Bernini, Pietro

BERNINI, PIETRO. - Sculptor and painter, b. at Sesto Fiorentino in 1562, d. at Rome in 1629. He trained in Mannerist painting at Florence, under Sirigatti, and between 1578-84 collaborated on the decoration of the villa at Caprarola. After a brief stay in Rome, of which no works are known, he went to Naples (1584) where he devoted himself to sculpture. Collaborating with Naccherino, he fused the elements of local plastic art into his Mannerism of Tuscan formation. His hand, traceable in numerous decorative works, is confirmed in the statues of the Monte di Pietà (1598-99), in those of the destroyed Medina fountain (c. 1600), of the Gesù Nuovo (1601), of the Ruffo chapel in the church of the Gerolamini (1603-1605), etc. In c. 1605 B. was called to Rome by Paul V. In his first work, the relief with the Assunta in the baptistery of S. Maria Maggiore (1606-11), the artist still adheres to the taste matured in the Neapolitan environment (typical is the pathetic dramatic quality of the figures); in the Incoronazione di Clemente VIII, on the tomb of the Pontiff in the Paolina chapel of the same church (1610-14), contact with the other sculptors of the chapel, C. Mariani, Valsoldo, Buonvicino, determined in B. a search for compositional spatiality and an accentuation of naturalism. The direct influence of the art of his son Gian Lorenzo (in Rome the two artists had a common workshop) is displayed in the lively impressionistic pictorialism of the statue of St. John the Baptist in S. Andrea della Valle (c. 1616; the iconography is inspired by the Michelangelesque Christ of the Minerva), in the group Enea e Anchise, still adhering for its compositional coldness and the composure of the modelling to sixteenth-century taste, in the Angelo of the Quirinale (1616-17), in the S. Sebastiano of the Palazzo Barberini, and even more in the group Plutone e Proserpina and in the fountain of the Barcaccia, works long debated as regards attribution to Gian Lorenzo or to P. The affinities with the group Enea e Anchise, evident in the formal Mannerism, in the treatment of the marble, in the pictorialism, akin, more than to the wholly Baroque one of Gian Lorenzo, rather to the taste spread by the style of Vittoria (and derived from B. perhaps through the intermediary of Mochi), have led more recent criticism to assign the Ratto di Proserpina to P. B., or at least to consider it a work of collaboration. Also in the fountain of the Barcaccia (debated until the documents established the attribution to P., of whom it is the last work, 1627-29), the anecdotal motif of the drifting boat is rendered analytically and the theme of water is placed at the service of a superficial decorativism that helps to accentuate the realism of the narrative elements (e.g., the sharp chipped edges of the marble and the precise depiction of the sun of the Barberini coat of arms). This work too remains within the sphere of P. B.'s Mannerism; he, in all his activity, from the Neapolitan to the Roman, preserved a ready ability and facility of craft, and in his eclectic assimilation of the forms of his time remained faithful to a clear and defined formal vision adhering to the Mannerist current that had determined his first formation.

Elsa Gerlini