(b Paris, 12 April 1666; d Rome, 3 May 1719). Sculptor. He was the son of (1) Pierre Legros (i) and his first wife, Jeanne, daughter of Gaspard Marsy. He was trained by his father and between 1690 and 1695 was a pensionnaire at the Académie de France in Rome, where among other works he made a marble copy (1692–5; Paris, Jard. Tuileries) of the antique statue of Vetturia, then in the Villa Medici. In 1695 he was excluded from the Académie when he accepted an invitation from the Jesuit architect Father Andrea Pozzo to collaborate on the new altar for the chapel of S Ignazio at Il Gesù, Rome. For this vast Baroque ensemble he sculpted the large and dramatic four-figure marble group Religion Overthrowing Heresy (1695–9; in situ), and in 1697 he won the commission for the silver and bronze centrepiece of the altar, the statue of the Apotheosis of St Ignatius of Loyola (1697–8; in situ). His success brought him a flood of important commissions, and he rapidly became the most eminent sculptor in early 18th-century Rome, unanimously elected in 1700 as Accademico di Merito at the Accademia di S Luca. In 1697 Cardinal de Bouillon, the French Ambassador in Rome, commissioned sculptures for the ambitious family mausoleum that he intended to erect in the abbey of Cluny, Saône-et-Loire. Although never installed, such surviving fragments as the seated statues of Frédéric-Maurice de la Tour d’Auvergne and his wife and a bas-relief of a cavalry battle (all marble, 1697–before 1708; Cluny, Hôtel-Dieu) demonstrate Legros’s lightness of touch and dazzling virtuosity in the handling of marble. In 1698 he received another commission from the Jesuits, to produce the large bas-relief of the Apotheosis of the Blessed Aloysius Gonzaga (marble; 1698–9; in situ; see fig.) for the new altar in the Lancellotti chapel at S Ignazio, Rome, and in 1701 he executed a statue of St Francis Xavier for S Apollinare, Rome (marble; in situ), a work whose subtle contrapposto and rhythmically agitated draperies give it the appearance almost of weightlessness. Among Legros’s other Jesuit commissions was the remarkably realistic polychrome marble statue of the Death of the Blessed Stanislaus Kostka (1702–3; Rome, S Andrea al Quirinale).

Part of the Legros family

• Legros, Pierre (ii) (1666-1719)
  • Legros
  • assistants
    • Bird, Francis
    • Campi, Pietro Paolo
  • collaboration
    • Ignatius Loyola
    • Théodon, Jean
  • methods
    • Modello, §I: Drawn
  • patrons and collectors
    • Crozat: (1) Pierre Crozat
    • Jesuit Order, §2: Iconography
  • personal collection
    • Manglard, Adrien
  • pupils
    • Loo, van: (3) Carle Vanloo
  • works
    • Bust, §III: Renaissance and Baroque
    • Dominican Order, §II, 1(iii): Iconography of St Dominic: Later developments
    • Guidi, Domenico
    • Italy, §IV, 4(i): Baroque sculpture, c 1600–c 1750: Rome
    • Pozzo, Andrea, §2(i): Rome, 1681–1702: S Ignazio, Il Gesù and oil paintings
    • Rome, §V, 16: Il Gesù