Baroque Rome's sculptor who treated marble like theatre
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, born in Naples on 7 December 1598 and dead in Rome on 28 November 1680, fused sculpture, architecture, and stagecraft for popes. One scholar likens his grip on sculpture to Shakespeare's on drama: a name that instantly signals a whole visual language.
Bernini came into the world in Naples in December 1598, the sixth of thirteen children born to Angelica Galante and the Florentine-born Mannerist sculptor Pietro Bernini. By the age of eight he was already being treated as a prodigy, and his father pushed him hard. Pope Paul V was among the first grandees to vouch for the boy, and admirers soon called him the Michelangelo of his century. Several pieces from roughly 1615 to 1620, including the Faun Teased by Putti in New York and the Boy with a Dragon at the Getty, are thought to be joint work by father and son.
Once settled in Rome he almost never left it. The one long absence was a reluctant five months in Paris working for Louis XIV; otherwise he made only short work trips to places such as Tivoli and Castelgandolfo. Pope Urban VIII told him that he and the city were made for each other. His first great patron, though, was the fabulously rich Cardinal Scipione Borghese, and in 1619 the young sculptor was hired to repair and finish the ancient Sleeping Hermaphroditus from the cardinal's collection.
Four marbles made between 1619 and 1625, all still in the Galleria Borghese, sealed his fame: Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius, The Rape of Proserpina, Apollo and Daphne, and David. Rudolf Wittkower judged that they opened a new chapter for European sculpture. Their novelty lay in freezing the tensest instant of a story, such as Pluto finally seizing his quarry or Daphne starting to turn into a tree. Where Michelangelo's David stands still and idealised, Bernini's bites his lip mid-throw, and Proserpina's loosening braids betray her panic.
Sculpture was only part of his range. He painted small oil canvases, wrote, directed and acted in Carnival satires while building their sets and stage machinery, and designed lamps, tables and mirrors. As an architect and planner he produced churches, chapels, squares, fountains, tombs and temporary festival structures of wood and stucco, which is why contemporaries saw him as Michelangelo's true heir.
Source: Gian Lorenzo Bernini
