[1]: 18 He created monumental works of sculpture for the Jesuits and the Dominicans and found himself centre stage of the two most prestigious artistic campaigns of his era, the Altar of Saint Ignatius of Loyola in the Gesù and the cycle of the twelve huge Apostle statues in the nave of the Lateran basilica.

He also played a prominent role in more intimate settings like the chapel of the Monte di Pietà and the Cappella Antamori in San Girolamo della Carità, both little treasures of the Roman late baroque not known to many because they are difficult to access.

Scholars frequently add a suffix like 'the Younger'[2] or 'Pierre II'[3] to distinguish him from his father, Pierre Le Gros the Elder, who was also a sculptor of renown to the French king Louis XIV.

2 [note 4] In the same year 1695, Le Gros took part in a competition for a marble group to be placed on the altar of Saint Ignatius of Loyola which the Jesuit Order was erecting to its founder in their Roman mother church Il Gesù.

[1]: 38, n. 4  While the figure of Religion appears like a statue, the old woman melts into the wall decoration, the man tips over the edge of the architectural framework towards the spectator and the snake, an anecdotal detail very typical for Le Gros, hisses directly at the viewer.

Le Gros' chasuble was left intact and the missing parts remade with slight variations in silver coated plaster from 1803 to 1804 under the supervision of Antonio Canova by one of his assistants.

[note 10] At the same time, Le Gros was already busy with another major Jesuit commission for the monumental altar relief of the Apotheosis of the Blessed Luigi Gonzaga in the church of Sant'Ignazio (1697–99).

Apart from also being a Frenchman, Cloche was probably introduced to the sculptor by his secretary, the painter and Dominican friar Baptiste Monnoyer,[note 11] who was a friend of Le Gros' at the Académie Royale in Paris.

[6]: II, 137  With the canonisation process initiated, Cloche commissioned the Sarcophagus for Pope Pius V (1697–98) of verde antico marble which was to be integrated into the existing papal tomb monument in the Cappella Sistina in Santa Maria Maggiore.

16 Also in 1702, the board of the Monte di Pietà in Rome, presided by the papal treasurer Lorenzo Corsini, continued the steady embellishment of their chapel which already boasted an altar relief by Domenico Guidi and had in time for the Holy Year 1700 found its architectural completion with the dome by Carlo Francesco Bizzaccheri.

Since his normal practice was to evoke naturalistic impressions by an extraordinarily fine surface treatment of a monochrome white marble, this multi-coloured tableau-like depiction is quite untypical for Le Gros.

A visitor would enter the quiet, dimly lit rooms carefully with a sense of apprehension and awe, and then see the striking silhouette of a motionless life size figure on a bed, approachable without a barrier.

With the large crucifix missing, an important iconographic dimension is lost today, i.e. the connection between Stanislas and Christ (similar to the statue of St. Francis Xavier of the same time) which would also round up the composition.

Together with some other sculptures outside the chapel (not planned to be made by Le Gros and, in fact, never executed), the iconographic message was the postulation of a royal rank and sovereignty of the family dating back to the 9th century, the same message Cardinal de Bouillon tried to support by commissioning a written history of his ancestry from the historiographer Étienne Baluze,[note 19] published in 1708 and containing an engraving of the envisaged funeral chapel with an idealised view of Le Gros's monument.

Apart from a thorough inspection by royal officials to determine whether they expressed any pretentious dynastic claims, the sculptures were not even unpacked in Cluny due to the fact that Cardinal de Bouillon so completely fell out with his cousin, the Sun King, that he was declared an enemy of the state and all construction stopped.

11 [16] At the end of 1702, Pope Clement XI announced his intention to finally have Borromini's colossal niches in the Lateran basilica filled with twelve heroic-scaled figures of the Apostles.

When it transpired that the undistinguished Florentine sculptor Antonio Andreozzi would not finish his Saint James the Greater, efforts were made in 1713 to win over Louis XIV to take on the patronage and employ Le Gros, but to no avail.

Le Gros' creation quickly became popular and triggered a rafter of drawings, reproductions and copies by for example Pompeo Batoni, Francesco Carradori, Martin Gottlieb Klauer and, best known of all, Laurent Delvaux who carved two marble versions.

39 [19] In 1708–10 Le Gros collaborated with his close friend, the architect Filippo Juvarra, in the creation of the Cappella Antamori in the church of San Girolamo della Carità, Rome.

The concept is highly theatrical with a large curtain (made from coloured marble) being drawn back by two Famae (both the work of Pierre-Étienne Monnot from designs by Le Gros) to reveal the protagonist.

Francesco Trevisani and three other academicians (Pasquale de' Rossi, Giovanni Maria Morandi and Bonaventura Lamberti) distanced themselves from subscribing to these new rules, and Le Gros sided with them on his return.

Upon their arrival, the statues of Saint Christina and Teresa of Avila were considered too beautiful to be exposed to the elements and brought into the church's interior (1804 transferred to Turin Cathedral) and to be replaced on the facade by copies by a local sculptor.

45 In a letter from 6 January 1719 to Rosalba Carriera, hoping to introduce the two on her planned visit to Rome, Crozat described Le Gros as "without question the best sculptor there is in Europe, and the most honest man and the most endearing there is.

If we believe Pierre-Jean Mariette, disappointment advanced his early death: "If he was indisposed against the Parisian academy, he was even more piqued by the honours conferred on Camillo Rusconi for the figures this able sculptor has made for Saint John Lateran.

In addition, the need for assistants brought a bevy of young sculptors and painters from all over Europe to his studio over the years like the Englishman Francis Bird and the Frenchman Guillaume Coustou who frequented his workshop before 1700, both eventually becoming significant artists in their home countries.

[12] In addition to passing on his style through students, copies and versions of important statues such as his St. Dominic, St. Ignatius or the Apostle Bartholomew can be found all over Europe and engravings were disseminated of his Luigi Gonzaga and Stanislas Kostka.

There were only very few artists who worked successfully in a similarly playful style as Le Gros in early 18th century Rome, namely Angelo de' Rossi, Bernardino Cametti and Agostino Cornacchini.

[1]: 28-30 According to Gerhard Bissell, Le Gros was a sculptor of brilliant technical ability: The most virtuoso marble worker of his time, he excelled in convincing the eye to see the depicted materials rather than stone.

While a classicist like Rusconi linked a spatial development closely to the anatomy of the figure, Le Gros achieved this with an abundance of highly malleable drapery and extrovert gestures.

In addition, he showed a keen sense for nuanced effects of light and shadow, whether it was to make the heavily polished, white as snow figure of Luigi Gonzaga stand out, or to cast Filippo Neri into a mystical shade.