Pietro Bracci Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Pietro Bracci was one of the main sculptors of the last Roman Baroque, first a pupil of Camillo Rusconi and then an artist in the service of the greatest exponents of the Curia: protégé of Cardinal Alessandro Albani, member (and then prince) of the Accademia di San Luca and of the Accademia Clementina of Bologna, among his works include many marble portraits of members of the papal court, two statues of Pope Clement XII (one in Ravenna, the other originally placed in the Campidoglio, then destroyed in 1798) and, above all, the famous statuary group in the center of the Trevi Fountain, with the imposing Ocean God on his shell-shaped chariot pulled by two sea horses and two tritons. Our drawing seems to refer precisely to the layout and decorative idea of ​​this late Baroque masterpiece, which depicts the moment in which Aeneas, following the instructions of the Sibyl, affixes the golden branch to the gates of Dis before heading towards the Elysian Fields : the entire episode, however, is set in a baroque fantasy architecture, almost a "hortus conclusus" of marble where the infernal beings, Cerberus and Pluto and Proserpina themselves are depicted as real marble sculptures. The sovereigns of Hades themselves, inserted in an architecture with caryatids and Gorgon heads, seem part of a decoration of a fountain, like those of the Renaissance and then Baroque "villas of delight", or like, indeed, the group of the God Ocean of the Trevi Fountain.