Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Interpreter of the Roman sentiment and life, sculptor and official architect of the papacy, Bernini dominated his whole century, all the art of Rome, and worked incessantly under nine pontificates. He was called a corrupter, he should better be called a regenerator. Into the stagnant waters of art with which the seventeenth century opened, great without greatness, wrong without novelty, he brought the mighty breath of genius; he stirred them up, turning them into a storm. The grand, the magnificent, the ingenious, the striking, the marvellous, the excessive, was the spirit, the ideal of the age; all this Bernini, the Michelangelo of the South, translated into art.
Domenico Gnoli, poet and historian
The Italian Renaissance had Michelangelo, and the Baroque had Bernini. And although the latter did not achieve the almost “divine” quality of the former, especially in painting, he was a colossus of art; a more than adequate painter, an outstanding architect, and undoubtedly the best sculptor of his era.
Imagen: Gian Lorenzo Bernini: “Self-portrait”, 1623. Oil on canvas, 38 x 30 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome.
The son of a well-known sculptor, Bernini was born in Naples in 1598, although as a child he moved with his family to Naples. As can be easily understood, in the artist’s early works (such as the “A Faun Teased by Children“, 1616-17, from the Metropolitan Museum) it is difficult to discern the degree of his father’s involvement, although they do make it clear that Gian Lorenzo’s talent must have manifested itself very early, which led the wealthy Cardinal Scipione Borghese to take an interest in his work, commissioning several sculptures for his villa in Rome, known today as the Villa Borghese.
Between 1619 and 1625, when he was little more than twenty years old, Bernini created four sculptures for Cardinal Borghese which rank among the most important works of the Italian Baroque, and which would be enough to ensure their author a place of prominence in the history of sculpture: “Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius” (1619), “The Rape of Proserpina” (1621-22), “David” (1623-24) and “Apollo and Daphne” (1622-25), which were immediately admired by his contemporaries. “Apollo and Daphne”, perhaps the most successful of them all, “breaks radically with the sculptural traditions of the fifteenth century, with the concept of the statue as a single block (…), as a static object confined in a space that the spectator defines with his movement rather than as a dynamic artefact that violently bursts into our spatial sphere and our experience” (Fernando Marías, “Bernini”, 1993).
Gian Lorenzo Bernini: “The Rape of Proserpina”, 1621-22. Marble, height: 255 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome. Photograph: Architas ·· Gian Lorenzo Bernini: “Apollo and Daphne”, 1622-25. Marble, height: 243 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome. Photograph: Architas
Bernini’s status as Rome’s foremost sculptor was already established, and during his lifetime he enjoyed the protection of seven popes. During the papacy of Urban VIII, an avowed admirer of Bernini, he produced the Baldachin of St Peter’s (1623-34), a work halfway between sculpture and architecture, executed in his father’s workshop with the collaboration of other leading Baroque figures such as Francesco Borromini. He also executed the large “Saint Longinus” (1629-38) for St Peter’s Basilica, and received commissions for such important works as the Fontana del Tritone (1624-43) and the Fontana della Barcaccia (1627), both in Rome. His enormous fame led him to receive commissions from some of the most important figures in Europe at the time, such as Cardinal Richelieu, of whom he executed a bust (1641-42) now in the Louvre in Paris.
With the beginning of the papacy of Innocent X, coinciding with the failure of his project for the bell tower on the façade of St Peter’s Basilica, which had to be demolished, Bernini’s career suffered a brief setback, from which he would soon recover, producing two of his greatest works, his sculpture of the “Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” (1645-52) for the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome and the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi, designed in 1651. With the beginning of the papacy of Alexander VII Bernini undertook what is perhaps his best known work, the design for St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican, possibly the great masterpiece of Baroque urban planning.
Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi. Design by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1651. Photograph: Paul Hermans ·· St Peter’s Square, Vatican. Design by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. 1656-67. Photograph: Diliff
In 1665, Bernini was summoned by King Louis XIV of France, of whom he produced a sensational bust now in the Palace of Versailles. Despite his enormous fame, Bernini’s designs for the modification of the Louvre Palace did not convince the king, and he returned to Rome the following year, where he lived until his death in 1680. Among his last works is the Tomb of Alexander VII, a complex ensemble of polychrome marbles located in the south transept of St. Peter’s Basilica.
G. Fernández · theartwolf.com
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