendship with his cousin Pierre Lepautre, also a sculptor and fellow at the Academy. His lodging there from 1690-95 was a fruitful time but not untroubled, since the academy was plagued by a constant financial crisis due to the high cost of Louis XIV's wars. The premises then were also a rather ramshackle affair and far from the grandeur the academy would later enjoy after a move to the Villa Medici in the 19th century. Keen to prove himself by carving a marble copy after the antique, Le Gros was eventually granted permission to do so by the director of the academy and his superior in Paris. His model was the so-called Vetturia, an ancient sculpture then in the garden of the Villa Medici in Rome. Finished in 1695, it was finally shipped to Paris some twenty years later and now stands in the Tuileries Garden. The same year 1695, Le Gros was ejected from the Academy after secretly preparing a model for a marble group on the altar of Saint Ignatius of Loyola in the Gesu, the Roman mother church of the Jesuit Order. In this most prestigious sculptural commission in Rome for decades, Le Gros was chosen to depict Religion Overthrowing Heresy and Hatred on the right hand side of the altar, using a dynamic ensemble of four over-lifesize marble figures. In the group, a towering young robed female figure of Religion wielding a cross scatters the aged personifications of the vices Hatred and Heresy. To one side, a putto tears apart a volume by the heretic Swiss reformer Zwingli, while a tome beneath the figure of Heresy bears Luther's name. A book next to Heresy's right hand bears Calvin's name. In 1697, with his sculptures nearly complete, he won a competition for the altar's main image, the silver statue of St. Ignatius. These, and other commissions he carried out concurrently, secured Le Gros's reputation, and further patronage led to the requirement for assistants and a larger workshop, which he found in a back wing of the Palazzo Farnese. Indeed, he was the busiest sculptor in Rome at the time, working for the Jesuits on the monumental relief of the Apotheosis of the Blessed Aloysius Gonzaga while at the same time starting his extensive work for the Dominicans with the Sarcophagus for Pope Pius V in Santa Maria Maggiore. In fact, he became the sculptor of choice for Antonin Cloche, the Master of the Dominicans, carving first the tomb, and later the honorary statue of Cardinal Casanate and embarking on the task to produce with his Saint Dominic the very first monumental statue of a founder of a religious order to adorn a niche in the nave of Saint Peter's. It epitomises his dynamic mature style: the saint's ardour and authority are well conveyed, emphasized by the ample, skilfully handled sweep of his draperies. Already elected a member of the Accademia di San Luca in 1700, Le Gros also continued to be employed by several branches of the Jesuit order for work such as the statue of St Francis Xavier in the Roman church of Sant'Apollinare and the tableau-like and very effective rendering of the Dying Stanislas Kostka in the Jesuit novitiate at Sant'Andrea al Quirinale. The latter statue in polychrome marble is today Le Gros's best-known work, but quite atypical, since his normal practice was to provoke naturalistic impressions by an extraordinarily fine surface treatment of a monochrome white marble. A few months earlier, he was commissioned to carve relief of Tobiah and Gabael for the chapel of the Monte di Pieta in Rome.