Ercole Ferrata

[3] Under the leadership of Bernini, he sculpted the Angel with a Cross for the Ponte Sant'Angelo and reportedly completed the elephant statue holding the obelisk in front of Santa Maria sopra Minerva.

With Francesco Aprile he sculpted Sant'Anastasia in Santa Anastasia in Rome, another statue resembling Bernini's famous dying Beata Ludovica Albertoni.

In 1673, when Cosimo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany established an informal academy in the Villa Madama in Rome, to give promising students an opportunity to study from antiquities, he placed it under the direction of Ercole Ferrata and the painter Ciro Ferri, who had been collaborating with Pietro da Cortona in frescoes for Palazzo Pitti.

"A rather colourless, plodding sculptor whose gifts were best displayed in executing or imitating the conceptions of more imaginative artists, Ferrata nonetheless enjoyed a deserved reputation as an authority on the antique".

[7] "He showed remarkable flair in making just the kind of attractive additions to a mutilated statue which most appealed to connoisseurs", according to Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny.