Pietro Francavilla

Pierre Franqueville, generally called Pietro Francavilla (1548 — 25 August 1615), was a Franco-Flemish sculptor trained in Florence, who provided sculpture for Italian and French patrons in the elegant Late Mannerist tradition established by Giambologna.

Born at Cambrai, he received his early training as a draftsman in Paris. In 1565 he is recorded at Innsbruck, where Alexander Colin was working on the elaborate monument in the Hofkirche for the funerary monument to Emperor Maximilian I. In this project Franqueville learned enough of the practice of sculpture to enter the large Florentine atelier of his fellow countryman, Giambologna. Francavilla became his master's main assistant in the carving of marble, including the masterpiece of the Rape of the Sabines displayed in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence. His first independent commissions were extended to him through Giambologna, who become overwhelmed with requests. Francavilla's finished pen-and-ink drawings after the master's bozzetti for projects, as they were stored at the workshop, are in some cases the only testament to works that have been lost or that were never executed.

In 1574, he began his first independent commission, eventually constituting thirteen garden sculptures for abbate Antonio di Zanobi Bracci for the Villa Bracci at Rovezzano near Florence. The thirteen were purchased through Sir Horace Mann, British envoy at Florence, for Frederick, Prince of Wales, who died without ever seeing them; they were left in storage at Kew and have been dispersed and ignored, then rediscovered in 1952. A late example in the series, the Venus at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, is signed and dated 1600, and must have been made for or acquired by Bracci's nephew, who inherited the estate in 1585.

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