Basilica Sancti Petri, Basilica di San Pietro , St. Peter's church, the flagship store of the multi-national corporation called the Roman Catholic church. Call it what you want, it's the house that JC built, and it is in Vatican City. Huge is a word. St. Peter's is the definition. On the A-B-C tour of Europe (Another Beautiful Church), St. Peter's takes the prize - if you are in the camp that believes size does matter. The current structure is largely Renaissance and Baroque, built on the spot where Old St.Peter's one stood, which itself was built over a Roman site that was the Circus of Nero. Ironically, for work on St Peter's, Pope Nicholas V brought 2,522 cartloads of marble from the Roman Colosseum which was named after the statue of Nero.
Bernini's bronze baldacchino is itself massive, and yet it doesn't even begin to fill the floorspace in this heavily decorated basilica. Some of the bronze for it came from the interior of the dome of the Pantheon.
Bernini designed a lot of what is seen at the at St. Peter's today, and created many sculptures for it. I do not think this is one of them, because I could not find it in a book that was devoted to Bernini' Vatican work. However, I assume it is from his era (baroque) because of the way she is breaking the "fourth wall" of the niche with her active pose. If anyone knows who did sculpt this, please tell me.
2 comments:
Burke, the mystery sculptor you enquired about is Pietro Paolo Campi from the Late Baroque period. The statue is St Giuliana Falconieri, probably from the reknown Falconieri family who were wealthy patrons of the arts, which may explain why the sculpture resides in the Falconieri chapel of St. Peter's. AA
Yes, apparently this is a statue of Saint Giuliana Falconieri (Florence, about 1270–1341) who founded the Ordine dei Servi di Maria (Order of the Servants of Mary). The statue has been sculpted by Pietro Paolo Campi from Carrara who was a student of Pierre Legros (according to the italian wikipedia).
Markus
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