Bernini, Gian Lorenzo (1598–1680)

Italian sculptor, architect, and painter. Bernini’s work in Rome made him the most influential and famous Italian artist of his time. Born in Naples on 7 December 1598, the son of a Florentine sculptor, Bernini was the first artist whose life and its retelling were coordinated to fashion an ideal image. All of the literary motifs that had come to signify identity as an artist are to be found not only in the reports of his contemporaries but also in his practice. As with Giotto (1266/7 or 1276–1337), his genius is apparent at an early age; like Michelangelo (1475–1564), he became the master of painting, sculpture, and architecture; as with Titian (1488/90–1576), his art earned him a knighthood (1621) and exacted the same deference from popes and kings. When Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–1689), reprising the role of Alexander the Great, visited Bernini in his studio, he greeted her in the coarse sculptor’s smock he wore when working, and she, far from being affronted by this lèse-majesté, sought to touch it with her own hand.

His father’s work at the church of Santa Maria Maggiore brought Bernini to Rome at the age of seven or eight, and with the exception of a five-month trip to Paris in 1665, where he did an unexecuted, but variously imitated, design for the Louvre, he remained in Rome all his life. From his father he acquired the technique that would make marble as yielding as wax; from Hellenistic sculpture, the example of optical surfaces and a way of composing figures on a stagelike plinth with one dominant point of view; and from modern painters like Caravaggio (1573–1610), Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), and Guido Reni(1575–1642), an affective naturalism and psychological immediacy that effaced the boundaries between subject and viewer, art and life. All of these traits are to be seen to such startling effect in the life-size sculptures Bernini executed for Cardinal Scipione Borghese that contemporary reports of his earlier precocity seem entirely plausible. In the Apollo and Daphne (1622–1625), the nymph’s transformation into root and bark, twig and leaf is no less astonishing to us than to the unsuspecting god; and in the David (1623), the grimly determined young hero prepares to loose his missile at a giant Goliath looming over the viewer’s shoulder. The inescapable realism and emotional intensity of these works also characterize certain of his portraits, like the bust of Scipione Borghese (1632) or that of the artist’s mistress, Costanza Buonarelli (1637–1638), which in its informality and unmeditated spontaneity reconfigures for the viewer Bernini’s own lively and passionate response to his sitter.

Beginning in the reign of Pope Urban VIII (reigned 1623–1644) these exercises of personal virtuosity were complemented by equally impressive displays of large-scale organizing in which Bernini engaged the energies and skills of many other artists and craftsmen to realize his ideas. Within a year of the pope’s elevation, he was commissioned to erect a gilded bronze canopy, or baldachin, over the tomb of the saint in the then still largely undecorated church of St. Peter’s. Commissions from Urban VIII and his successors for the decoration of the crossing and the nave, the tombs of Urban VIII and Alexander VII (reigned 1655–1667), the Sacrament Chapel, and the enormous apparition of Peter’s throne in the apse of the church followed. Thus, with his designs for the angels holding the instruments of Christ’s Passion on the bridge over the Tiber connecting the Vatican with the city and for the colonnades surmounted by saints fronting the church, visiting St. Peter’s became, and remains, an experience largely shaped by Bernini’s never surpassed exaltations of Catholic piety and papal authority.

Nevertheless, the originality and religious conviction of Bernini’s art is perhaps more readily grasped in the Cornaro Chapel in church of Santa Maria della Vittoria (1647–1652). Here, as elsewhere, he harnesses all the arts to a single, over-whelming effect. The architecture, composed of multicolored marbles, breaks forward over the altar as if forced from within to disclose the white, marmoreal vision of Saint Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), mysteriously lit from a hidden window above. Swooning in an ecstasy of divine love, which, in keeping with the eroticized imagery of her Autobiography, has been provoked by an angel piercing her heart with a flame-tipped spear, Teresa reclines on a bank of clouds, wholly lost in her rapture. Yet the visual metaphor of her wildly cascading drapery belies the quietude of her dangling limbs, parted lips, and half-closed eyes and betrays the depth and violence of her passion. On the floor of the chapel, skeletons in inlaid marble rise toward the light of the Holy Spirit that miraculously bursts through the ceiling and descends in a painted glory of angels. Thus in one apparently transitory image, Bernini merges and illustrates as never before the typically baroque themes of love (physical and spiritual), death (real and mystical), and salvation (Teresa’s and the viewer’s).

Although many criticized the clothing of the spiritual in the sensual, the persuasive power that resulted made Bernini’s works definitive examples for those who sought to move their audience for religious and political ends. At its most aggressive, this desire to compel assent appears in the comedies that from the 1640s the artist staged during the Carnival season before Lent. In these works a rush of strong emotion—astonishment, alarm, fear—bonded the audience to the fiction. In one, a great quantity of water broke through its dike and threatened to soak the spectators; in another, an accidental fire, kindled by the scripted carelessness of an actor, appeared to ignite the theater. Although ephemeral in effect, like his festive decorations and firework displays, a clear continuity exists between these theatrical devices and Bernini’s permanent works of architecture, painting, and sculpture. In the Triton Fountain(1642–1643) and Four Rivers Fountain (1647–1651), the lack of architectural frames and the animation of sculpture and water enable them to take possession of the urban space, and in San Andrea al Quirinale (1658–1670) the figurative decorations are coextensive with and inhabit the space of the church. It was this ability to absorb the viewer into a spectacle that seemed to be unfolding before his eyes that made Bernini so influential during the early modern period.