By Elisabetta Povoledo
The New York Times
Oct. 31, 2017
ROME
ROME
No artist defined 17th-century Rome more than Gian Lorenzo Bernini did, working under nine popes and leaving an indelible mark on the Eternal City.
And there is probably no better place to appreciate his talent and genius than the Borghese Gallery in Rome, the villa — now a museum — built by his first patron, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, where Bernini revealed his talent for capturing tension and drama in stone. But during a remarkable exhibition titled “Bernini,” which runs until Feb. 4, visiting may be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Following the cardinal’s diktat that Bernini fill every room to “stimulate the imagination,” the artist crafted four monumental groups for the villa in the early 1620s — including the spectacular “Pluto and Persephone” and “Apollo and Daphne” — which demonstrate his skill at overcoming the limitations of his material, carving marble as if it were dough.
Now these must-see staples have been joined by nearly 60 other Bernini works.
Museums that lent pieces — including the Louvre, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York — “were extremely supportive because they clearly understood that this was a unique occasion,” said Anna Coliva, the director of the gallery, who curated the show with Andrea Bacchi, the director of the Federico Zeri Foundation.
“I don’t think that there will ever be such a complete exhibit of Bernini,” said Anna Coliva, the director of the Borghese Gallery.
And there is probably no better place to appreciate his talent and genius than the Borghese Gallery in Rome, the villa — now a museum — built by his first patron, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, where Bernini revealed his talent for capturing tension and drama in stone. But during a remarkable exhibition titled “Bernini,” which runs until Feb. 4, visiting may be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Following the cardinal’s diktat that Bernini fill every room to “stimulate the imagination,” the artist crafted four monumental groups for the villa in the early 1620s — including the spectacular “Pluto and Persephone” and “Apollo and Daphne” — which demonstrate his skill at overcoming the limitations of his material, carving marble as if it were dough.
Now these must-see staples have been joined by nearly 60 other Bernini works.
Museums that lent pieces — including the Louvre, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York — “were extremely supportive because they clearly understood that this was a unique occasion,” said Anna Coliva, the director of the gallery, who curated the show with Andrea Bacchi, the director of the Federico Zeri Foundation.
“I don’t think that there will ever be such a complete exhibit of Bernini,” said Anna Coliva, the director of the Borghese Gallery.
The gallery’s halls offer a lushly decorated backdrop for the pieces “in a way that we hoped that Bernini” — who was also a showman, playwright and creator of extravagant spectacles — “might have envisaged, had he been alive,” Ms. Coliva added in an interview.
The gallery has staged a Bernini exhibition with loans before, when itreopened in 1998 after a lengthy renovation. The latest exhibition builds on the Borghese collection, fleshing out the artist’s career from his apprenticeship with his father, the sculptor Pietro Bernini (a collaboration that Gian Lorenzo “would later try to expunge,” Mr. Bacchi said), with a series of sculptures they crafted in tandem, to his ambition to become an all-around artist, adding architecture and painting to his already considerable skills.
For the first time, over a dozen paintings — portraits and half-figures — that are universally accepted as by Bernini are being shown under one roof. They are juxtaposed with his better-known marble and bronze busts, mostly of powerful clerics.
The marble portraits cover a 60-year period during which Bernini depicted a marmoreal “Who’s Who” of Rome. The Louvre lent its bust of Cardinal Richelieu, whom Bernini never met. He crafted the statue from a painting, something Mr. Bacchi said was both an innovation and a challenge: “He wrote that it was hard enough to give the warmth and life of people to marble, but doing it without ever meeting the person is nigh-on impossible.”
Bernini’s fame in his lifetime and beyond — “Bernini is synonymous with the Baroque and the Baroque with Bernini,” Mr. Bacchi said — has made him a much-studied figure.
But the Borghese exhibition provides new nuggets for scholarship, and offers an opportunity to closely compare works that are normally thousands of miles apart, like two versions of the “Crucified Christ” lent by institutions in Madrid and Toronto.
Restoration work around the exhibition also led to discoveries. A Bernini statue of St. Bibiana was removed from its church so that it could be restored directly at the museum. The sculpture had previously been moved during the bombing of Rome in World War II, and the restoration — which cost 62,000 euros, or about $72,000 — suggested that it had been mounted incorrectly on its return.
Ms. Coliva said that once the exhibition is over, she hopes to find funds to build a new altar for the church, so that the statue can be admired from the viewpoint that the restoration work suggests Bernini had intended.
Bernini worked throughout Rome, but clearly curators couldn’t move monumental works like the sculptures in St. Peter’s Basilica and the Four Rivers Fountain in Piazza Navona. They came up with the next best thing: a series of models and sketches of such pieces, showing Bernini’s way of working.
But those are just appetizers. Just look up Bernini in the index of any guidebook to Rome: His impact and legacy are citywide.
The First Twists That Made Marble Move
‘Bernini: Sculpting in Clay’ at the Metropolitan Museum
Considering how well suited clay was to the sense of animation Bernini sought, you might wonder why only 52 of his terra-cotta works are known. In his fascinating catalog essay the art historian Tomaso Montanari supposes that Bernini most likely made several thousand clay models over the course of his nearly 70-year career. (What a loss for today’s art market!) One reason so few have survived is that Bernini himself was uninterested in small sculpture.
His ambitions were entirely directed to the kind of awe-inspiring fusions of art and architecture that his great predecessor Michelangelo created. Bernini was famous in his time for his modeling skill — he sometimes gave demonstrations for courtly entertainment — but he never produced anything in clay as a finished work and seems to have regarded his clay models as little more than rough drafts.
The taste of his time was another factor. There was a fad for small, finely worked bronzes to decorate scholarly studies, but Bernini’s rough sketches did not fit that template. So no one thought to save and preserve them. Later, things began to change. Partly because Bernini had become the object of a personality cult and partly because of a rising appreciation for the putatively soulful authenticity of the spontaneous sketch, a few collectors did save some of Bernini’s clay models.
What remains, nevertheless, is deeply telling, not only about Bernini but also about modernity in general. The visual dynamism that he sought in clay and marble is of the essence in Baroque sculpture and in paintings by Caravaggio and Rubens, among others. More than just a style, though, it manifests a new kind of worldview, an immense leap from the static cosmos of the medieval mind to a new universe of constant change.
It is almost too perfect metaphorically that among Bernini’s greatest achievements was the design of several extravagantly theatrical fountains around Rome. He was all about turbulence and flow, and so in our own electrified age are we.
“Bernini: Sculpting in Clay” runs through Jan. 6 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.
‘Bernini: Sculpting in Clay’ at the Metropolitan Museum
By KEN JOHNSON
- OCT. 4, 2012
Marble yielded like butter in the hands of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the greatest sculptor of 17th-century Europe. As if responding to a sorcerer’s spells, stone became flesh, cloth, fur and the bark and leaves of trees. In works like “Apollo and Daphne” (1622-25) and “The Ecstasy of St. Teresa” (1645-52), superhumanly beautiful gods, angels and humans seem animated from within by a relentlessly striving life force. Everything is in flux, moving swiftly and sometimes violently. Bodies struggle, twisting and turning in different directions. Almost always there seems to be wind blowing hair and beards and causing robes and drapery to undulate in choppy waves.
How, pragmatically speaking, did Bernini (1598-1680) work his magic? That is the question explored by “Bernini: Sculpting in Clay,” an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art focusing on that primordial, infinitely plastic material out of which much, if not all, he produced emerged.
The exhibition was organized by Ian Wardropper, director of the Frick Collection; Anthony Sigel, a Harvard Art Museums conservator; and C. D. Dickerson III, curator of European art at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Along with Paola D’Agostino, a senior research associate at the Met, these experts examined all works in clay believed to be by Bernini and determined that 52 were authentic. Thirty-nine of them are on view here, along with related, sketchy drawings.
So this is an important exhibition, insofar as it establishes a scholarly baseline for the study of Bernini terra-cotta work. It is not a blockbuster of a show, however.
Most of the works are small, roughly and quickly made pieces known as bozettos, in which Bernini worked out compositions and gestures of individual figures he planned to make without worrying over details. But while not spectacular, they are wonderfully deft and will be a revelation for viewers unfamiliar with Bernini’s working methods.
In the exhibition a series of 10 approximately 12-inch-tall clay angels is displayed on two rows of pedestals mimicking those of the Ponte Sant’Angelo, the ancient Roman bridge built around A.D. 135. Their bigger-than-life versions, each a beautiful winged youth holding an object related to the Passion of Jesus, have loftily presided there from widely spaced parapets since 1672.
Like many of his projects, this one, a papal commission to restore the old bridge, was far too big for any one man to complete, and Bernini, then approaching 70, delegated eight of the angel sculptures to other artists who would follow designs he developed in clay models and drawings. For the two he would carve himself, he produced numerous variations in clay, and those here are striking for the impression of controlled spontaneity they convey.
The clay itself, visibly imprinted by Bernini’s fingers and variously worked with sculpturing tools, seems as alive as the figures it embodies. In this sense they seem distinctly modern in a way that Bernini’s marble works do not. They call to mind sculptures from two centuries later by artists like Rodin, Degas and Medardo Rosso.
Some of the terra-cotta pieces are more fully worked, and several of those are showstoppers. The most impressive is a half-size lion standing with shoulders hunched, legs splayed and head lowered, as if to drink from a stream. Though the lion is posed in a moment of stillness, you sense in the beast’s bony and sinewy anatomy a terrific potential for action. In his final marbleized form he appears emerging from a cave to lap the waters of the Fountain of the Four Rivers (1649-51) in the Piazza Navona in Rome.
Another masterpiece is “Model for the Fountain of the Moor” (1653), which represents a muscular fellow with windblown hair surfing an ocean wave on a giant conch shell. His arms are unfortunately broken off, but his athletic wildness is undiminished.
On a spiritually higher plane, there is the 1672 model for “The Blessed Ludovica Albertoni” (1672-74). This dying nun half-reclines in her rumpled habit on a chaise, head thrown back, eyes closed and a hand to her right breast. We gather she is experiencing ultimate, ecstatic union with the divine, though a profane-minded viewer might be distracted by an underlying erotic tenor.
- OCT. 4, 2012
*
Bernini: Sculpting in Clay at the Metropolitan Museum of Art - lion for the Fountain of the Four Rivers
Credit Librado Romero/The New York Times
Marble yielded like butter in the hands of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the greatest sculptor of 17th-century Europe. As if responding to a sorcerer’s spells, stone became flesh, cloth, fur and the bark and leaves of trees. In works like “Apollo and Daphne” (1622-25) and “The Ecstasy of St. Teresa” (1645-52), superhumanly beautiful gods, angels and humans seem animated from within by a relentlessly striving life force. Everything is in flux, moving swiftly and sometimes violently. Bodies struggle, twisting and turning in different directions. Almost always there seems to be wind blowing hair and beards and causing robes and drapery to undulate in choppy waves.
How, pragmatically speaking, did Bernini (1598-1680) work his magic? That is the question explored by “Bernini: Sculpting in Clay,” an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art focusing on that primordial, infinitely plastic material out of which much, if not all, he produced emerged.
The exhibition was organized by Ian Wardropper, director of the Frick Collection; Anthony Sigel, a Harvard Art Museums conservator; and C. D. Dickerson III, curator of European art at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Along with Paola D’Agostino, a senior research associate at the Met, these experts examined all works in clay believed to be by Bernini and determined that 52 were authentic. Thirty-nine of them are on view here, along with related, sketchy drawings.
*
"The Blessed Ludovica Albertoni,” a clay model in the Met’s Bernini show.
CreditLibrado Romero/The New York Times
So this is an important exhibition, insofar as it establishes a scholarly baseline for the study of Bernini terra-cotta work. It is not a blockbuster of a show, however.
Most of the works are small, roughly and quickly made pieces known as bozettos, in which Bernini worked out compositions and gestures of individual figures he planned to make without worrying over details. But while not spectacular, they are wonderfully deft and will be a revelation for viewers unfamiliar with Bernini’s working methods.
In the exhibition a series of 10 approximately 12-inch-tall clay angels is displayed on two rows of pedestals mimicking those of the Ponte Sant’Angelo, the ancient Roman bridge built around A.D. 135. Their bigger-than-life versions, each a beautiful winged youth holding an object related to the Passion of Jesus, have loftily presided there from widely spaced parapets since 1672.
Like many of his projects, this one, a papal commission to restore the old bridge, was far too big for any one man to complete, and Bernini, then approaching 70, delegated eight of the angel sculptures to other artists who would follow designs he developed in clay models and drawings. For the two he would carve himself, he produced numerous variations in clay, and those here are striking for the impression of controlled spontaneity they convey.
*
Bernini's model of an angel and a cherub. Credit Librado Romero - The New York TimesThe clay itself, visibly imprinted by Bernini’s fingers and variously worked with sculpturing tools, seems as alive as the figures it embodies. In this sense they seem distinctly modern in a way that Bernini’s marble works do not. They call to mind sculptures from two centuries later by artists like Rodin, Degas and Medardo Rosso.
Some of the terra-cotta pieces are more fully worked, and several of those are showstoppers. The most impressive is a half-size lion standing with shoulders hunched, legs splayed and head lowered, as if to drink from a stream. Though the lion is posed in a moment of stillness, you sense in the beast’s bony and sinewy anatomy a terrific potential for action. In his final marbleized form he appears emerging from a cave to lap the waters of the Fountain of the Four Rivers (1649-51) in the Piazza Navona in Rome.
Another masterpiece is “Model for the Fountain of the Moor” (1653), which represents a muscular fellow with windblown hair surfing an ocean wave on a giant conch shell. His arms are unfortunately broken off, but his athletic wildness is undiminished.
On a spiritually higher plane, there is the 1672 model for “The Blessed Ludovica Albertoni” (1672-74). This dying nun half-reclines in her rumpled habit on a chaise, head thrown back, eyes closed and a hand to her right breast. We gather she is experiencing ultimate, ecstatic union with the divine, though a profane-minded viewer might be distracted by an underlying erotic tenor.
*
Bernini's athletic (though armless) figure for the Fountain of the Moor.
CreditLibrado Romero/The New York Times
Considering how well suited clay was to the sense of animation Bernini sought, you might wonder why only 52 of his terra-cotta works are known. In his fascinating catalog essay the art historian Tomaso Montanari supposes that Bernini most likely made several thousand clay models over the course of his nearly 70-year career. (What a loss for today’s art market!) One reason so few have survived is that Bernini himself was uninterested in small sculpture.
His ambitions were entirely directed to the kind of awe-inspiring fusions of art and architecture that his great predecessor Michelangelo created. Bernini was famous in his time for his modeling skill — he sometimes gave demonstrations for courtly entertainment — but he never produced anything in clay as a finished work and seems to have regarded his clay models as little more than rough drafts.
The taste of his time was another factor. There was a fad for small, finely worked bronzes to decorate scholarly studies, but Bernini’s rough sketches did not fit that template. So no one thought to save and preserve them. Later, things began to change. Partly because Bernini had become the object of a personality cult and partly because of a rising appreciation for the putatively soulful authenticity of the spontaneous sketch, a few collectors did save some of Bernini’s clay models.
What remains, nevertheless, is deeply telling, not only about Bernini but also about modernity in general. The visual dynamism that he sought in clay and marble is of the essence in Baroque sculpture and in paintings by Caravaggio and Rubens, among others. More than just a style, though, it manifests a new kind of worldview, an immense leap from the static cosmos of the medieval mind to a new universe of constant change.
It is almost too perfect metaphorically that among Bernini’s greatest achievements was the design of several extravagantly theatrical fountains around Rome. He was all about turbulence and flow, and so in our own electrified age are we.
“Bernini: Sculpting in Clay” runs through Jan. 6 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.
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Bernini, the Man of Many Heads
By HOLLAND COTTER
AUG. 7, 2008
LOS ANGELES
By HOLLAND COTTER
AUG. 7, 2008
LOS ANGELES
Whoosh! You can practically hear the sound of satin flung over papal shoulders and the rustle and creak of silk against silk brocade in “Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture” at the J. Paul Getty Museum here.
You may imagine other sounds, too — murmurs, commands, sick-bed sighs and a single, startled intake of breath — as you walk past the 28 bronze and marble busts in this exhibition, which has to be one of the outstanding displays of 17th-century European sculpture in the United States in recent decades.
As the largest show yet of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s portraits, it couldn’t be otherwise. Just look at the guest list: Scipione Borghese has come from Rome, Costanza Bonarelli from the Bargello in Florence, Cardinal Richelieu from the Louvre and Thomas Baker, he of the Steven Tyler mop, from the Victoria and Albert in London.
These people almost never travel, yet here they are in Los Angeles, cleanly installed and plexi-free, thanks in part to some upper-level deal cutting. (The Getty returned 40 works from its collection to Italy last year and was given the green light on the Italian loans in return.)
Although there are works in the show by artists other than Bernini, he is at its center just as he was at the center of the art we call Italian Baroque, a period style defined by virtuosic naturalism, kinetic emotionalism and high-flying formal glamour. It was an aesthetic of large personalities, and Bernini had one.
In fact he had it all: not just talent, ego and energy, but also brains (unhampered by troubling introspection), looks (evident in two 20-something self portraits, one painted, one drawn, in the show) and a careerist’s savvy that seldom let him down.
Born in 1598 and raised in Rome, he turned out preposterously sophisticated work when barely into his teens and continued to produce at peak form until his death in 1680. He adhered to the Renaissance model of the artist as polymath. In addition to being a sculptor, painter and draftsman, he had a major career as an architect; was a poet, playwright and stage designer; and still found time for a scandalous love life.
Like other successful artists of his day he was both a master and a servant, a celebrity and a functionary. He could be innovative to the point of sacrilege — one thinks of his orgasmic St. Teresa, or the crazed immensity of the baldacchino over the tomb of St. Peter in the Vatican — yet his invention was almost always at the service of a conservative political and religious elite. He pushed the spiritual potential of art in radical directions but was a propagandist for hire to the Church Triumphant.
A blend of novelty and caution marks many of the portrait busts by him in the Getty show, which was organized with the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Almost all of his sitters were tied, through election or blood, to the ecclesiastical bureaucracy in Rome. One of his earliest commissions, from 1621, was for matched bronze portraits of two successive popes, Paul V, who had recently died, and Gregory XV, who had succeeded him.
The portraits are alike in being dense and compact, doing nothing special with sculptural space. Paul V, bullet-headed and blandly benign, seems locked in his mountainous cape. He is a monument. Gregory feels more alive. Aged and ill — he would be dead in two years — he leans forward within his armorlike vestments. His lips are parted as if hanging slack or caught in mid-utterance, an effect that Bernini would repeat, to dynamic effect, many times.
A portrait bust of Costanza Bonarelli.CreditMonica Almeida/The New York Times
The naturalism that animates this sculpture is more pronounced in Bernini’s portraits in marble. A glance at them will tell you how much he loved this material, which he approached as a plastic, malleable substance, like wet clay or raw dough.
In his best marble portraits, every inch of the surface has been touched and touched again: chiseled and smoothed, tapped, scraped and brushed. Every facial feature sings, every fall of cloth is a luscious little aria. Each detail — the freshly shaved cheek, rolls of flesh under eyes, moisture gathered at the corners of lips — adds to the vivacious ensemble
This illusion of vivacity is remarkable given that, as often as not, Bernini lacked a live model to work from. A number of portraits were executed after — sometimes years after — the subject had died. Features had to be based on portraits or death masks, or on verbal descriptions. Yet the goal was always the same: to give an abstract, dimming memory the immediacy of life.
Certain subjects were very much alive but unavailable. Charles I of England ordered a portrait sculpture from Bernini and sent a painting of himself to Rome to serve as a model. The picture, which is in the Getty show, was custom made for the job: a triple portrait of the king seen face-on, in three-quarters view and in profile.
It was also painted by no less an artist than Anthony van Dyck. And its image of Charles as Trinitarian dandy wearing three silk outfits and a pearl-drop earring is a fabulous thing in itself. It is all that survives of the commission. Although Bernini shipped the requested bust to England, it was lost in a fire there.
Anyway, long-distance portraiture wasn’t his style. When possible he liked having his subjects in front of him, chattering, gesturing, carrying on, being whoever they were. The pleasure he took in on-the-spot observation shines through in chalk drawings as vivid as snapshots of unidentified but clearly unfancy sitters, each of whom received his close and loving attention.
Only one drawing seems to be a study for a sculptural portrait bust, but for a great one, the bust of Scipione Borghese, a cardinal with intimate links to the Vatican. A nephew of Paul V, he had given Bernini the nod for the 1621 papal bronzes, and to this commission he quickly added others, including a series of mythological and biblical tableaus — “Apollo and Daphne,” “David” — that caused a sensation.
If any of Bernini’s portraits can be said to convey affection, the one of Scipione does. Or maybe it’s just a sense of relaxation. He presents his old friend as he saw him — corpulent, loquacious, hat tipped back, lips pursed in a quip — but also as he envisioned him: the rock-solid source of stability he had been for a young artist making his way. And this blend of realism and idealism, of fleeting impressions and monumentality, instantly expanded the possibilities of sculptural portraiture.
The expansion is taken to an extreme in the bust of Costanza Bonarelli, done four years later, in 1636. The young woman was Bernini’s mistress at the time, and the likeness was a self-commission: Bernini kept it for private contemplation. If Scipione’s portrait is candid, this one is an exercise in psychological exposure, distilled in the look on the woman’s face: startled, feral, lips parted as if with a gasp.
Apparently she had cause to be on the alert. When Bernini suspected her of infidelity — the third party involved being his younger brother — he ordered a servant to slash her face.
But by the 1630s Bernini’s involvement with portraiture was sporadic. He had acquired an exacting new papal patron in Urban VIII and was deep into the decoration of St. Peter’s. In his absence other artists — Alessandro Algardi, Giuliano Finelli, François Duquesnoy — commandeered the portrait field. Examples of their work flesh out the show, which has been organized by Catherine Hess of the Getty, Andrea Bacchi of the University of Trento in Italy and Jennifer Montagu of the Warburg Institute, London. But Bernini himself has the final word.
The last gallery documents his apotheosis as artist to the rich and famous. His portrait of Richelieu is here, as are those of two additional popes and, in bronze replica, his bust of Louis XIV. And then there is Thomas Baker, a British nobody with a huckster’s mouth, a head of unruly hair and a ton of money. When he offered to pay Bernini more than Charles I had paid for a portrait, the artist agreed. And so it is with the sight of Baker’s blank eyes and absurd coiffure, and the clink of coins in the air, that we leave the Baroque portrait behind.
“Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture” remains at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles, through Oct. 26. It travels to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, from Nov. 28 to Mar. 8.
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The Woman Who Drove Bernini Mad
‘Bernini’s Beloved,’ by Sarah McPhee
By MAXWELL CARTERJULY 13, 2012
The early modernists didn’t look favorably on bust portraiture. A decade before shocking Paris with “Les Fleurs du Mal,” Charles Baudelaire enlivened his 1846 Salon review with the brisk polemic “Why Sculpture Is Boring.” In closing, he weighed the merits of contemporary but now forgotten portraitists, lauding one for “boldness” and “facility of modeling,” chiding the other for “meticulous sincerity” and “dryness.” Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini’s striking “Portrait of Costanza Piccolomini,” carved two centuries earlier, exemplifies the former qualities. “Bernini’s Beloved,” Sarah McPhee’s scrupulous biography of the statue’s sitter, more often exhibits the latter.
Costanza was born around 1614 into the Piccolomini clan, whose prominent forebears included Pope Pius II. While her line retained the nominal advantages of nobility, its material trappings were gone. Her father, an impecunious footman, left Costanza undowered and thus among those young women thought to be “at acute risk for prostitution.” Between the ages of 14 and 16, she was granted stipends from two religious confraternities, the conditions for which were local residence and rectitude. Costanza had been rescued “e faucibus daemonis” — “from the Devil’s jaws,” as the saying went.
Some two years later, she wed Matteo Bonucelli, who soon became an assistant to the “animator of marbles,” Bernini, the favorite of Pope Urban VIII, whose portrait he executed around this time. Though his onetime associate Francesco Borromini split with Bernini in 1633, the artist’s assistants were typically loyal and long-serving. Costanza’s husband proved no different. In the mid-1630s, when Matteo first came to work with Bernini at St. Peter’s, the couple settled near the Quirinal Hill, an area, McPhee explains, that was “thick with sculptors.”
With impressive clarity and detail, she catalogs the contents of the Bonucellis’ various homes, most notably their significant collection of art. But McPhee’s sources fail her at more crucial junctures. Costanza’s momentous affair with Bernini, which began around 1636, is rather lamely conceived: “If Bernini had failed to meet Costanza” when she was living elsewhere in the city, “he certainly met her now, and they soon began an affair. There is no record of how this took place.” McPhee skirts this and other inconvenient gaps, leaving the reader to question the challenging biographical enterprise she has assumed.
Costanza subsequently took up with Bernini’s younger brother Luigi, inflaming the sculptor with “homicidal rage.” He broke two of Luigi’s ribs with an iron rod and ordered his servant to slash Costanza’s face. Whereas Bernini’s connections spared him from punishment, Costanza was briefly interned in an institution for wayward women. Bernini married shortly thereafter, though he continued employing his cuckolded assistant until Matteo’s death in 1654.
Costanza’s inspiring widowhood commends her to posterity. She took charge of Matteo’s commissions and negotiated the sale of several important paintings, including Nicolas Poussin’s “Plague at Ashdod,” which now hangs in the Louvre. She died in 1662, providing handsomely for her 7-year-old daughter — and only child — Olimpia Caterina.
In the course of her study, McPhee cools previously overheated accounts of Costanza (“lips furious with passion, enchanting with voluptuous promises”) and provides an illuminating view of Baroque Rome. Gathering the most complete and accurate biographical data to date, she also underscores her chief difficulty — the dispersal, after Costanza’s death, of the historical evidence “among the pages of notarial documents in the Roman archives.”
However, for all McPhee’s diligence, dusty “notarial documents” don’t easily come to life. “Bernini’s Beloved” will profit scholars, though it may not delight the layman. Toward the close of her book, McPhee quotes the 17th-century poet Giambattista Marino’s “Anfione di Marmo”: “To animate stone / your chisel knows better than my lyre.” For those who have seen Bernini’s marble, if not perhaps for Baudelaire, the chisel’s indeed the thing.
BERNINI’S BELOVED
A Portrait of Costanza Piccolomini
By Sarah McPhee
Illustrated. 260 pp. Yale University Press. $45.
You may imagine other sounds, too — murmurs, commands, sick-bed sighs and a single, startled intake of breath — as you walk past the 28 bronze and marble busts in this exhibition, which has to be one of the outstanding displays of 17th-century European sculpture in the United States in recent decades.
As the largest show yet of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s portraits, it couldn’t be otherwise. Just look at the guest list: Scipione Borghese has come from Rome, Costanza Bonarelli from the Bargello in Florence, Cardinal Richelieu from the Louvre and Thomas Baker, he of the Steven Tyler mop, from the Victoria and Albert in London.
Although there are works in the show by artists other than Bernini, he is at its center just as he was at the center of the art we call Italian Baroque, a period style defined by virtuosic naturalism, kinetic emotionalism and high-flying formal glamour. It was an aesthetic of large personalities, and Bernini had one.
In fact he had it all: not just talent, ego and energy, but also brains (unhampered by troubling introspection), looks (evident in two 20-something self portraits, one painted, one drawn, in the show) and a careerist’s savvy that seldom let him down.
Like other successful artists of his day he was both a master and a servant, a celebrity and a functionary. He could be innovative to the point of sacrilege — one thinks of his orgasmic St. Teresa, or the crazed immensity of the baldacchino over the tomb of St. Peter in the Vatican — yet his invention was almost always at the service of a conservative political and religious elite. He pushed the spiritual potential of art in radical directions but was a propagandist for hire to the Church Triumphant.
A blend of novelty and caution marks many of the portrait busts by him in the Getty show, which was organized with the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Almost all of his sitters were tied, through election or blood, to the ecclesiastical bureaucracy in Rome. One of his earliest commissions, from 1621, was for matched bronze portraits of two successive popes, Paul V, who had recently died, and Gregory XV, who had succeeded him.
The portraits are alike in being dense and compact, doing nothing special with sculptural space. Paul V, bullet-headed and blandly benign, seems locked in his mountainous cape. He is a monument. Gregory feels more alive. Aged and ill — he would be dead in two years — he leans forward within his armorlike vestments. His lips are parted as if hanging slack or caught in mid-utterance, an effect that Bernini would repeat, to dynamic effect, many times.
The naturalism that animates this sculpture is more pronounced in Bernini’s portraits in marble. A glance at them will tell you how much he loved this material, which he approached as a plastic, malleable substance, like wet clay or raw dough.
In his best marble portraits, every inch of the surface has been touched and touched again: chiseled and smoothed, tapped, scraped and brushed. Every facial feature sings, every fall of cloth is a luscious little aria. Each detail — the freshly shaved cheek, rolls of flesh under eyes, moisture gathered at the corners of lips — adds to the vivacious ensemble
This illusion of vivacity is remarkable given that, as often as not, Bernini lacked a live model to work from. A number of portraits were executed after — sometimes years after — the subject had died. Features had to be based on portraits or death masks, or on verbal descriptions. Yet the goal was always the same: to give an abstract, dimming memory the immediacy of life.
Certain subjects were very much alive but unavailable. Charles I of England ordered a portrait sculpture from Bernini and sent a painting of himself to Rome to serve as a model. The picture, which is in the Getty show, was custom made for the job: a triple portrait of the king seen face-on, in three-quarters view and in profile.
It was also painted by no less an artist than Anthony van Dyck. And its image of Charles as Trinitarian dandy wearing three silk outfits and a pearl-drop earring is a fabulous thing in itself. It is all that survives of the commission. Although Bernini shipped the requested bust to England, it was lost in a fire there.
Anyway, long-distance portraiture wasn’t his style. When possible he liked having his subjects in front of him, chattering, gesturing, carrying on, being whoever they were. The pleasure he took in on-the-spot observation shines through in chalk drawings as vivid as snapshots of unidentified but clearly unfancy sitters, each of whom received his close and loving attention.
Only one drawing seems to be a study for a sculptural portrait bust, but for a great one, the bust of Scipione Borghese, a cardinal with intimate links to the Vatican. A nephew of Paul V, he had given Bernini the nod for the 1621 papal bronzes, and to this commission he quickly added others, including a series of mythological and biblical tableaus — “Apollo and Daphne,” “David” — that caused a sensation.
If any of Bernini’s portraits can be said to convey affection, the one of Scipione does. Or maybe it’s just a sense of relaxation. He presents his old friend as he saw him — corpulent, loquacious, hat tipped back, lips pursed in a quip — but also as he envisioned him: the rock-solid source of stability he had been for a young artist making his way. And this blend of realism and idealism, of fleeting impressions and monumentality, instantly expanded the possibilities of sculptural portraiture.
The expansion is taken to an extreme in the bust of Costanza Bonarelli, done four years later, in 1636. The young woman was Bernini’s mistress at the time, and the likeness was a self-commission: Bernini kept it for private contemplation. If Scipione’s portrait is candid, this one is an exercise in psychological exposure, distilled in the look on the woman’s face: startled, feral, lips parted as if with a gasp.
Apparently she had cause to be on the alert. When Bernini suspected her of infidelity — the third party involved being his younger brother — he ordered a servant to slash her face.
But by the 1630s Bernini’s involvement with portraiture was sporadic. He had acquired an exacting new papal patron in Urban VIII and was deep into the decoration of St. Peter’s. In his absence other artists — Alessandro Algardi, Giuliano Finelli, François Duquesnoy — commandeered the portrait field. Examples of their work flesh out the show, which has been organized by Catherine Hess of the Getty, Andrea Bacchi of the University of Trento in Italy and Jennifer Montagu of the Warburg Institute, London. But Bernini himself has the final word.
The last gallery documents his apotheosis as artist to the rich and famous. His portrait of Richelieu is here, as are those of two additional popes and, in bronze replica, his bust of Louis XIV. And then there is Thomas Baker, a British nobody with a huckster’s mouth, a head of unruly hair and a ton of money. When he offered to pay Bernini more than Charles I had paid for a portrait, the artist agreed. And so it is with the sight of Baker’s blank eyes and absurd coiffure, and the clink of coins in the air, that we leave the Baroque portrait behind.
“Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture” remains at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles, through Oct. 26. It travels to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, from Nov. 28 to Mar. 8.
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‘Bernini’s Beloved,’ by Sarah McPhee
By MAXWELL CARTERJULY 13, 2012
The early modernists didn’t look favorably on bust portraiture. A decade before shocking Paris with “Les Fleurs du Mal,” Charles Baudelaire enlivened his 1846 Salon review with the brisk polemic “Why Sculpture Is Boring.” In closing, he weighed the merits of contemporary but now forgotten portraitists, lauding one for “boldness” and “facility of modeling,” chiding the other for “meticulous sincerity” and “dryness.” Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini’s striking “Portrait of Costanza Piccolomini,” carved two centuries earlier, exemplifies the former qualities. “Bernini’s Beloved,” Sarah McPhee’s scrupulous biography of the statue’s sitter, more often exhibits the latter.
Costanza was born around 1614 into the Piccolomini clan, whose prominent forebears included Pope Pius II. While her line retained the nominal advantages of nobility, its material trappings were gone. Her father, an impecunious footman, left Costanza undowered and thus among those young women thought to be “at acute risk for prostitution.” Between the ages of 14 and 16, she was granted stipends from two religious confraternities, the conditions for which were local residence and rectitude. Costanza had been rescued “e faucibus daemonis” — “from the Devil’s jaws,” as the saying went.
Some two years later, she wed Matteo Bonucelli, who soon became an assistant to the “animator of marbles,” Bernini, the favorite of Pope Urban VIII, whose portrait he executed around this time. Though his onetime associate Francesco Borromini split with Bernini in 1633, the artist’s assistants were typically loyal and long-serving. Costanza’s husband proved no different. In the mid-1630s, when Matteo first came to work with Bernini at St. Peter’s, the couple settled near the Quirinal Hill, an area, McPhee explains, that was “thick with sculptors.”
With impressive clarity and detail, she catalogs the contents of the Bonucellis’ various homes, most notably their significant collection of art. But McPhee’s sources fail her at more crucial junctures. Costanza’s momentous affair with Bernini, which began around 1636, is rather lamely conceived: “If Bernini had failed to meet Costanza” when she was living elsewhere in the city, “he certainly met her now, and they soon began an affair. There is no record of how this took place.” McPhee skirts this and other inconvenient gaps, leaving the reader to question the challenging biographical enterprise she has assumed.
Costanza subsequently took up with Bernini’s younger brother Luigi, inflaming the sculptor with “homicidal rage.” He broke two of Luigi’s ribs with an iron rod and ordered his servant to slash Costanza’s face. Whereas Bernini’s connections spared him from punishment, Costanza was briefly interned in an institution for wayward women. Bernini married shortly thereafter, though he continued employing his cuckolded assistant until Matteo’s death in 1654.
Costanza’s inspiring widowhood commends her to posterity. She took charge of Matteo’s commissions and negotiated the sale of several important paintings, including Nicolas Poussin’s “Plague at Ashdod,” which now hangs in the Louvre. She died in 1662, providing handsomely for her 7-year-old daughter — and only child — Olimpia Caterina.
In the course of her study, McPhee cools previously overheated accounts of Costanza (“lips furious with passion, enchanting with voluptuous promises”) and provides an illuminating view of Baroque Rome. Gathering the most complete and accurate biographical data to date, she also underscores her chief difficulty — the dispersal, after Costanza’s death, of the historical evidence “among the pages of notarial documents in the Roman archives.”
However, for all McPhee’s diligence, dusty “notarial documents” don’t easily come to life. “Bernini’s Beloved” will profit scholars, though it may not delight the layman. Toward the close of her book, McPhee quotes the 17th-century poet Giambattista Marino’s “Anfione di Marmo”: “To animate stone / your chisel knows better than my lyre.” For those who have seen Bernini’s marble, if not perhaps for Baudelaire, the chisel’s indeed the thing.
BERNINI’S BELOVED
A Portrait of Costanza Piccolomini
By Sarah McPhee
Illustrated. 260 pp. Yale University Press. $45.