Gillis van den Vliete
Gillis van den Vliete known in Italy as Egìdio della Riviera[1][2] (Mechelen, c. 1535 – buried on 4 September 1602 in Rome)[3] was a Flemish sculptor, restorer of ancient sculptures and antique dealer.
[8] Gillis van den Vliete was admitted on 14 June 1579 as a member of the Pontificia Insigne Accademia di Belle Arti e Letteratura dei Virtuosi al Pantheon, a pontifical academy in Rome established for the purpose of studying, cultivating and perfecting the fine arts.
An example is the case of the work on the horses at Monte Cavallo executed from 1589 to 1590 by Flaminio Vacca, Pietro Paolo Olivieri and Lodovico Sormanno.
[4] In the Santa Maria dell'Anima in Rome he and Mostaert collaborated from 1576 to 1579 on marble reliefs for the tomb of Duke Karl Friedrich of Jülich-Cleves-Berg.
The principal section shows, among other things, a scene of the Last Judgement, with some male nudes that cite the famous Laocoön and His Sons sculpture discovered in 1506.
According to Baglione, the central relief with the Last Judgment was flanked by statues of religion and faith on the right and left, all set in columns, niches, frontons; above a bas-relief with the presentation of a staff of honor to the Duke and two putti to the side.
The inscription on it states that Karl Friedrich had a precocious sense of piety, was brilliant despite his youth and knew many things and many languages.
[15] Van den Vliete and Mostaert collaborated round 1600 on a marble funerary monument for Cardinal and Margrave Andrew of Burgau (Andreas von Österreich) in the Santa Maria dell'Anima.
[17] In the past two bas-reliefs on the funeral monument of Pope Pius V in the Santa Maria Maggiore were attributed to van den Vliete.
although some art historians have attributed these to Mostaert: one representing the pontiff giving a standard to Admiral Marcantonio Colonna, at the time of his departure for the battle of Lepanto (1571) where he commanded twelve galleys and the other showing the same pontiff handing the baton of command to the Count of Santa Fiore before his departure for France at the head of an army of the Holy See.
In the same church, he has been traditionally credited with creating for the funeral monument of Pope Sixtus V, two bas-reliefs, one having as its subject the canonisation of Saint Didacus of Alcalá and the other, the pontiff's deputy sending Cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini to Germany as a legate.
[16] For the garden of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli van den Vliete created the Fontana Della Madre Natura which included a statue of Diana of Ephesus, the nature goddess.
[19] The statue is surmounted by an arch with limestone concretions and from Diana Efesia's multiple breasts water gushes back into the basin below.
[18] A few other sculptures have been attributed to the artist, including a Lying warrior (Museo Bardini ) and a Andromeda (Sotheby's 8 July 2005 London lot 75).
[20] The marble basin of the Fontana del Moro was made in 1575 by Giacomo della Porta and was decorated with groups of tritons, dragons and masks by 16th-century artists including van den Vliete, Taddeo Landini, Simone Moschini and Giacobbe Silla Longhi to designs by della Porta himself, which were replaced in 1874 with copies by Luigi Amici.
