Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Italian sculptor and architect

• Born: December 7, 1598
• Birthplace: Kingdom of Naples (now in Italy)
• Died: November 28, 1680
• Place of death: Rome, Papal States (now in Italy)

The sculpture and architecture of Bernini are considered to be among the most complete expressions of the thought and feeling of the Counter-Reformation. He is also one of the most representative practitioners of the High Baroque style.

Early Life

Although born in Naples, Gian Lorenzo Bernini was largely reared in Rome, where his father, Pietro, a minor Florentine sculptor, had obtained employment on the decorative program of Pope Paul V . The young Bernini was, by all accounts, a child prodigy who showed an early aptitude for his father’s profession. At the age of eight, he is said to have carved a marble head that excited general admiration, and, by the time he was ten or eleven years old, he had attracted the personal attention of Pope Paul. The principal artistic influences on the young sculptor were, first, his father, who guided and encouraged the boy’s early efforts with the utmost devotion, and, second, the Vatican itself, where he drew and studied the masterpieces of ancient sculpture and Renaissance painting.

Bernini’s earliest surviving works are not precisely datable; early biographers and some modern scholars accept a date as early as 1610, while a majority place them around 1615. These juvenilia include a lifelike portrait of Bishop G. B. Santoni and a mythological group, The Goat Amalthea with the Infant Jupiter and a Faun , long regarded as an ancient Hellenistic piece because of its textural realism. Slightly later, and somewhat larger in scale, are marble figures of Saint Sebastian and Saint Laurence. The latter was Bernini’s patron saint and is represented enduring martyrdom on a flaming grill. In order to achieve a convincing facial expression, the sculptor is said to have stuck his own foot into a fire while observing his face in a mirror. Although the story may be apocryphal, it does reflect Bernini’s concern for psychological authenticity and his typically Baroque penchant for studying his own reactions.

More ambitious still were a series of life-size marble groups, produced between 1618 and 1625 for the great connoisseur and collector Cardinal Scipione Borghese. The first, Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius Fleeing Troy , focuses on the physical and psychological contrast between three stages of life: manhood, old age, and childhood. A similar contrast heightens the drama of Pluto and Persephone , which represents the god of the underworld abducting his screaming victim. The vigorous, determined figure of the abductor is juxtaposed to the soft, vulnerable girl in his arms. The imprints of his grasping fingers on her pliant flesh are often cited as an example of Bernini’s vivid illusionism. Apollo and Daphne again makes the most of a violent and erotic myth in which the nymph turns into a laurel tree at the moment the god seizes her. The capture of seemingly instantaneous action and reaction and the transformation of skin into bark is a tour de force of the sculptor’s art.

Work on the Apollo and Daphne was interrupted by a new commission from Scipione Borghese for a statue of David. David had been a favorite theme of the Italian sculptural tradition, but Bernini represents him in a new way: neither before nor after the encounter with Goliath but in the very act of hurling the stone. This pose implies the presence of the opponent in the spectator’s space, so that the tension and energy of the figure seem to extend into his environment, a characteristic Baroque strategy. The David’s face is said to be a self-portrait, based on the image in a mirror held for the artist by his close friend, Cardinal Maffeo Barbarini. While the David was in progress, Barbarini was elected pope and, as a result, new vistas were opened to the twenty-four-year-old Bernini.

Life’s Work

When Barbarini became Pope Urban VIII in 1623, Bernini’s activities were redirected to the service of the Church. Initially, the pope encouraged the artist to study painting and architecture to supplement his mastery of sculpture. Architecture did indeed become an important aspect of Bernini’s career, but although he is said to have produced more than 150 paintings, only a few are identified, including several self-portraits that show him as a handsome man with a long face and prominent, dark eyes.

The major artistic challenge facing the new Papacy was the internal decoration of the newly completed St. Peter’s Basilica, and this responsibility fell to Bernini. In 1629, at the age of thirty, he was officially named architect of St. Peter’s, but by then he had already been at work for five years on the baldachin, the enormous bronze structure under the dome of the cathedral that marks the place where Saint Peter is believed to be buried. This monument, modeled on the canopy held over living popes, rises dynamically on its vine-covered corkscrew columns to a height of 95 feet.

Bernini also supervised the design of the four gigantic piers that surround the baldachin. Each pier contains a niche with a colossal statue of a saint, one of which, Saint Longinus, was executed by Bernini himself. Longinus’s agitated robe demonstrates the sculptor’s ability to make drapery convey emotional excitement, a requirement in ecclesiastical commissions.

Another of Bernini’s early projects for St. Peter’s was the tomb of Urban VIII, which displays a rich contrast of colors and textures between a central core in gilt bronze and peripheral figures in white marble. The artist’s taste for momentary action is reflected in the presence of a skeleton shown in the process of writing the epitaph. The effigy on Urban’s tomb reflects Bernini’s talent for portraiture. Several busts from this period, of the pope, of Borghese, and of the sculptor’s mistress, Costanza Bonarelli, re-create not only the features but also the personalities of the sitters.

One of Bernini’s rare failures was a scheme to add bell towers to the facade of St. Peter’s. One tower was actually begun, but, because of unsound foundations, had to be demolished. This reversal coincided with the death, in 1644, of Pope Urban, and Bernini fell temporarily out of favor with the papal court. This misfortune, however, turned to his advantage by permitting him to accept private commissions, the most notable of which was the Cornaro Chapel in the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, executed between 1645 and 1652. The chapel is a total ensemble involving architecture, painting, and sculpture in several media, which culminates in a vision of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa . Bernini regarded it as the most beautiful of all of his creations.

The artist regained papal approval with his spectacular design for the Four Rivers Fountain, constructed between 1648 and 1651, and, with the pontificate of Alexander VII , he again enjoyed the close friendship and enthusiastic patronage of a pope. It was during this period that Bernini designed the Piazza San Pietro in front of St. Peter’s, shaped by two colonnades that he likened to motherly arms reaching out to embrace the faithful. For the interior of the cathedral, he constructed a climactic spectacle in the apse, the Cathedra Petri (chair of Peter), a characteristically multimedia amalgam of sculpture and architecture. The Scala Regia (royal stairway), incorporating an equestrian statue of the Emperor Constantine, and the dramatic tomb of Alexander VII in St. Peter’s are further legacies of the collaboration between the pope and the sculptor.

Late in his career, starting about 1658, Bernini undertook a number of architectural projects. His palace designs either were not built or were substantially remodeled; nevertheless, they exerted considerable influence. His three churches are all central plan structures and, predictably, function as showcases for the sculpture and painting within. Perhaps the most remarkable of the three is San Andrea al Quirinale, built between 1658 and 1670.

Bernini left Rome only once. In 1665, at the insistence of Louis XIV , he traveled to Paris, where he spent five months engaged in various sculptural and architectural projects for the king. His bust of Louis XIV is a result of this trip, but for the most part his style was too dynamic and exuberant for the sober, classic taste of the French court.

Bernini’s latest works, such as the Angels for the Ponte Sant’Angelo, Beata Lodovica Albertoni , and the portrait of Gabriele Fonseca, all dating from after the French expedition, reflect the intense spirituality of the aging artist. Bernini remained active and productive almost until his death, which occurred nine days before his eighty-second birthday.

Significance

Throughout his long career Bernini demonstrated exceptional skills of hand, mind, and spirit. His almost legendary technical facility in the production of sculpture, seen particularly in his early works, was matched by an equally remarkable talent for conceiving and planning large-scale monuments and supervising their execution by others. These abilities are displayed in his many and varied ecclesiastical commissions. Bernini’s particular contribution to Counter-Reformation religious art, however, consisted in his ability to make visionary experiences vividly real and to find visual and physical metaphors for spiritual states.

Another aspect of Bernini’s genius was its seeming universality. An English visitor to seventeenth century Rome wrote in his diary that “Bernini… gave a public opera wherein he painted the scenes, cut the statues, invented the engines, composed the music, writ the comedy, and built the theatre.” This ability to synthesize different art forms is characteristic of many of the artist’s most impressive and distinctive monuments. Architecture, painting, sculpture, marble, bronze, stucco, and pigment are combined with the imagination of a stage director. Bernini’s extraordinary versatility is seen also in the range of his production within his primary field of sculpture: mythological groups, devotional images, portrait busts, tombs, and fountains. In all of these types, he set the standard for Baroque sculpture.

Bernini was generally regarded by his contemporaries as the greatest artist of his day, and his style was widely emulated. His reputation declined rather drastically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but soared again in the twentieth century. This revival was spearheaded by scholarly investigation, but his work is now widely appreciated by the art-loving public.

Bibliography

Baldinucci, Filippo. The Life of Bernini. Translated by Catherine Enggass. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966. An important source on Bernini’s life and career, published two years after his death, by a contemporary scholar and critic. Brief, with an informative foreword.

Bauer, George C., ed. Bernini in Perspective. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1976. A collection of essays about Bernini written between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, with an introduction by the editor. Includes a biography by the artist’s son, black-and-white illustrations, and a bibliography.

Hibbard, Howard. Bernini. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1965. Scholarly but concise and highly readable text. Focuses on sculpture but touches on other areas as well. Includes black-and-white illustrations, a short bibliography, and notes.

Lavin, Irving. Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. A study of the interaction of the arts in Bernini’s oeuvre, dealing with several of his chapels and altars and, in greatest depth, with the Cornaro Chapel. Includes a catalog of relevant works, a bibliography, and extensive color and black-and-white illustrations.

McPhee, Sarah. Bernini and the Bell Towers: Architecture and Politics at the Vatican. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. In 1638, Bernini began to design and build twin towers atop St. Peter’s Basilica. The project was a dismal failure, permanently tarnishing Bernini’s reputation. McPhee recounts how and why the project failed, placing the blame not on Bernini but on the liturgical and political constraints that the Vatican imposed upon him.

Marder, T. A. Bernini and the Art of Architecture. New York: Abbeville Press, 1998. A chronological description of the major architectural works, including sketches, plans, and spectacular new photographs.

Morrissey, Jake. The Genius in the Design: Bernini, Borromini, and the Rivalry That Transformed Rome. New York: Morrow, 2005. Outlines the relationship and conflict between Bernini and Borromini, the two most significant Italian Baroque architects.

Wallace, Robert. The World of Bernini, 1598-1680. Alexandria, Va.: Time-Life Books, 1970. A popular and reliable survey of the life and times of Bernini. Includes lavish illustrations, many in color.

Wittkower, Rudolf. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the Sculptor of the Roman Baroque. 3d ed. London: Phaidon Press, 1981. A definitive work on Bernini’s sculpture, with chapters on various genres. Contains a catalog, bibliography, chronological table, and extensive illustrations.