Francois Duquesnoy Biography
François Duquesnoy (Brussels, 12 January 1597 – Livorno, 18 July 1643) was a Flemish sculptor, among the greatest exponents of the Roman Baroque. Son of Jérôme Duquesnoy the Elder (author of the famous Manneken Pis), younger brother of Jérôme the Younger, he trained with his father, court sculptor of Archduke Albert of Habsburg, governor of the Netherlands. In 1618 he moved to Rome, where he was known as "Francesco Fiammingo". In Rome he began to specialize in the production of wooden or ivory statuettes at Carlo Lorenese. Later he received the help of the patron Pieter Visscher,[1] and from 1624 he began to frequent the French painter Nicolas Poussin, whose influence is evident in the classicism of his first Roman works. He met the Flemish painter Karel Philips Spierincks, a follower of Poussin, and took up lodgings with him in via Vittoria, a side street of via del Babuino. Other works of the period were the Tomb of Adriano Vryburch (1629) and the Tomb of Ferdinand van den Eynde (1629-1633), both in the Roman church of Santa Maria dell'Anima, and the Tomb of Bernardo Guglielmi, located instead in San Lorenzo out of the walls. The latter betrays, like other contemporary works, Bernini's influence.[2] Having approached Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who was then involved in the work on the canopy of St. Peter's - a work in which he collaborated on the sculptural decoration - Pope Urban VIII commissioned him in 1629 the statue of Saint Andrew (of which the relic of the head was preserved in the basilica) to be placed in one of the pillars that support the Michelangelo dome. He completed the work in 1640: at the same time he worked on what is considered his masterpiece, the Santa Susanna for the Roman church of Santa Maria di Loreto. In the meantime, the artist received numerous commissions from nobles and cardinals, including a valuable bust of Cardinal Maurizio of Savoy (1635) and a relief with Concert of Angels at the Santissimi Apostoli in Naples. He died in Livorno in 1643, during the journey to reach France where Cardinal de Richelieu had appointed him court sculptor; he was buried under the altar of St. Andrew of the Dutch-Alemannic Nation in the Church of Our Lady. His production influenced French, German and Dutch sculpture of the eighteenth century, and if on the one hand it represented an antithesis of purist taste compared to Bernini, on the other Duquesnoy himself highlighted Bernini elements, falling within the baroque academic current.
