BERNINI, GIAN LORENZO. – Architect, sculptor, painter, scenographer, born in Naples to the sculptor Pietro B., a Florentine, and Angelica Galante, a Neapolitan, on 7 December 1598; died in Rome on 28 November 1680. He was described by Schlosser as a “much debated genius.” His personality was certainly complex; yet it was precisely through the strength of his genius that B. demonstrated how the Baroque taste, decried by Neoclassical criticism, could be resolved into art.
Gian Lorenzo - Portrait, engraved by A. van Westerhout (1670).
Baldinucci, in his *Life of B.*, already expressed a widely held conviction when he wrote: “It is a very widespread belief that he was the first to attempt to unite architecture with sculpture and painting in such a way that all three might form a beautiful whole.” Superficially this seems true, but B. was essentially a sculptor, in the sense that even when his architectural masses resolved into chromatic movement, they always retained a sculptural and representational “feeling” inclined toward expression. Naturally, B. was not a sculptor in the manner of Michelangelo, precisely because of the chromatic and painterly experience implicit in his understanding of mass. As a sculptor, he was a pupil of his father, who encouraged him to practice on models of classical art. For B., classical art meant above all Hellenistic art, where the pictorial experience of sculpture itself was most vividly manifested.
Already in the youthful group *Jupiter as a Child* (Rome, Borghese Gallery), he appears to us “Alexandrian”; yet at the same time there is an intention to return to the simple elements of the Renaissance, akin to the figurative situation of the Carracci. The monument to Bishop Santoni in S. Prassede (1612) is Cinquecento in style and timid in execution. But soon his painterly vein was to triumph: contributing to this was the very figurative environment in which B. was formed, represented in Rome by that current of Venetian origin which, from Alessandro Vittoria, through Pietro B., developed in Rome in Camillo Mariani and in Mochi. Mochi, moreover, shows that he had surpassed the taste of the late Cinquecento, still largely evident in Pietro B., and was initiating the new Baroque language in sculpture. To the group *Aeneas and Anchises* in the Borghese Gallery, B. is said to have collaborated with his father in his youth; yet in reality no trace of his personality is to be seen there. This personality, however, manifests itself in early works such as *St. Lawrence Strozzi* (Florence), *The Damned Soul* and *The Blessed Soul* (Rome, Palazzo di Spagna), and above all *David* (c. 1619, Rome, Borghese Gallery). The latter derives iconographically from a figure in the frescoes by Guido Reni in S. Gregorio al Celio, and in the end there is no trace of Michelangelesque influence. B. immediately intuited the image in painterly movement, with an anticlassical curve in the pose, the virtuosity of surfaces—smooth or rough (to indicate different materials)—and the expressive energy of the face, said to be a self-portrait.
*The Rape of Proserpina* (Borghese Gallery), far less significant, is probably a case of collaboration between Gian Lorenzo and Pietro B.; in reality it is a group much less “Baroque” and more Cinquecento and Gianbolognaesque than might appear. The group *Apollo and Daphne* (1622; Borghese Gallery), however, stands among the highest achievements of the young B., now fully confident in his means. The swirling drapery of Apollo recalls Mochi, and the face echoes the Apollo Belvedere. In truth, the figure of Daphne is the better one; yet the work is admirable for its trembling, moved musicality, in a light rhythm, in a painterly movement at its peak, complex for the chromatic research that inheres in II.
Perhaps from the brief pontificate of Gregory XV (1622) date the bust of Cardinal Montoya (Church of S. Maria in Monserrato) and the monument to Cardinal Bellarmino (Church of the Gesù), iconographically linked to the type of late Cinquecento sculptural portraiture, yet so intense in painterly life and so incisive that the conventional meaning of the severe anti-formalist tradition now appears surpassed. B., in fact, rejects no tradition, provided it can be brought back and reduced to the meaning of his own figurative vision.
The pontificate of Urban VIII (1624) encompasses the highest achievements of Bernini’s genius, both in sculpture and in architecture and painting. The marble portrait of Costanza Buonarelli, beloved by B. (Florence, Bargello, c. 1625), reveals a freedom in portraiture, a synthesis of psychological and painterly vitality, surpassing in the “open cut” of the portrait the busts of Cardinal Scipione Borghese (c. 1632), where the dynamic amplitude of the bust denotes the influence of Rubens and embodies the new portrait canon of B., who wished the subject “to move and speak” (Baldinucci). To this period also belongs the painted self-portrait in the Uffizi. B.’s pictorial activity, moreover, proceeded discontinuously, mainly between 1625 and 1635. As a painter, B. confirms (contrary to what has been asserted) his apparent adherence to the Venetian-influenced group, through his relations with Andrea Sacchi and Poussin; and the *David* in the Incisa della Rocchetta collection shows how he also looked to Guercino. B., however, intended above all to avail himself of certain painters who would carry out his Berninian figurative ideas under his guidance, such as Carlo Pellegrini, author of the painting of St. Maurice, once attributed to B. himself, and Guido Ovaldo Abbatini. Among the studios of this period, the statue of St. Bibiana (1626) should also be remembered.
Yet it was above all as an architect that B. established himself in more than one work, and at least in one masterpiece: the baldacchino for St. Peter’s (1624). The painterly movement animating the baldacchino realizes more than anywhere else the synthesis of sculpture and architecture peculiar to B., and the rhythm of the twisted columns is truly that of an animated mass. The work took nine years and established B.’s fame as an architect. In the façade of S. Bibiana (1626) and that of the Collegio di Propaganda Fide (1627), although the accent of Berninian proportions is recognizable, he appears as an artist of Cinquecento severity, not unmindful of Giacomo della Porta. Yet in the Palazzo di Propaganda Fide he achieves pictorial effects through the inclination of the façade to form a spur.
B. also played a major role in the construction of Palazzo Barberini; yet the question of how much belongs to B. and how much to Maderno and Borromini remains unresolved. It should be noted that during the pontificate of Urban VIII, B. was also a scenographer for the Barberini theater. The work on the mausoleum of Urban VIII in St. Peter’s, begun in 1628, was completed much later (1647). It responds to a new type of funerary monument that would last until Neoclassicism; and it is a masterpiece of B. Other works from the pontificate of Urban VIII, in chronological order, are: the tomb of Countess Matilda in St. Peter’s (1635); the model for the two bell towers of the façade of St. Peter’s (1637), of which only one was begun, then interrupted and later demolished due to cracks and the opposition it encountered; and the Fountain of the Triton in Piazza Barberini, so picturesque and dynamic, etc.
The Blessed (B.) first fell into disfavour with the new pope Innocent X (1644), who preferred Borromini. He then sculpted *Truth Unveiled by Time* (Borghese Gallery), which remained unfinished in the figure of Time and was meant to symbolise the artist’s state of mind in the face of human injustice. Here one observes a complex pictorial and chromatic search, through a broad movement in a wave of Rubensian forms. But the masterpiece of this period is *The Ecstasy of St Teresa* (1647) in Santa Maria della Vittoria, which not only represents an architectural, sculptural, pictorial and scenographic synthesis, but also reveals the extreme sensitivity of the B., in a sincere vision disclosed by the virtuoso treatment of the marble masses. Once restored to the Pope’s favour, he designed the Fountain of the Rivers in Piazza Navona (1651), for whose execution he availed himself of the help of some pupils. He began (1650) the construction of the Palazzo Montecitorio, notable for the broken line of its design and completed much later by Carlo Fontana.
The B.’s activity developed further during the pontificate of Alexander VII Chigi. Suffice it to recall the marvellous design for the colonnade of St Peter’s (1656), the church of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale (1658) and the bronze *Cathedra* in St Peter’s (1661). In the latter, the principle of the moving colouristic mass that creates an anti-landscape representational space is important.
The B.’s fame was by now such that King Louis XIV of France asked him for the design of the façade of the Louvre and wished him to come to Paris. He remained there for five months, from April 1665, but his design was not adopted, also because of jealousy on the part of French artists. Nor did the equestrian portrait of the king please, and it was poorly reproduced by Giraudon (a marvellous terracotta sketch is in the Borghese Gallery). In any case, the B.’s journey to France, faithfully described in a diary by Fréart de Chantelou, remains a fundamental document in the history of figurative taste in general and of the B. in particular.
Returning to his homeland, he executed numerous further works, among which we may recall: the equestrian statue of Constantine (1670, portico of St Peter’s); the statues for Ponte Sant’Angelo, two of which are in the church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte; the monument to Pope Alexander VII in St Peter’s (1672–1678); the recumbent statue of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni in San Francesco a Ripa (1674); and so on.
Numerous drawings by the B. also survive, often springing from an intimate and immediate state of mind. Drawings that cannot be understood without uncovering, entire and concrete, the personality of the B., sculptor, architect, painter and stage-designer. Even his caricatures recall the activity of a playwright and actor in the artist, and seem to arise rather from a personal dramatic attitude, sharply mordant and caustic, than from a benevolent experience of the ‘comic’.
The B. was a classicist. Not only because in his works, especially architectural ones, he employs the traditional classical vocabulary, but because the Baroque language (understood positively) that he exalted is often resolved into a very high individual synthesis and thus remains classical in essence. — See Plates XCII–XCIII.