OLIVIERI, PIER PAOLO. - Sculptor and architect, b. in Rome in 1551 and d. there in 1599. Both in his architectural works and in his sculptural ones he is bound to the very particular taste of the close of the century dominated by the Catholic Reformation, an academic and cold taste that reveals itself in that manner of defining forms with an abstract clarity lacking vitality, onto which a wealth of pre-Baroque decoration is sometimes grafted.
The church of S. Andrea della Valle, begun in 1591 (it was later continued by Maderno), the ciborium and the altar in the transept of S. Giovanni in Laterano (1598-99), more sober and poorer in details than the previous church, clearly reveal the characteristics indicated above. Even if he is more original in his sculptures, he is no less caught up in the atmosphere surrounding him. There is generally in his works a minute, insistent, analytical search for details, studied and rendered with excessive care, due in part to the influence of northern sculptors working in those years in Rome, which sometimes makes him lose the overall view. In the statue of Gregory XIII in S. Maria in Aracoeli, signed and datable to 1576-77, he treats the marble with an extreme skill that allows him to render the differentiation of material in the linen, the damask, the embroidered parts of the Pontiff's garment, to whose face he nevertheless cannot give life and character. In the Monument to Gregory XI in S. Francesca Romana he seems to come suddenly to life in the relief with the Return of the Pope from Avignon (1584), but in the two statues of Prudence and Faith the cold and external search for grandeur prevails once again. Nor can a different judgment be given for the St. Anthony in the Sistine Chapel in S. Maria Maggiore (1587) and the St. Elijah in S. Giovanni in Laterano, finished by C. Mariani. The same artist completed the great relief with the Adoration of the Magi in the Caetani chapel in S. Pudentiana, which had remained unfinished at the O.'s death.
Works of his are also found outside Rome: a bas-relief with the Death of Caesar in the Villa della Volpe near Siena; a tomb signed and dated 1590 in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, and a statue depicting Friendship in the Louvre.
Bibliography3 works
Maria Donati