Roman sculptor, 18th century, Pope Pius VI on horseback, gilded bronze Roman sculptor, c. 1775 POPE PIUS VI ON HORSEBACK Gilded bronze group depicting the Pope on horseback and blessing as he rides to the Basilica of St. John Lateran to take possession of the Roman diocese, dressed in cape and mozzetta with stole and hat, the horse covered with a caparison with elements of the papal coat of arms. The base shows on the front face a cartouche with a coat of arms crowned by a tiara and keys, while on the back a similar cartouche crowned by the papal umbrella with keys, inscribed in relief SACROS BASILIC / LATER POSSES / DIE XXX NOV / MCCLXV ; cm 50x31x17 Alvar Gonzales Palacios, who has studied this group in the past, recalls two other examples similar in size, but made of patinated bronze and finished with less care. One of them, owned by Marquis Patrizio Patrizi Montoro and exhibited at the Roman Fasto exhibition held at Palazzo Sacchetti in 1991, boasted an old and unconvincing attribution proposed by Antonino Santangelo in 1959 to a Roman artist, Lorenzo Weber (not to be confused with the Lorenzo Maria Weber, engraver of cones and gems at the court of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany), of whom no other information can be found. Precisely on the occasion of the Roman exhibition, Alvar Gonzales Palacios himself put forward the proposal that the bronze may have been cast in Luigi Valadier's workshop, an attribution later rejected by the same scholar as lacking reliable evidence. An interesting piece of information for the dating of our work comes to us from the coat-of-arms on the base, being in fact the one used by Pius VI at the beginning of his pontificate, on which two-headed eagles and cornflowers alluding to the Empire and France were depicted, with in the middle what then remained his only arms, composed of garden lilies curved by the blowing of a silver kite charged at the top with three gold stars: this suggests that the work relates to the first year of his pontificate, elected on 15 February 1775.