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| Biography: Gian Lorenzo Bernini |
The Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) almost singlehandedly created high baroque sculpture. His work in architecture, although more conservative, ranks him among the three or four major architects of the 17th century.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini was born in Naples on Dec. 7, 1598. His mother was Neapolitan. He was trained as a sculptor by his father, Pietro, who came from Florence. But Bernini was Roman: he was brought to Rome as a child; he remained there almost all his life; and he absorbed completely Rome's dual heritage of empire and papacy.
Not long after Pietro Bernini moved from Naples to Rome, he began work on the sculpture of the Pauline Chapel, the enormous addition to S. Maria Maggiore built for the reigning pope, Paul V. This commission gave the elder Bernini an opportunity to introduce his son, who was a child prodigy, to the Pope and the Pope's favorite nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese. The cardinal, a man of vast wealth with a real passion for art, was to become Bernini's first important patron.
In his youth Bernini made the customary studies of the work of Raphael and Michelangelo. But Hellenistic sculpture and Roman sculpture in the Hellenistic tradition were to influence his development far more, and it was largely from these ancient sources that he drew the powerfully dynamic and fluid style that was to characterize his mature work. Contemporary painting as well, by Caravaggio, the Carracci, and Guido Reni, was to play a role in his stylistic formation.
Under the rule of the Barberini pope, Urban VIII (1623-1644), Bernini dominated the artistic scene in Rome. His commissions were so large that he had to draw into his studio most of the sculptors then working in Rome. From this time on, Bernini's bigger works were usually executed by assistants, working from his designs and under his close supervision.
With Urban's successor, Innocent X, Bernini's fortunes changed. Finding the papal treasury empty and the purses of his predecessor's family filled beyond their wildest dreams, the new pope drove the Barberini from Rome and rejected everyone, Bernini included, who had belonged to their circle. At the same time sculptors and architects who had been envious of Bernini's fabulous success rushed to attack him on trumped-up charges that the lofty bell tower Bernini had erected on the facade of St. Peter's was pulled down. But Bernini's trials were short-lived. He was soon back in favor, hard at work for Innocent X, who had found it impossible to find another artist with half Bernini's talent. For the rest of his life each succeeding pope sought his services.
During Bernini's later years the spiritual content of his art deepened. Under the guidance of his close friend and religious counselor Father Gian Paolo Oliva, the head of the Jesuit order, he made intensive studies of the writings of St. Ignatius of Loyola and carried out the spiritual exercises the saint prescribed. He attended mass daily.
In 1665, when he was an old man, Bernini was called to France. The idea was to have the world's most famous artist, Bernini, serve the world's most powerful monarch, Louis XIV. The architect was to build a royal palace, a new and grander Louvre, for the King. Bernini's trip from Rome to Paris was like the triumphal procession of a great lord. But less than 6 months after he arrived, he was ready to go home, disillusioned by court intrigue and his lack of sympathy for almost anything French. (In Paris he considered himself surrounded by cultural barbarians.) His designs for the Louvre were never carried out.
Back in Rome, Bernini's creative imagination remained undiminished even into old age, though as his strength failed him he depended more and more on assistants to carry out his designs. He died in Rome on Nov. 28, 1680.
Sculptural Style
Of Bernini's early work for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the most spectacular is the life-size marble group Apollo and Daphne (1622-1624). Bernini was totally baroque in his choice of the monument of maximum drama: a split second of climax in the midst of movement and change. The story, told by Ovid, is that Cupid's arrows inflamed Apollo with love for the wood nymph Daphne, who was predestined to reject the love of all men. She fled with Apollo in pursuit, and at the moment he was about to overtake her she was transformed into a laurel tree. In Bernini's sculpture the metamorphosis is happening before our eyes. As Apollo reaches out to touch her side, Daphne leaps into the air. Branches filled with leaves sprout from her fingers, roots from her toes, bark from her thigh. Nothing like it had ever been done in sculpture before. The whole group, including the many fragile leaves on slender stems, was carved from one block of marble. From this single block Bernini created the wide range of textures with which he convincingly differentiated earth, bark, skin, cloth, leaves, and hair.
For Pope Urban VIII Bernini created the Triton Fountain (1642-1643) in the square where the Barberini had their palace. Its design is sheer fantasy. Four sinuous dolphins turn up their tails to support a giant two-sided sea-shell on which is seated a triton blowing a conch. Though the fountain is architectural in scale, it remains sculptural in concept. Throughout the whole mass there is not a straight line or a right angle. There is no division between the parts that are organic and those that are inorganic: all are equally undulant, equally alive. Water is an integral part of the composition. Rising in a great jet that spurts up from the triton's conch, it splashes down into the basins formed by the double shell and, spilling over the edges, falls into the surrounding pool. In all Bernini's fountains the movement of the water increases the sense of movement inherent in the sculpture. It contributes a still further dimension with its sound: water falling, splashing, breaking, dripping, and gurgling as it drains away. Bernini created the baroque fountain. It was one of his most brilliant achievements. His examples inspired a host of imitations throughout Rome and all of Europe.
During the reign of Innocent X, when Bernini was temporarily in disgrace, he created the Cornaro Chapel in the small Roman church of S. Maria della Vittoria (1644-1655). The central group in the chapel depicts the mystical vision of St. Theresa. The saint herself described how once, when she floated on air in ecstatic rapture, an angel appeared before her and plunged the golden arrow of Divine Love repeatedly into her heart.
In Bernini's concept of the vision, the saint and the angel, both of white marble, seem to float in a niche above the altar. They are bathed in divine light in the form of gilded rays from above but also by natural daylight that comes mysteriously and without explanation from a hidden window. The scene is set within a complex architectural niche that bows outward as if impelled by the force of the miraculous vision. The ceiling of the chapel is painted to give the illusion that part of the roof has melted away. Into the open space overhead floats a vision of heaven with angels on cloud banks who circle round the dove of the Holy Ghost. Below, along the side walls of the chapel, there are marble reliefs representing members of the Cornaro family, who kneel in prayer. Bernini's statue of St. Theresa, at the center of the chapel, is the most famous representation of ecstasy in art. The swooning saint sustained on a cloud appears in a void, removed from direct contact with earthly things. Overcome by her vision, she lies limp, head fallen back, eyes closed, arms and legs dangling. In sharp contrast, the violent agitation of her garments serves to reveal the agitation of her soul.
The high baroque portrait, which Bernini invented, is exemplified in the bust of Francesco d'Este (1650-1651). Always the mood is momentary, here conveyed by the sharply turned head and focused eyes. Often the lips are slightly parted, as if the sitter were about to speak. Elements surrounding the face serve to indicate social position. Here the magnificent wig with its cascade of curls sets up patterns of light and shadow, while the great, deeply cut drapery whose billowing folds engulf the torso makes the sitter appear larger than life.
The large marble Angel with Crown of Thorns that Bernini carved in the years 1667-1669 shows his late style. The statue was conceived as part of a large group of figures, each holding a symbol of the Passion of Christ. The angel's face is pained, but in these late works it is the drapery that becomes the major vehicle for the emotions. No longer is there any interest, as there was with the Apollo and Daphne, in realistic textures. Instead, the robe is transformed into a series of thin ridges whose sharp, insistent rhythms lick around the body like flames. The expressive intensity of works such as this reflects Bernini's own deepening mysticism at the end of his life.
Architectural Works
As an architect, Bernini was less radical than as a sculptor and more concerned with the monumental heritage of imperial Rome. For the plan of S. Andrea al Quirinale in Rome (1658-1670) he went back to the Pantheon with its alternating chapels that ring a circular dome. But Bernini changed the circular plan to an oval one to make the space more active, and he added an enclosed area for the high altar where the light pours down from a window. The interior is inlaid with the richest colored marbles and is accented with architectural ornament of such refinement that the effect is often compared to a jewel box.
Bernini's crowning achievement in architecture was St. Peter's Square in Rome (1656-1667). The section nearest the church is a trapezoid, but the main part of the square is an enormous oval partially enclosed by two semicircular colonnades. The square provides a monumental entrance to St. Peter's and a place where crowds, up to half a million at a time, gather to receive the pope's blessing. Bernini is known to have visualized the square symbolically as arms reaching out to embrace a multitude of the faithful. Architecturally the idea of freestanding colonnades that contain the space of a circular square was Bernini's invention, but the inspiration went back to imperial Rome. Apart from the row of statues on the balustrade, Bernini's square has little ornament. The travertine columns are severely simple, unfluted Tuscan Doric. Individually they speak softly, but when hundreds are massed together the effect is amplified, like waves of the sea.
Universal Man
Bernini is the last of the so-called universal men in the world of art. Primarily a sculptor, the greatest since Michelangelo, he was also one of the great architects of the age. He was once widely famed as a painter, though few of his canvases can be identified today. He also created designs for an endless series of temporary objects - funeral decorations, processional chariots, intricate torches, portable thrones - all the paraphernalia of pageantry so dear to the hearts of the baroque age.
Bernini won fabulous acclaim for his theater spectaculars. He wrote plays and staged those by others in the vast theater of the Barberini Palace. For these he invented stage machinery to produce effects that amazed his audiences: rising platforms filled with people, sheets of water that seemed about to flood the theater, flames that seemed about to destroy it. John Evelyn, an Englishman in Rome in 1644, wrote in his diary: "Bernini … gave a public opera wherein he painted the scenes, cut the statues, invented the engines, composed the music, writ the comedy, and built the theatre."
Further Reading
The best book on Bernini's sculpture is Rudolf Wittkower, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the Sculptor of the Roman Baroque (1955; 2d ed. 1966). Wittkower's Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600-1750 (1958; rev. ed. 1965), includes a section on Bernini as an architect. Howard Hibbard, Bernini (1966), is a good, popular study based on Wittkower. A contemporary view of Bernini is Filippo Baldinucci, The Life of Bernini (1682; trans. 1966). For the 17th-century Italian and European background see David Ogg, Europe in the Seventeenth Century (1925; 8th ed. 1961), and Carl J. Friedrich, The Age of the Baroque, 1610-1660 (1952).
Additional Sources
Bernini in perspective, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976.
Borsi, Franco, Bernini, New York: Rizzoli, 1984, 1980.
Scribner, Charles, Gianlorenzo Bernini, New York: H.N. Abrams, Publishers, 1991.
| Architecture and Landscaping: Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini |
Sculptor, architect, painter, and poet, who made an outstanding contribution to the evolution of
Bernini was a master of the theatrical, as his sensational Cornaro Chapel in the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome (1645–52), demonstrates. In the Ecstasy of St Teresa, a smiling angel thrusts its spear into the bosom of the swooning Saint, carried aloft in clouds, illuminated by gilded-rod sunbursts and concealed lighting, and placed within an aedicule above the altar. The whole vision is viewed by members of the Cornaro family, as though in theatre-boxes: it is a stunning, unforgettable, and magical creation (though deeply disturbing to puritanical dispositions). He also used theatrical techniques of false perspective, concealed lighting, and optical devices at the Scala Regia, Vatican Palace (1663–6), to emphasize the illusion of great length and size.
He designed the Four Rivers Fountain (1648–51) in the Piazza Navona, Rome (a powerful
As an architect, Bernini was also outstanding. His finest church is Sant'Andrea al Quirinale (1658–70), an ellipse with the highaltar set on the short axis, and a series of
In secular architecture he was equally influential. His Palazzo Chigi (later Odescalchi) of 1664–6, which has a centrepiece of eight
Bibliography
The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)
| Spotlight: Gian Lorenzo Bernini |
From our Archives: Today's Highlights, December 7, 2005
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini |
In 1629, Bernini was appointed architect of St. Peter's. He designed the ornate baldachin under the dome, the Cathedra Petri (the monument enshrining St. Peter's chair), and the exuberant marble decorations of the chapels and nave. During the 1640s he designed the Cornaro Chapel as well as that of Santa Maria della Vittoria. From 1656 onward he worked on the great elliptical piazza and the vast, embracing arms of the colonnades in front of the church.
During Innocent's papacy Bernini frequently worked for private patrons. He was commissioned to do the fountains in the Piazza Navona (1648-51). For St. Peter's Church, he created the Scala Regia and the heroic equestrian statue of Constantine (1654-70). He was assisted by a host of sculptors in these vast enterprises. Between 1658 and 1670 Bernini designed three churches: San Tomaso di Villanova at Castelgandolfo, Santa Maria dell'Assunzione at Ariccia, and Sant' Andrea al Quirinale in Rome. He established a new mode, dynamically linking sculpture and architecture. In 1665, Louis XIV invited him to Paris to finish designing the Louvre, but Bernini's plans failed to win approval. Returning to Italy, he continued to work on St. Peter's.
Much of Bernini's sculpture combines white and colored marbles with bronze and stucco, most effectively used in Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome, where he represented the Ecstasy of St. Teresa. Often inspired by classical forms, Bernini transformed the marble block into a vital, almost breathing figure. A self-portrait drawn c.1665 (Royal Coll., Windsor) is an example of his superb draftsmanship. Bernini was known as a wit; he wrote comedies and made numerous caricatures. He produced several plays, all of which contained effective illusions. All of his important work is in Rome, with the exception of the Neptune and Triton (Victoria and Albert Mus.) and the bust of Louis XIV (Versailles).
Bibliography
See studies by H. Hibbard (1965), R. Wittkower (2d ed. 1966), J. Blazostock (1981), F. Borsi (1985), I. Lavin (1985), and T. A. Marder (1998).
| History 1450-1789: Gian Lorenzo Bernini |
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo (1598–1680), Italian sculptor, architect, and painter. Bernini's work in Rome made him the most influential and famous Italian artist of his time. Born in Naples on 7 December 1598, the son of a Florentine sculptor, Bernini was the first artist whose life and its retelling were coordinated to fashion an ideal image. All of the literary motifs that had come to signify identity as an artist are to be found not only in the reports of his contemporaries but also in his practice. As with Giotto (1266/7 or 1276–1337), his genius is apparent at an early age; like Michelangelo (1475–1564), he became the master of painting, sculpture, and architecture; as with Titian (1488/90–1576), his art earned him a knighthood (1621) and exacted the same deference from popes and kings. When Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–1689), reprising the role of Alexander the Great, visited Bernini in his studio, he greeted her in the coarse sculptor's smock he wore when working, and she, far from being affronted by this lèse-majesté, sought to touch it with her own hand.
His father's work at the church of Santa Maria Maggiore brought Bernini to Rome at the age of seven or eight, and with the exception of a five-month trip to Paris in 1665, where he did an unexecuted, but variously imitated, design for the Louvre, he remained in Rome all his life. From his father he acquired the technique that would make marble as yielding as wax; from Hellenistic sculpture, the example of optical surfaces and a way of composing figures on a stagelike plinth with one dominant point of view; and from modern painters like Caravaggio (1573–1610), Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), and Guido Reni (1575–1642), an affective naturalism and psychological immediacy that effaced the boundaries between subject and viewer, art and life. All of these traits are to be seen to such startling effect in the life-size sculptures Bernini executed for Cardinal Scipione Borghese that contemporary reports of his earlier precocity seem entirely plausible. In the Apollo and Daphne (1622–1625), the nymph's transformation into root and bark, twig and leaf is no less astonishing to us than to the unsuspecting god; and in the David (1623), the grimly determined young hero prepares to loose his missile at a giant Goliath looming over the viewer's shoulder. The inescapable realism and emotional intensity of these works also characterize certain of his portraits, like the bust of Scipione Borghese (1632) or that of the artist's mistress, Costanza Buonarelli (1637–1638), which in its informality and unmeditated spontaneity reconfigures for the viewer Bernini's own lively and passionate response to his sitter.
Beginning in the reign of Pope Urban VIII (reigned 1623–1644) these exercises of personal virtuosity were complemented by equally impressive displays of large-scale organizing in which Bernini engaged the energies and skills of many other artists and craftsmen to realize his ideas. Within a year of the pope's elevation, he was commissioned to erect a gilded bronze canopy, or baldachin, over the tomb of the saint in the then still largely undecorated church of St. Peter's. Commissions from Urban VIII and his successors for the decoration of the crossing and the nave, the tombs of Urban VIII and Alexander VII (reigned 1655–1667), the Sacrament Chapel, and the enormous apparition of Peter's throne in the apse of the church followed. Thus, with his designs for the angels holding the instruments of Christ's Passion on the bridge over the Tiber connecting the Vatican with the city and for the colonnades surmounted by saints fronting the church, visiting St. Peter's became, and remains, an experience largely shaped by Bernini's never surpassed exaltations of Catholic piety and papal authority.
Nevertheless, the originality and religious conviction of Bernini's art is perhaps more readily grasped in the Cornaro Chapel in church of Santa Maria della Vittoria (1647–1652). Here, as elsewhere, he harnesses all the arts to a single, over-whelming effect. The architecture, composed of multicolored marbles, breaks forward over the altar as if forced from within to disclose the white, marmoreal vision of Saint Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), mysteriously lit from a hidden window above. Swooning in an ecstasy of divine love, which, in keeping with the eroticized imagery of her Autobiography, has been provoked by an angel piercing her heart with a flame-tipped spear, Teresa reclines on a bank of clouds, wholly lost in her rapture. Yet the visual metaphor of her wildly cascading drapery belies the quietude of her dangling limbs, parted lips, and half-closed eyes and betrays the depth and violence of her passion. On the floor of the chapel, skeletons in inlaid marble rise toward the light of the Holy Spirit that miraculously bursts through the ceiling and descends in a painted glory of angels. Thus in one apparently transitory image, Bernini merges and illustrates as never before the typically baroque themes of love (physical and spiritual), death (real and mystical), and salvation (Teresa's and the viewer's).
Although many criticized the clothing of the spiritual in the sensual, the persuasive power that resulted made Bernini's works definitive examples for those who sought to move their audience for religious and political ends. At its most aggressive, this desire to compel assent appears in the comedies that from the 1640s the artist staged during the Carnival season before Lent. In these works a rush of strong emotion—astonishment, alarm, fear—bonded the audience to the fiction. In one, a great quantity of water broke through its dike and threatened to soak the spectators; in another, an accidental fire, kindled by the scripted carelessness of an actor, appeared to ignite the theater. Although ephemeral in effect, like his festive decorations and firework displays, a clear continuity exists between these theatrical devices and Bernini's permanent works of architecture, painting, and sculpture. In the Triton Fountain (1642–1643) and Four Rivers Fountain (1647–1651), the lack of architectural frames and the animation of sculpture and water enable them to take possession of the urban space, and in San Andrea al Quirinale (1658–1670) the figurative decorations are coextensive with and inhabit the space of the church. It was this ability to absorb the viewer into a spectacle that seemed to be unfolding before his eyes that made Bernini so influential during the early modern period.
Bibliography
Avery, Charles. Bernini: Genius of the Baroque. London, 1997.
Baldinucci, Filippo. The Life of Bernini. Translated by Catherine Enggass. University Park, Pa., and London, 1966. Translation of La vita del Cavaliere Gio. Lorenzo Bernino (1682).
Chantelou, Paul Fréart de. Diary of the Cavaliere Bernini's Visit to France. Edited and with an introduction by Anthony Blunt, annotated by George C. Bauer, and translated by Margery Corbett. Princeton, 1985. Translation of Journal du voyage en France du Cavalier Bernin (1665).
Lavin, Irving. Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts. New York and London, 1980.
Marder, Tod A. Bernini and the Art of Architecture. New York, 1998.
Wittkower, Rudolf. Bernini: The Sculptor of the Roman Baroque. 4th ed. London, 1990.
—GEORGE C. BAUER
| Wikipedia: Gian Lorenzo Bernini |
| Gian Lorenzo Bernini | |
|---|---|
 A self portrait: Bernini is said to have used his own features in his David |
|
| Born | December 7, 1598 Naples |
| Died | November 28, 1680 (aged 81) Rome |
| Occupation | sculptor, painter and architect |
Gian Lorenzo Bernini (also spelled Gianlorenzo or Giovanni Lorenzo; 7 December 1598 — 28 November 1680) was an Italian artist who worked principally in Rome. He was the leading sculptor of his age and also a prominent architect. In addition he painted, wrote plays, and designed metalwork and stage sets.
A student of Classical sculpture, Bernini possessed the unique ability to capture, in marble, the essence of a narrative moment with a dramatic naturalistic realism which was almost shocking. This ensured that he effectively became the successor of Michelangelo, far outshining other sculptors of his generation, including his rival, Alessandro Algardi. His talent extended beyond the confines of his sculpture to consideration of the setting in which it would be situated; his ability to be able to synthesise sculpture, painting and architecture into a coherent conceptual and visual whole has been termed by the art historian, Irving Lavin, the ‘unity of the visual arts’.[1] A deeply religious man, working in Counter Reformation Rome, Bernini used light as an important metaphorical device in the perception of his religious settings; often it was hidden light source that could intensify the focus of religious worship,[2] or enhance the dramatic moment of a sculptural narrative.
Bernini was also a leading figure in the emergence of Roman Baroque architecture along with his contemporaries, the architect, Francesco Borromini and the painter and architect, Pietro da Cortona. Early in their careers they had all worked at the same time at the Palazzo Barberini, initially under Carlo Maderno and on his death, under Bernini. Later on, however, they were in competition for commissions and fierce rivalries developed, particularly between Bernini and Borromini.[3] Despite the arguably greater architectural inventiveness of Borromini and Cortona, Bernini’s artistic pre-eminence, particularly during the reigns of popes Urban VIII (1623-44) and Alexander VII (1655-1665), meant he was able to secure the most important commission in Rome of the day, St. Peter's Basilica. His design of the Piazza San Pietro in front of the Basilica is one of his most innovative and successful architectural designs.
During his long career, Bernini received many important commissions, many associated with the papacy. At an early age, he came to the attention of the papal nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, and in 1621, at the age of only twenty three, he was knighted by Pope Gregory XV. Following his accession to the papacy, Urban VIII is reported to have said, "Your luck is great to see Cardinal Maffeo Barberini Pope, Cavaliere; but ours is much greater to have Cavalier Bernini alive in our pontificate". [4] Although he did not fare so well during the reign of Innocent X, under Alexander VII, he once again regained pre-eminent artistic domination and continued to be held in high regard by Clement IX.
Bernini and other artists fell from favour in later neoclassical criticism of the Baroque. It is only from the late nineteenth century that art historical scholarship, in seeking an understanding of artistic output in the cultural context in which it was produced, has come to recognise Bernini’s achievements and restore his artistic reputation.
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Bernini was born in Naples to a Mannerist sculptor, Pietro Bernini, originally from Florence. At the age of seven he accompanied his father to Rome, where his father was involved in several high profile projects.[5] There, as a boy, his skill was soon noticed by the painter Annibale Carracci and by Pope Paul V, and Bernini gained the patronage exclusively under Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the pope's nephew. His first works were inspired by antique Hellenistic sculpture.
Under the patronage of the Cardinal Borghese, young Bernini rapidly rose to prominence as a sculptor. Among the early works for the cardinal were decorative pieces for the garden such as "The Goat Amalthea with the Infant Zeus and a Faun", and several allegorical busts such as the "Damned Soul" and "Blessed Soul". By the age of twenty-two years, he completed the bust of Pope Paul V. Scipione's collection in situ at the Borghese gallery chronicles his secular sculptures, with a series of masterpieces:
Bernini's sculptural output was immense and varied. Among his other well-known sculptures: the "Ecstasy of St. Theresa", in the Cornaro Chapel (see Bernini's Cornaro chapel: the complete work of art found in the Baroque section), Santa Maria della Vittoria, and the now-hidden "Constantine", at the base of the Scala Regia (which he designed). He was given the commission for the tomb of the Barberini Pope in St Peters. He helped design the Ponte Sant'Angelo, sculpting two of the angels, soon replaced by copies by his own hand, while the others were made by his pupils based on his designs.
At the end of April 1665, at the height of his fame and powers, he travelled to Paris, where he remained until November; he met Paul Fréart de Chantelou who kept a Journal of Bernini's visit. [6] Bernini's international popularity was such that on his walks in Paris the streets were lined with admiring crowds. This trip, encouraged by Father Oliva, general of the Jesuits, was a response to the repeated requests for his works by King Louis XIV. Here Bernini presented some designs for the east front of the Louvre. which were ultimately rejected. He soon lost favor at the French court as he praised the art and architecture of Italy over that of France; he said that a painting by Guido Reni was worth more than all of Paris. The sole work remaining from his time in Paris is a bust of Louis XIV, which set the standard for royal portraiture for a century.
Bernini's architectural works include sacred and secular buildings and sometimes their urban settings and interiors.[7] He made adjustments to existing buildings and designed new constructions. Amongst his most well known works is the Piazza San Pietro (1656-67), the piazza and colonnades in front of St Peter's and the interior decoration of the Basilica. Amongst his secular works are a number of Roman palaces: following the death of Carlo Maderno, he took over the supervision of the building works at the Palazzo Barberini from 1630 on which he worked with Borromini); the Palazzo Ludovisi (now Palazzo Montecitorio)(started 1650); and the Palazzo Chigi (now Palazzo Chigi-Odescalchi) (started 1664).
His first architectural projects were the façade and refurbishment of the church of Santa Bibiana (1624-6) and the St. Peter's baldachin (1624-1633), the bronze columned canopy over the high altar of St. Peter's Basilica. In 1629, and before the Baldacchino was complete, Urban VIII put him in charge of all the ongoing architectural works at St Peter's. However, due to political reasons and miscalculations in his design of the bell-towers for St. Peter's, Bernini fell out of favor during the Pamphili papacy of Innocent X. [8] Never wholly without patronage, Bernini then regained a major role in the decoration of St. Peter's with the Pope Alexander VII Chigi, leading to his design of the piazza and colonnade in front of St. Peter's. Further significant works by Bernini at the Vatican include the Scala Regia, (1663-6) the monumental grand stairway entrance to the Vatican Palace and the Cathedra Petri, the Chair of Saint Peter, in the apse of St. Peter's.
Bernini did not build many churches from scratch, rather his efforts were concentrated on pre-existing structures, and in particular St. Peter's. He fulfilled three commissions for new churches; his stature allowed him the freedom to design the structure and decorate the interiors in a consistant manner. Best known is the small oval baroque church of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale, a work which Bernini's son, Domenico, reports his father was very pleased with. [9] Bernini also designed churches in Castelgandolfo (San Tommaso da Villanova, 1658-61) and Ariccia (Santa Maria Assunta, 1662-4).
When Bernini was invited to Paris in 1665 to make works for Louis XIV, he presented designs for the east facade of the Louvre Palace but his adventurous concave-convex façades were ultimately turned down in favour of the more stern and classic proposals of the French architect Claude Perrault, signalling the waning influence of Italian artistic hegemony in France. Perrault's final design did, however, include Bernini's feature of a flat roof behind a Palladian balustrade.
In 1639, Bernini bought property on the corner of the via Mercede and the via del Collegio di Propoganda Fide. On this site he built himself a palace, the Palazzo Bernini, at what are now Nos 11 and 12 via della Mercede. He lived at No. 11 but this was extensively changed in the nineteenth century. It has been noted how very galling it must have been for Bernini to witness through the windows of his dwelling, the construction of the tower and dome of Sant'Andrea delle Fratte by his rival, Borromini, and also the demolition of the chapel that he, Bernini, had designed at the Collegio di Propoganda Fide to see it replaced by Borromini's chapel. [10]
True to the decorative dynamism of Baroque, among Bernini's most gifted creations were his Roman fountains that were both public works and papal monuments. His fountains include the Fountain of the Triton or Fontana del Tritone and the Barberini Fountain of the Bees, the Fontana delle Api. [11] The Fountain of the Four Rivers or Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi in the Piazza Navona is a masterpiece of spectacle and political allegory. An oft-repeated, but false, anecdote tells that one of the Bernini's river gods defers his gaze in disapproval of the facade of Sant'Agnese in Agone (designed by the talented, but less politically successful, rival Francesco Borromini). However, the fountain was built several years before the façade of the church was completed.
Bernini was also the author of the statue of the Moor in La Fontana del Moro in Piazza Navona (1653).
Bernini also revolutionized marble busts, lending glamorous dynamism and animation to the stony stillness of portraiture. Starting with the immediate pose, leaning out of the frame, of bust of Monsignor Pedro de Foix Montoya at Santa Maria di Monserrato, Rome. The once-gregarious Cardinal Scipione Borghese, in his bust is frozen in conversation.
His most famous portrait is that of Costanza Bonarelli (c. 1637). It does not portray divinity or royalty, but a woman in a moment of disheveled privacy. Bernini had an affair with Costanza, who was the wife of one of Bernini's assistants. When Bernini suspected Costanza to be involved with his brother, he badly beat him and ordered a servant to slash her face with a razor. Pope Urban VIII intervened on his behalf and he was fined.[12]
Bernini also gained royal commissions from outside Italy, for subjects such as Louis XIV, Cardinal Richelieu, Francesco I d'Este, Charles I of England and Henrietta Maria. The last two were produced in Italy from portraits made by Van Dyck (now in the royal collection), though Bernini preferred to produce portraits from life - the bust of Charles was lost in the Whitehall Palace fire of 1698 and that of Henrietta Maria was not undertaken due to the outbreak of the English Civil War[13][14].
An exhibition co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, explores Bernini's portraits: Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture, August 5–October 26, 2008.
The Elephant and Obelisk, affectionately as Bernini's Chick by the Roman people, is located in the Piazza della Minerva and in front of the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Pope Alexander VII decided that he wanted an ancient Egyptian obelisk to be erected in the piazza and in 1665 he commissioned Bernini to create a sculpture to support the obelisk. The sculpture of an elephant bearing the obilisk on its back was created by one of Bernini's students,Ercole Ferrata and finished in 1667. An inscription on the base aligns the Egyptian goddess Isis and the Roman goddess Minerva with the Virgin Mary who the church is dedicated to. [15] A popular antecdote concerns the elephant's smile. To find out why it is smiling, the viewer must head around to the rear end of the animal and to see that its muscles are tensed and its tail is shifted to the left as if it were defecating. The animal's rear is pointed directly at the office of Father Domenico Paglia, a Dominican friar, who was one of the main antagonists of Bernini and his artist friends, as a final salute and last word.
Bernini worked along with Ercole Ferrata to create a much admired fountain for the Lisbon palace of the Portuguese nobleman, the Count of Ericeira. For the same patron he also created a series of paintings with the battles of Louis XIV as subject. These works were lost as the palace, its great library and the rich art collection of the Counts of Ericeira were destroyed along most of central Lisbon as a result of the great earthquake of 1755.
The death of his patron Urban VIII in 1644 and the election of the Pamphilj pope, Innocent X, initially marked a downturn in Bernini's career and released a series of opportunities for Bernini's rivals. However, within several years, Innocent reinstated him at St Peter's to work on the extended nave and commissioned the Four Rivers fountain in the Piazza Navona. At the time of Innocent's death in 1655, Bernini was the arbitrator of public artistic taste in Rome. His artistic ascendency continued under Alexander VII.
He died in Rome in 1680, and was buried in the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. Among the many who worked under his supervision were Luigi Bernini, Stefano Speranza, Giuliano Finelli, Andrea Bolgi, Filippo Parodi, Giacomo Antonio Fancelli, Lazzaro Morelli, Francesco Baratta, and Francois Duquesnoy. Among his rivals in architecture were Francesco Borromini and Pietro da Cortona; in sculpture, Alessandro Algardi.
Two years after his death, Queen Christina of Sweden, then living in Rome, commissioned Filippo Baldinucci to write his biography. [16]
Bernini's activity as a painter was a sideline which he did mainly in his youth. Despite this his work reveals a sure and brilliant hand, free from any trace of pedantry. He studied in Rome under his father, Pietro, and soon proved a precocious infant prodigy. His work was immediately sought after by major collectors.
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