A Late Baroque Master’s Lost Marble Turns Up in a UK Salvage Yard

Spotted at a Wiltshire reclamation yard and purchased for £300 ($395), a marble sculpture by Late Baroque master Pietro Bracci (1700–1773) is expected to bring between £ 5,000 and £10,000 ($6,600–$13,200) at auction. Research undertaken by a specialist at U.K. auction house Woolley & Wallis has identified the roughly two-foot-tall marble as the only surviving maquette for Bracci’s 1736 bronze statue of Pope Clement XII.

The life-sized bronze once stood in the Great Hall of the Palazzo Nuovo, one of the Capitoline Museums opened to the public by Clement (1652–1740) in 1736. It was subsequently melted down during the brief, French-imposed Roman Republic (1798–1799). Until the discovery of Bracci’s model for the sculpture, the only known representation of the completed work was an engraving by 18th-century artist brothers Stefano and Rocco Pozzi.

Bracci was born in Rome and trained under Roman sculptor Camillo Rusconi, himself influenced by High Baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. A successful artist in his day, Bracci is best known for carving the colossal figure of Oceanus in Rome’s Trevi fountain. The commission for his commemorative portrait of Clement, celebrating the pontiff’s urban renewal projects and his munificence in acquiring antique statues for the Capitoline Museums collection, followed on Bracci’s earlier marble portrait of him produced for the city of Ravenna.

“To have a rare eighteenth-century marble figure of Pope Clement XII by Pietro Bracci come to light is a remarkable opportunity,” the auction house’s furniture specialist Mark Yuan Richards said in a statement. “Bracci was one of the great sculptors of eighteenth-century Rome, and this extraordinary survivor offers a tangible connection to the world of the papal court and the artistic splendor of the period.”

The piece will be sold on October 8 as part of Woolley & Wallis’s Fine Furniture and Collections auction.