Ottavio Mosto

The Venetian who peopled Mirabell. Ottavio Mosto carved the four mythological groups around the Grand Parterre fountain in 1690, each staging one of the elements as a story the archbishops wanted their guests to read as flattery: Paris carrying off Helena, Aeneas hauling his father from burning Troy, Hercules lifting Antaeus, Hades seizing Persephone. Around the same time he and Bernhard Michael Mandl carved the marble dwarves of the Zwerglgarten, grotesque portraits of real court figures. Twenty-eight originally, seventeen survive.