FALCONET, Étienne-Maurice

French sculptor and writer on art, a pupil of Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne. Falconet was perhaps the most quintessentially RococoGLOSSARYA style of design, painting, and architecture dominating the 18th century, often considered the last stage of the Baroque. Developing in the Paris townhouses of the French aristocracy at the turn of the 18th century, Rococo was elegant and ornately decorative, its mood lighthearted and witty. Louis XV furniture, richly decorated with organic forms, is a typical product. Leading exponents of the Rococo sryle included the French painters Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), and the German architect Johann Balthasar Neumann (1687-1753). Rococo gave way to Neo-classicism. of all French sculptors, his forté being gently erotic figures such as the celebrated Bather (1757) in the Louvre. Like many other of his works, this was reproduced in porcelain by the Sèvres factory, of which he was director from 1757 to 1766, a position that he gained through the influence of his patron Mme de Pompadour.

Falconet had other sides to his talent, however, and his masterpieceGLOSSARYA term now loosely applied to the finest work by a particular artist or to any work of art of acknowledged greatness or of preeminence in its field. Originally it meant the piece of work by which a craftsman, having finished his training, gained the rank of'master' in his guild. - the equestrian statue of Peter the Great in St. Petersburg - is in a completely different vein. He went to Russia in 1766, recommended to Catherine II by Diderot, and left in 1778, the statue being unveiled in 1782. The huge horse is represented with its forelegs raised and unsupported - a daring technical feet - and the heroic vigour of the statue gives it a place among the greatest examples of the type.

Falconet suffered a stroke in 1783 and thereafter produced no more sculpture, devoting himself to writing. A six-volume edition of his writings had already appeared in 1781 and in 1761 he had published his best-known literary work, Réflexions sur la sculpture. In this he was one of the first to argue that the modern artists were superior to those of the ancient world. (It is significant that unlike most of his distinguished contemporaries he never saw the need to visit Italy.)