MAZZUOLI, Giuseppe

Mazzuoli was a Sienese Late Baroque sculptor. He was a pupil of Ferrata and Caffà and worked for Bernini, especially on the Tomb of Alexander VII. He kept the Berninesque tradition alive and untouched by French classicism. He worked in Rome after 1686, and completed Caffà’s Baptism of Christ in Valetta cathedral, Malta after Caffà’s early death. His twelve Apostles, originally in Siena Cathedral, are now in the Oratory, London.

The significant sculptural undertaking that inaugurated the eighteenth century in Rome was the realization of the colossal statues of the Apostles in twelve monumental, green marble niches, decorated by the dove symbol of the Pamphilj family, which Francesco Borromini built during the reconstruction of the interior of San Giovanni in Laterano. The statues, the completion of Borromini’s project, were executed before 1718 by the most important sculptors of the time from Rome and elsewhere. The sculptors included Camillo Rusconi (Andrew, Matthew, James the Greater, John the Evangelist), Francesco Moratti (Simon), Angelo de’ Rossi (James the Less), Giuseppe Mazzuoli (Philip), Lorenzo Ottoni (Thaddeus), as well as the Frenchmen Pierre-�tienne Monnot (Peter, Paul) and Pierre Le Gros (Bartholomew, Thomas).

Mazzuoli’s St Philip belongs to this series.

The exceptional beauty of this child, the fruit of an incestuous union engineered by the insulted Aphrodite, caused an argument among the gods that could only end in his death: he was killed by a boar while hunting. In devoting one of his chief works to that fatal incident, Mazzuoli expressed in a typically Baroque depiction of a dramatic moment the idea of the transience of beauty.