PROSPERO ANTICHI, known as il BRESCIANO. - Sculptor, born in Brescia, active in Rome from about 1580, died there in 1599.
He belonged to the group of Lombard artists who, under the pontificates of Gregory XIII and Sixtus V, contributed to the renewal of the city, extending into sculpture a mannerism poised between eclecticism and academism, destined to peter out in weary and monotonous forms before the Berninian renewal. Of the few surviving works (many stucco works have been destroyed), one of the best is the Nativity in the Sistine Chapel in S. Maria Maggiore, in which P. still appears faithful to the Sansovinesque tradition and “derives Lombard-style pictorial effects from the landscape background” (Venturi); the best known is the colossal and exceedingly clumsy statue of Moses for the façade of the Acqua Felice, in which Michelangelism is reduced to an empty and theatrical quest for grandeur. Other works include: the tomb of Gregory XIII in St. Peter’s Basilica and the models for the four lions at the base of the obelisk of S. Pietro.