BERNINI, PIETRO. — Sculptor and painter, born at Sesto Fiorentino in 1562, died in Rome in 1629. He trained in Mannerist painting in Florence under Sirigatti, and between 1578 and 1584 collaborated on the decoration of the Villa of Caprarola. After a brief stay in Rome, the works from which are unknown, he went to Naples (1584) where he devoted himself to sculpture. Collaborating with Naccherino, he fused into his Tuscan-formed Mannerism the elements of local plastic art. His hand can be traced in numerous decorative works, and is confirmed in the statues of the Monte di Pietà (1598–99), in those of the destroyed Fontana Medina (c. 1600), of the Gesù Nuovo (1601), of the Ruffo chapel in the church of the Gerolamini (1603–1605), etc. Around 1605, Bernini was summoned to Rome by Paul V. In his first work there, the relief of the Assumption in the baptistery of Santa Maria Maggiore (1606–11), the artist still adhered to the taste developed in the Neapolitan milieu (typical is the pathetic dramatic quality of the figures); in the Coronation of Clement VIII, on the pope’s tomb in the Pauline chapel of the same church (1610–14), contact with the other sculptors of the chapel, C. Mariani, Valsoldo, and Buonvicino, led Bernini to seek a new spatial composition and an accentuation of naturalism.
Bernini, Pietro — The Assumption, relief in the chapel of the baptistery of the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore — Rome.
The direct influence of his son Gian Lorenzo (the two artists worked together in Rome) is evident in the vivid impressionistic pictorialism of the statue of St John the Baptist in Sant’Andrea della Valle (c. 1616; the iconography is inspired by Michelangelo’s Christ of the Minerva), in the group Aeneas and Anchises, still adhering in its cold compositional balance and restrained modelling to the sixteenth-century taste, in the Angel of the Quirinal (1616–17), in the St Sebastian in the Palazzo Barberini, and even more in the group Pluto and Proserpina and in the Fontana della Barcaccia, works long debated regarding attribution to Gian Lorenzo or to Pietro. The formal Mannerist affinities with the group Aeneas and Anchises, evident in the treatment of marble and in the pictorialism—closer to the style diffused by the art of Vittoria (and perhaps derived by Bernini through Miochi) than to the fully Baroque style of Gian Lorenzo—have led recent criticism to assign the Rape of Proserpina to Pietro Bernini, or at least to regard it as a collaborative work. Even in the Fontana della Barcaccia (long disputed until documents confirmed its attribution to Pietro, of which it is his final work, 1627–29), the anecdotal motif of the drifting boat is rendered analytically, and the theme of water is employed to serve a superficial decorative effect that contributes to accentuating the realism of the narrative elements (e.g., the sharp chisel marks in the marble and the precise depiction of the sun in the Barberini coat of arms). This work too remains within the Mannerist sphere of Pietro Bernini, who throughout his career—from his Neapolitan period to his Roman one—retained a ready skill and facility of craftsmanship, and in his eclectic assimilation of contemporary forms remained faithful to a clear and defined formal vision, adhering to the Mannerist current that had shaped his initial training.