Forgotten sculpture of Pope Clement XII found at a recycling yard in England: Pietro Bracci’s marble maquette, bought for £300, goes to auction for £10,000

A small marble statue, bought for just £300 (about $398) at a recycling yard in Wiltshire, England, has been identified by experts as a work by Pietro Bracci (1700–1773), one of the best-known sculptors of Baroque Rome, as Artnet News reports.

The owners of the yard in south-west England had misidentified the marble, but a sharp-eyed collector recognised its value and sent it for appraisal to the regional auction house Woolley & Wallis. There it was confirmed that the sculpture, about 60 cm tall, is the only surviving maquette for the bronze statue of Pope Clement XII, cast by master founder Francesco Giardoni. Only this working model and an engraving by the artist brothers Stefano and Rocco Pozzi, made in the mid-18th century, have survived as evidence of that work.

The bronze statue, erected inside the Palazzo Nuovo in Rome, was a tribute to the pope who himself founded that building in 1734 as the world’s first public art museum — the Capitoline Museums. The bronze was melted down during the French-imposed Roman Republic in the late 1790s, when such monuments were melted for weapons and coins. The inscription on the pedestal praised the ambitious building projects of Clement XII, who had launched a broad programme of architectural renewal of the city.

The maquette goes to auction on October 8, as part of Woolley & Wallis’s “Fine Furniture and Collections” sale, with an estimate of £10,000 (about $13,300) — an extraordinary return for the buyer who picked it up for £300. “For a rare 18th-century marble figure of Pope Clement XII by Pietro Bracci to come to light is an extraordinary opportunity,” the auction house’s furniture specialist Mark Yuan Richards said, according to Artnet News. “This remarkable survivor offers a tangible link to the world of the papal court and the artistic brilliance of the period.”

Bracci, a pupil of the sculptor Camillo Rusconi, is best known for the figure of Oceanus in Rome’s famous Trevi Fountain. In the 1730s he enjoyed steady papal patronage and, before the Capitoline commission, had already completed a larger statue of Clement XII for the main square of Ravenna. Bracci also helped restore the ancient sculptures of the great Capitoline collection, linking his name forever to Rome’s artistic heritage.