Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Gian Lorenzo Bernini was born in Naples on December 7, 1598, the son of Pietro Bernini, a Florentine sculptor then working in the southern city, and Angelica Galante, a Neapolitan ^[1]. Around 1606 Pietro moved the family to Rome after receiving papal commissions, and it was in Rome that the boy's education truly began, in his father's workshop and among the ancient marbles of the papal collections ^[2].

The child's talent announced itself early. Pietro brought his son to the attention of powerful patrons, and by his teens Gian Lorenzo was carving independent works of startling maturity. Contemporary biographers, including his son Domenico and the writer Filippo Baldinucci, recorded that Pope Paul V examined a drawing by the boy and predicted a second Michelangelo ^[1]. Whatever embellishment such stories carry, the surviving early sculptures confirm an ability far beyond his years: the Goat Amalthea group, carved when he was probably still in his early teens, was long mistaken for an antique ^[2].

Rome itself was his second teacher. Bernini spent long hours drawing after the Laocoon, the Belvedere Torso, and other celebrated antiquities in the Vatican, as well as studying the paintings of Raphael and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel ^[3]. This grounding in both classical sculpture and High Renaissance painting shaped a sensibility that treated marble as something capable of pictorial effects, an idea that would define his mature style.

The decisive relationship of Bernini's youth was with Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Paul V and one of the most acquisitive collectors in Europe. Between roughly 1618 and 1625 Bernini carved for him the sequence of life-size marble groups that made his reputation: Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius, the Rape of Proserpina, Apollo and Daphne, and David ^[2]. All four remain in the Galleria Borghese in Rome.

These works rethought what sculpture could do. The Proserpina group renders Pluto's fingers pressing into the goddess's thigh with a softness that seems impossible in stone ^[3]. Apollo and Daphne freezes the instant of the nymph's transformation into a laurel tree, bark climbing her legs and leaves sprouting from her fingers, a subject painters had attempted but no sculptor had dared at this scale ^[2]. The David, unlike the calm standing figures of Donatello and Michelangelo, twists at the moment of maximum effort, lips compressed, about to release the sling. Bernini reportedly studied his own straining face in a mirror while modeling it ^[1].

In 1623 Cardinal Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII, and Bernini's position changed from favored young sculptor to something closer to artistic director of Rome. Urban is said to have told him it was his fortune to see Maffeo Barberini pope, but the pope's greater fortune that Bernini lived during his pontificate ^[1]. Honors followed quickly: knighthood in the Order of Christ, the presidency of the Academy of St. Luke in 1629, and in the same year, on the death of Carlo Maderno, the post of architect of St. Peter's ^[4].

Any account of Gian Lorenzo Bernini achievements begins at St. Peter's. His first great task there was the Baldacchino (1624-1633), the bronze canopy nearly thirty meters high that rises over the high altar and the tomb of the apostle, its twisted columns recalling those believed to come from Solomon's Temple ^[4]. Later, under Alexander VII, he designed the Cathedra Petri (1657-1666), the gilded bronze reliquary enclosing the chair of St. Peter in the apse, framed by clouds, angels, and a burst of golden light around a window of the Holy Spirit ^[5].

His most discussed sculpture belongs to the Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria. The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647-1652) shows the Spanish mystic swooning as a smiling angel prepares to pierce her heart with a golden arrow, the scene lit from a hidden window and watched by marble portraits of the Cornaro family in boxes like theater spectators ^[3]. Bernini conceived the chapel as a total work uniting sculpture, architecture, painting, and controlled light, an approach scholars often describe with his own circle's phrase, the beautiful whole ^[2].

As an urban designer he changed the experience of Rome itself. The Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona (1648-1651), commissioned by Innocent X, sets personifications of the Danube, Nile, Ganges, and Rio de la Plata around a rocky base carrying an ancient Egyptian obelisk ^[4]. Grandest of all is the colonnade of St. Peter's Square (1656-1667), two sweeping arms of nearly three hundred travertine columns that Bernini himself compared to the maternal arms of the Church receiving the faithful ^[5]. His smaller church of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale (1658-1670), built on an oval plan, was reportedly the building of his own that gave him the most satisfaction ^[1].

Bernini was also the leading portrait sculptor of his century. Busts such as those of Scipione Borghese, Costanza Bonarelli, and Louis XIV caught sitters mid-thought, lips parted, drapery in motion, establishing a model for state portraiture in marble that lasted well over a century ^[6].

Bernini's private life had one notorious episode. In the late 1630s he carried on an affair with Costanza Bonarelli, the wife of one of his assistants, and carved of her the strikingly informal bust now in the Bargello in Florence. When he discovered that his own brother Luigi was also involved with her, Bernini attacked Luigi and sent a servant to slash Costanza's face ^[7]. Urban VIII shielded the artist from serious consequences, fining him but pressing him toward marriage.

In 1639 Bernini married Caterina Tezio, the daughter of a Roman lawyer. The marriage lasted until her death in 1673 and produced eleven children, among them Domenico Bernini, whose biography of his father remains a primary source for the artist's life ^[1]. By all surviving accounts the older Bernini became intensely devout, attending mass daily, practicing the spiritual exercises of the Jesuits, and walking regularly to the church of the Gesù for devotions ^[1].

He was famous for wit as well as temper. Bernini wrote and staged comedies for Roman carnival seasons, designing ingenious stage machinery including a famous simulated flood, and his rapid caricatures in pen are among the earliest of the genre ^[2]. The diarist Paul Fréart de Chantelou, who accompanied him in France, left a detailed record of his conversation, full of sharp judgments on art and artists ^[6].

Bernini's career had one severe public setback. Bell towers he built onto the facade of St. Peter's under Urban VIII showed cracks, and under the unfriendly pontificate of Innocent X the southern tower was demolished in 1646, a humiliation his rivals exploited ^[4]. He answered with work: the Four Rivers fountain won back Innocent's favor, and the sculpture Truth Unveiled by Time, which he kept in his own house, was his private commentary on the affair ^[2].

In 1665, at the invitation of Louis XIV, the sixty-six year old Bernini made a celebrated journey to Paris to design a new east front for the Louvre. He was received almost like a visiting prince, and he carved a marble bust of the young king that still stands at Versailles, but his palace designs were set aside in favor of French architects and he returned to Rome after five months ^[6]. The episode marked the limits of Italian artistic authority in a Europe increasingly oriented toward France.

He never stopped working. His late religious sculptures, including the angels for the Ponte Sant'Angelo (1667-1669), the ecstatic Blessed Ludovica Albertoni (1671-1674) in San Francesco a Ripa, and the tomb of Alexander VII in St. Peter's with its gilded skeleton lifting a shroud of colored marble, show an art turned toward death and salvation ^[5]. Bernini suffered a stroke in 1680 that paralyzed his right arm, which he is said to have accepted calmly as rest for the arm that had labored so long. He died in Rome on November 28, 1680, a few days short of his eighty-second birthday, and was buried simply in the family tomb in Santa Maria Maggiore ^[1].

For roughly two centuries after his death Bernini's reputation sank with the Baroque itself. Neoclassical critics, led by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, treated his art as the corruption of good taste, and the revival came only in the twentieth century, above all through the scholarship of Rudolf Wittkower, whose 1955 monograph re-established him as one of the greatest of European sculptors ^[3]. Today the Borghese marbles and the Cornaro Chapel are among the most visited artworks in Italy.

His influence is hard to overstate. Sculptors across Catholic Europe, from Rome to Vienna to the Iberian world, worked in idioms he created, and the fusion of arts he pioneered shaped church interiors, fountains, and royal portraiture into the eighteenth century ^[2]. Rome's public face, from the piazza of St. Peter's to Piazza Navona and the angels on the bridge to Castel Sant'Angelo, still bears his stamp more than any other single artist's.

Basic Gian Lorenzo Bernini facts, his Naples birth in 1598, his service to eight popes, his death in Rome in 1680, only frame the larger point of any Gian Lorenzo Bernini biography: he demonstrated that marble could seem to breathe, blush, and move, and that a city could be composed like a work of art. Art historians commonly rank him with Michelangelo as one of the two supreme sculptors of the Italian tradition ^[3].