The Triumph of Faith

For the figurative parts of his sumptuous machine Pozzo asked for the collaboration of two French sculptors, Théodon and Legros; the colony of foreign artists in Rome had grown ever more numerous: young people of all nations were drawn there both by the possibility of studying the antique and by the celebrated renown of the various artists, who could in practice offer, in painting as in sculpture, examples of every tendency; in sculpture the current that attracted most followers was the delicate academicism in the manner of Duquesnoy, veined with subtle pictorialism, when a decided influence of the great decorators such as Cortona and Gaulli, who conditioned compositional schemes, did not push towards more overt and showy effects.