BERNINI, PIETRO. — Sculptor and painter, born in Sesto Fiorentino in 1562, died in Rome in 1629. He trained in Mannerist painting in Florence under Sirigatti, and between 1578 and 1584 collaborated in the decoration of the villa at Caprarola. After a brief sojourn 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 sculpture with the Tuscan Mannerism of his training. His hand, traceable in numerous decorative works, is confirmed in the statues of the Monte di Pietà (1598–99), 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. Around 1605 B. was summoned to Rome by Paul V. work, the relief of the Assunta in the baptistery of S. Maria Maggiore (1606–11), the artist still adhered to the taste developed in the Neapolitan milieu (the pathetic drama of the figures is typical); in the Incoronazione di Clemente 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 B. to seek compositional spatiality and to accentuate naturalism.
The direct influence of the art of his son Gian Lorenzo (in Rome the two artists had a shared workshop) is evident in the lively Impressionistic pictorialism of the statue of S. Giovanni Battista in S. Andrea della Valle (c. 1616; the iconography is inspired by Michelangelo’s Christ of the Minerva), in the group Enea e Anchise, which, in its compositional coldness and the restraint of its modelling, still adheres to sixteenth-century taste, in the Angelo of the Quirinal (1616–17), in the S. Sebastiano of the Barberini Palace, and even more so in the group Plutone e Proserpina and in the Barcaccia fountain, works whose attribution to Gian Lorenzo or P. has long been debated. The affinities with the group Enea e Anchise, evident in the formal Mannerism, the treatment of the marble, and the pictorialism—which, rather than resembling Gian Lorenzo’s entirely Baroque manner, is closer to the taste disseminated by Vittoria’s style (and perhaps adopted by B. through Mochi)—have led more recent criticism to assign the Ratto di Proserpina to P. B., or at least to regard it as a collaborative work. The Barcaccia fountain as well (debated until documents established its attribution to P., and his last work, 1627–29) analytically translates the anecdotal motif of the drifting boat, while the theme of water is placed at the service of a superficial decorativism that helps to heighten the realism of the narrative elements (for example, the sharply torn edges of the marble and the precise depiction of the sun in the Barberini coat of arms). This work too remains within the sphere of P. B.’s Mannerism; throughout his activity, from his Neapolitan to his Roman period, he retained a ready skill and facility in his craft, and in his eclectic assimilation of the forms of his time he remained faithful to a clear and defined formal vision, aligned with the Mannerist tendency that had shaped his initial training.