MOCHI, FRANCESCO. — Sculptor, born in Montevarchi on 29 July 1580, died in Rome on 6 February 1654. In his twenties he moved to Rome and collaborated with the Vicentine Camillo Mariani on various Roman churches.
Between 1603 and 1610 he carved his first statues of notable quality at Orvieto: the Angel of the Annunciation and the Virgin Annunciate (Museo dell’Opera del Duomo). Shortly thereafter, on his return to Rome, he executed a most admirable St Matthew for the exterior of the Pauline Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore. However, it was the two equestrian bronze monuments of Ranuccio and Alessandro Farnese, completed at Piacenza between 1612 and 1629, that fully established his reputation, which he maintained with the fine statue of St Martha in Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome (1629). Later, the colossal, grandiose figure of the Veronica in St Peter’s Basilica (1640) and the mediocre statues of the Baptism of Christ (now near Ponte Milvio) drew criticism and provoked the schemes of his rivals Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Alessandro Algardi, so that the sculptor’s final years were spent amid professional tribulations and humiliations.
Above all in the equestrian group of Duke Alessandro, Mochi achieved a perfect harmony of stylistic elements, blending the innate Tuscan virtues with the pictorial and lyrical dynamism he had absorbed from Venetian art, while the reliefs on the two pedestals—especially that depicting the Bridge over the Scheldt for the military blockade of Antwerp—display a modernity of landscape and atmospheric setting. He also produced several marble portrait busts of strong relief, the finest expressions of Roman Baroque, such as that of Prince Carlo Barberini (Barberini collection, Rome, where a small bronze equestrian statue of the same subject is also preserved) and that of Cardinal Ladislao d’Aquino in Santa Maria sopra Minerva.