Pierre-Étienne Monnot

Pierre-Étienne Monnot (9 August 1657 — 24 August 1733) was a French sculptor from the Franche-Comté who settled in Rome in 1687 for the rest of his life. He was a distinguished artist working in a late-Baroque idiom for international clients. In Italian sources he is often referred to as Pietro Stefano Monnot, an italianised version of his name.

Monnot was born at Orchamps-Vennes near Besançon in the Franche-Comté. Trained by his father, a woodcarver, he subsequently worked for Jean Dubois, a sculptor in Dijon, for a year. He then took on independent commissions for religious works in Besançon and Poligny. Monnot also visited Paris on at least two occasions, probably 1679-1681 and between 1684 and 1686, where he might have had contact with or worked under some of the leading sculptors working on the various enterprises of Louis XIV.

Leaving Besançon in December 1686, he arrived in Rome in February 1687, where he was introduced to an established, tightly-knit community of Burgundian artists. Monnot quickly intregrated into Rome's artistic circles and gained many commissions. With the main sculptures of the Saint Ignatius altar in the Church of the Gesù assigned to Pierre Le Gros the Younger and Jean-Baptiste Théodon in 1695, French sculptors in Rome became highly prized for decades to come. Monnot himself contributed a Pair of Angels holding the IHS monogramme to the Saint Ignatius altar.

Monnot's first major commission was for two marble reliefs, a Nativity and a Flight into Egypt flanking Domenico Guidi's Dream of St. Joseph for the right transept altar in Santa Maria della Vittoria. Here, as in some other pieces, Monnot was to some measure influenced by Guidi, a pupil of Alessandro Algardi, who had become a prominent sculptor in late 17th century Rome.

...
Wikipedia