MONNOT, Pierre Etienne

French sculptor, active in Italy. His father, a wood-carver, moved with his family to Besançon when Monnot was still a child. Monnot was taught to carve by his father, and at the age of 19 he moved to Dijon, where he was apprenticed to the sculptor Jean Dubois. Although he spent the years 1677-87 in Paris, his professional career was passed almost entirely outside France. His earliest dated work is a group of five small marbleGLOSSARYloosely applied to any hard limestone that can be sawn into thin slabs and will take a good polish so that it is suitable for decorative work; more strictly, it refers to metamorphosed limestones whose structure has been recrystallized by heat or pressure. Marbles are widely disseminated and occur in a great variety of colours and patterns, but certain types have been particularly prized by sculptors. The most famous of Greek white marbles in the ancient world was the close-grained Pentelic, which was quarried at Mount Pentelicon in Attica. The Elgin Marbles are carved in Pentelic. Widely used also were the somewhat coarser-grained translucent white marbles from the Aegean islands of Paros and Naxos. Parian marble was used for the celebrated Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The pure white Carrara marble, quarried at Massa, Carrara, and Pietra Santa in Tuscany from the 3rd century BC, is the most famous of all sculptors' stones. It was used for the Apollo Belvedere, and was much favoured in the Renaissance, particularly by Michelangelo, who often visited the quarries to select material for his work. Neoclassical sculptors also favoured Carrara marble because of its ability to take a smooth, sleek surface, but it can look rather 'dead' compared with some of the finest Greek marbles. reliefs (1688) for the Hôtel de Ville at Poligny, Jura (in situ).

After his training in France Monnot gravitated to Rome where he made copies after antiqueGLOSSARYthe classical age of Greece and Rome began with the Greek migrations of the 2nd millennium BC, and ended in the West in 476 AD with the deposition of the Roman emperor Romulus Augustulus (c. 475 AD); in the East it ended in 529 AD when the Platonic Academy was closed by Justinian (482 - 565 AD). sculptures as well as after paintings by the Bolognese artists Francesco Albani and Domenichino. His most important works are in the San Giovanni in Laterano (Sts Peter and Paul) and in St Peter's (Tomb of Pope Innocent XI).