Francesco Mochi

His early training was with the Florentine painter Santi di Tito, where he formed a taste for pictorial clarity and the primacy of disegno, exemplified in the sculpture of Giambologna and his studio and followers.

Mochi worked with Stefano Maderno on a prominent papal commission, the Cappella Paolina in Santa Maria Maggiore, where he contributed his still somewhat immature Saint Matthew and the Angel, in travertine.

"A fanfare raising sculpture from its slumber", as Rudolf Wittkower called it,[4] it prefigures the baroque with its restrained emotiveness.

[6] His late Roman works are the Christ Receiving Baptism[7] (1635 or later, Ponte Milvio, Rome); Taddeus (1641–44, Orvieto), and Saints Peter and Paul (1638–52, Porta del Popolo).

Mochi, in a letter pleading for completion of his payments, remarked that he had laboured "con ogni studio" in order "to stamp his old age with a memorable work".