MOLLI, Clemente - b. ~1599 Bologna, d. 1664 Venezia

Italian sculptor. He was a sculptor with diverse interests, including architecture, poetry, and painting, in which he was expert and dealer. In the period before his Venetian work he had been active in Emilia and Romagna, sculpting in marble and in stucco, and had probably brought his own artistic culture up to date with a journey to Rome. With his altar in the Widmann Chapel in the church of San Canciano he introduced novel features to Venetian sculpture which can be traced back to his Bolognese background, including familiarity with the plastic and pictorial models of Guido Reni.

The other sculptures Molli made in Venice, where his work is documented up to 1662, reflect the beginnings of a stylistic withdrawal and an aridity which in the end was to gain the upper hand. Finally he expressed himself in conventional and, by this time anachronistic ways.

As far as the architectural activities of Molli is concerned, to which there is a contemporary reference, no documentary evidence has yet emerged, but it must have constituted only a marginal part of his oeuvre. Some of his sculptural work, like the sculpture for the high altar of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, and San Pietro in Castello, are in architectural settings by Baldassare Longhena.

Guardian Saint

This statue is on the high altar of the basilica. The altar was designed by Baldassare Longhena, with sculptures by Clemente Molli, Francesco Cavrioli, and Bernardo Falconi. In the absence of artists able to work with equal competence in both sculpture and architecture, as Jacopo Sansovino and Alessandro Vittoria, sculptors in Venice began to depend increasingly on architects from the 1640s onward. Architects worked out projects in their entirety, entrusting single parts of the work to the different masters, from stonecarver and sculptor to the more modest artisans. The architect himself supervised and once finished, he approved, signing the relevant invoices and submitting them to the client for payment.