Francesco Mochi was an Italian early-Baroque sculptor active mostly in Rome and Orvieto. He was born in Montevarchi and died in Rome. His early training was with the anti-Mannerist Florentine painterSanti di Tito, where he formed a taste for pictorial clarity and the primacy of disegno, exemplified in the sculpture of Giambologna and his studio and followers. He moved to Rome around 1599 and continued his training in the studio of the Venetian-trained sculptor Camillo Mariani. Mochi was a contemporary of Gian Lorenzo Bernini's father, Pietro, as well as later with the son.
Career
Mochi worked with Stefano Maderno on a prominent papal commission, the Cappella Paolina in Santa Maria Maggiore, where he contributed his still somewhat immatureSaint Matthew and the Angel, in travertine. His first major work was the Annunciation of the Virgin by the Angel, composed of two statues. "A fanfare raising sculpture from its slumber", as Rudolph Wittkower called it, it prefigures the baroque with its restrained emotiveness. Mochi was one of the few seventeenth-century sculptors who was also a master bronze-caster. He made two masterly equestrian bronze statues of Ranuccio and Alessandro Farnese in Piazza Cavalli, Piacenza. Ranuccio Farnese, 1612–20, and Alessandro Farnese, 1620–29, are among the high points of his career. He returned from Piacenza to Rome, where he found Bernini fully in charge of major commissions, and a current fully developed Baroque style with which Mochi was now out of touch. His reputation for bitterness and irritation regarding the overshadowing of his career significantly decreased the number of commissions he received. His late Roman works are the Christ Receiving Baptism ; Taddeus, and Saints Peter and Paul, and Saint Martha for the Barberini family chapel at Sant'Andrea della Valle.
One of the four massive sculptures in the crossing of St. Peter's Basilica, the statue of the frantic Saint Veronica displaying the by then lost Veil of Veronica is the best-known masterpiece by Mochi, in the most prominent position. The other three are François Duquesnoy's, Bernini's, and Andrea Bolgi's. Of the four, Mochi's is the least appropriate to its site and topic, the most idiosyncratic and original. Bernini's Longinus is an intermediary between the sober but contorting classicism of Bolgi and Duquesnoy and the emotive dynamism of Mochi. Mochi's passionate depiction appears oversteps the decorum of the place. The other statues exude the equanimity of passionate triumphal Catholicism, celebrated here in the center of the mother church. The frantic pitch of the Veronica seems to attempt to storm into the circle of dramatic setpieces, with a shrill fervor. Mochi, in a letter pleading for completion of his payments, remarked that he had laboured "con ogni studio" in order "to stamp his old age with a memorable work". Mochi's modern reinterpretation stems in part from interest in him that was renewed by the exhibition Francesco Mochi 1580–1654 1981
