MOCHI, FRANCESCO. — Sculptor, born at Montevarchi on 29 July 1580, died at Rome on 6 February 1654. At about twenty he moved to Rome and collaborated with the Vicentine Camillo Mariani on various Roman churches.
Between 1603 and 1610 he sculpted at Orvieto his first statues of notable quality: the Announcing Angel and the Annunciation (Museo dell'Opera del Duomo). Shortly afterward, on returning to Rome, he executed there a highly distinguished St Matthew for the exterior of the Pauline Chapel in S. Maria Maggiore. It was, however, the two bronze equestrian monuments of Ranuccio and Alessandro Farnese, completed at Piacenza from 1612 to 1629, that fully established his renown, which he sustained with the beautiful statue of St Martha in S. Andrea della Valle at Rome (1629); subsequently, however, the colossal, emphatic figure of Veronica in the Vatican Basilica (1640) and the mediocre statues of the Baptism of Christ (now near Ponte Milvio) gave fuel to the criticisms and intrigues of his rivals G. L. Bernini and Algardi, so that the final years of M. passed amid professional tribulations and humiliations. Above all, in the equestrian group of Duke Alessandro, M. achieved a complete concordance of stylistic elements, mastering, through his innate Tuscan virtues, the pictorialism and lyrical, dynamic impetus acquired through his contacts with Venetian art, while the reliefs on the two pedestals, particularly that recalling the Bridge over the Scheda, for the military bloc of Antwerp, display entirely modern refinements of landscape art and atmospheric setting. He is also responsible for several strongly modelled marble portrait busts, among the finest expressions of the Roman Baroque, such as that of Prince Carlo Barberini (Barberini collection in Rome, where a small bronze equestrian statue depicting the same personage is also preserved) and the other of Cardinal Ladislao D'Aquino in S. Maria sopra Minerva.