ALGARDI, ALESSANDRO. — Sculptor and architect, born in Bologna on 27 Nov. 1595, died in Rome in 1654. He learned painting from Ludovico Carracci and worked in the studio of Giulio Cesare Conventi, a mediocre sculptor and engraver. His artistic formation, more than through a few specific masters, is to be sought in the cultural environment of Carraccism and the Bolognese school of painting in general, with which he maintained ties even after moving to Rome. Of his early activity, which was rather close to the art of the goldsmith, there remain, among other works, a *Pietà* in ivory formerly in the Rospigliosi Gallery and now in the Liebermann Collection in Berlin; *Jesus Falling under the Cross*, a bronze in the Palazzo Venezia Museum; the *Flagellated Christ* in the Hoffnheim Collection in Vienna; a *Madonna* in the Ducal Palace of Urbino and a *Crucifix* in the sacristy of St Peter’s in Perugia.
Having arrived in Rome in 1625 after a stay in Mantua, he executed for the Bandini Chapel in S. Silvestro al Quirinale the two stucco statues of St John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene, in which a Berninian influence is not absent. Soon after, in the Frangipane portraits in S. Marcello al Corso or in the Mellini monument in S. Maria del Popolo, he found the exact measure of his own personality.
During the pontificate of Urban VIII, when Bernini enjoyed the pope’s favour, the difference in style and taste reduced Algardi’s activity to modest, if not obscure, work; works from this period include those for the church of S. Luca, marked by a lively classicism. Then, with his appointment as Academician in 1640, but even more with the death of Urban and the fall from grace of Bernini, his true worth could be fully manifested. After executing the group of St Philip and the Angel and the bust of Gregory XV in S. Maria in Vallicella (1640) and the *Decapitation of St Paul* in the church of the same name in Bologna (1641), he produced for Innocent X the monument to Leo XI in St Peter’s, the large altarpiece of the Meeting of Attila and Leo the Great in the same basilica (1650), the portrait of Donna Olimpia (Doria Gallery) and the bronze statue of Innocent X in the Campidoglio, which, in psychological depth, solid plastic form and lively pictorial sensitivity, surpasses Bernini’s statue of Urban VIII that stands opposite II.
In particular, in the Vatican altarpiece of Attila, he transfers into marble the painterly vision of the Bolognese, but does not do so as a virtuoso exercise; rather, he sets against the Berninian manner another no less original individuality, equally Baroque.
Bellori takes Algardi as the typical proof of his theoretical position on the ideal of beauty and therefore dwells on his biography; yet one must not conclude from this that the Bolognese sculptor stood apart from the taste of his time, to which indeed he fully adhered; the truth of Bellori’s assertion lies more in the sculptor’s training than in the reality of his art.
The absence of any chromatic effect in Algardi’s sculptures is due to the fact that his subtle sensibility as a sculptor could extract from white marble those effects that others sought in polychromy, and not to any aversion to the pictorial and colouristic taste that he shared with the Berninian current, to which he is usually opposed.
He was also an architect, and among his works should be mentioned, besides the Villa Bel Respiro where he showed himself a skilful and accomplished decorator, the high altar in S. Nicolò da Tolentino; the fountain in the courtyard of S. Damaso in the Vatican and the door leading from the interior of S. Ignazio to the Collegio Romano. The traditional attribution to Algardi of the façade of S. Ignazio is doubtful. — See Pl. LXV.