Gian Lorenzo (or Gianlorenzo) Bernini (, ; ; Italian Giovanni Lorenzo; 7 December 1598 – 28 November 1680) was an Italian sculptor, architect, painter and city planner. Bernini's creative abilities and mastery in a range of artistic arenas define him as an uomo universale or Renaissance man. While a major figure in the world of architecture, he was more prominently the leading sculptor of his age, credited with creating the Baroque style of sculpture.
As one scholar has commented, "What Shakespeare is to drama, Bernini may be to sculpture: the first pan-European sculptor whose name is instantaneously identifiable with a particular manner and vision, and whose influence was inordinately powerful ..."Katherine Eustace, Editorial, Sculpture Journal, vol. 20, n. 2, 2011, p. 109. In addition, he was a painter (mostly small canvases in oil) and a man of the theatre: he wrote, directed and acted in plays (mostly Carnival satires), for which he designed stage sets and theatrical machinery. He produced designs as well for a wide variety of decorative art objects, including lamps, tables, mirrors, and even coaches.
As an architect and city planner, he designed secular buildings, churches, chapels, and public squares, as well as massive works combining both architecture and sculpture, especially elaborate public fountains and funerary monuments and a whole series of temporary structures (in stucco and wood) for funerals and festivals. His broad technical versatility, boundless compositional inventiveness and sheer skill in manipulating marble ensured that he would be considered a worthy successor of Michelangelo, far outshining other sculptors of his generation. His talent extended beyond the confines of sculpture to a consideration of the setting in which it would be situated; his ability to synthesize sculpture, painting, and architecture into a coherent conceptual and visual whole has been termed by the late art historian Irving Lavin the "unity of the visual arts".I. Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, New York: Morgan Library and Oxford University Press, 1980.
Biography
Youth
Bernini was born on 7 December 1598 in Naples to Angelica Galante, a Neapolitan, and Mannerist sculptor Pietro Bernini, originally from Florence. He was the sixth of their thirteen children.Gallery.ca . For a list of Bernini's siblings, see Franco Mormando, Bernini: His Life and His Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 2–3. Note that the primary source for much of the information about Bernini's life comes from the biography written by his youngest son Domenico. For a scholarly, annotated English translation of the latter, see Franco Mormando, ed. and trans., Domenico Bernini, Life of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, University Park, Penn State Univ. Press, 2011. Gian Lorenzo Bernini was "recognized as a prodigy when he was only eight years old, [and] he was consistently encouraged by his father, Pietro. His precocity earned him the admiration and favour of powerful patrons who hailed him as 'the Michelangelo of his century'". More specifically, it was Pope Paul V, who after first attesting to the boy Bernini's talent, famously remarked, 'This child will be the Michelangelo of his age,' later repeating that prophecy to Cardinal Maffeo Barberini (the future Pope Urban VIII), as Domenico Bernini reports in his biography of his father. In 1606 his father received a papal commission (to contribute a marble relief to the Cappella Paolina of Santa Maria Maggiore) and so moved from Naples to Rome, taking his entire family with him and continuing in earnest the training of his son Gian Lorenzo.
Several extant works, dating –1620, are by general scholarly consensus, collaborative efforts by both father and son: they include the Faun Teased by Putti (, Metropolitan Museum, NYC), Boy with a Dragon (–17, Getty Museum, Los Angeles), the Aldobrandini Four Seasons (, private collection), and the recently discovered Bust of the Savior (1615–16, New York, private collection).For the newly rediscovered bust of the Savior, see Pietro and Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Bust of the Savior. With an essay by Andrea Bacchi, New York: Andrew Butterfield Fine Arts, 2016. For the other collaborative works, see the 2017 Galleria Borghese exhibition catalogue, Bernini (eds. Andrea Bacchi and Anna Coliva [Milan): Officina Libraria, 2017), respectively pp. 38–41, 68–71, 48–53 and 28. Sometime after the arrival of the Bernini family in Rome, word about the great talent of the boy Gian Lorenzo spread throughout the city, and he soon caught the attention of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew to the reigning pope, Paul V, who spoke of the boy genius to his uncle. Bernini was therefore presented before Pope Paul V, curious to see if the stories about Gian Lorenzo's talent were true. The boy improvised a sketch of Saint Paul for the marvelling pope, and this was the beginning of the pope's attention on this young talent.Franco Mormando, ed. and trans., Domenico Bernini, Life of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, University Park, Penn State Univ. Press, 2011, p. 98.
Once he was brought to Rome, he rarely left its walls, except (much against his will) for a five-month stay in Paris in the service of King Louis XIV and brief trips to nearby towns (including Civitavecchia, Tivoli and Castelgandolfo), mostly for work-related reasons. Rome was Bernini's city: "You are made for Rome," said Pope Urban VIII to him, "and Rome for you." It was in this world of 17th-century Rome and the international religious-political power which resided there that Bernini created his greatest works. Bernini's works are therefore often characterized as perfect expressions of the spirit of the assertive, triumphal but self-defensive Counter Reformation Catholic Church. Certainly, Bernini was a man of his times and deeply religious (at least later in life),For a more nuanced, cautious discussion of the traditional hagiographic view of Bernini as "fervent Catholic" and of his art as simply a direct manifestation of his personal faith, see Mormando, "Bernini's Religion: Myth and Reality", pp. 60–66 of the Introduction to his critical, annotated edition, Domenico Bernini, The Life of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, University Park, Penn State U Press, 2011. See also the same author's article, 'Breaking Through the Bernini Myth' in the online journal, Berfrois, 11 October 2012: but he and his artistic production should not be reduced simply to instruments of the papacy and its political-doctrinal programs, an impression that is at times communicated by the works of the three most eminent Bernini scholars of the previous generation, Rudolf Wittkower, Howard Hibbard, and Irving Lavin.Regarding Hibbard's classic book on Bernini (Bernini [New York: Penguin, 1965]), often cited as a leading authority, though still a valuable resource, it has never been updated since its original publication and the author's premature death; a vast amount of new information about Bernini has surfaced since then. It also accepts too readily the whitewashed, hagiographic depictions of Bernini, his patrons, and of Baroque Rome as supplied by the first, official biographies by Baldinucci and Domenico Bernini. Similar criticism regarding an insufficiently critical reading of contemporary sources (especially ecclesiastical ones) and a simplistic reductionism in the description of Bernini's true mindset and artistic vision could also be made of the scholarship of Wittkower and Lavin. As Tomaso Montanari's recent revisionist monograph, La libertà di Bernini (Turin: Einaudi, 2016) argues and Franco Mormando's anti-hagiographic biography, Bernini: His Life and His Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), illustrates, Bernini and his artistic vision maintained a certain degree of freedom from the mindset and mores of Counter-Reformation Roman Catholicism.
Partnership with Scipione Borghese
Under the patronage of the extravagantly wealthy and most powerful Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the young Bernini rapidly rose to prominence as a sculptor.The most up-to-date and most comprehensive catalogue raisonné of all of Bernini's sculptures is Maria Grazia Bernardini's monumental Catalogo delle sculture, with an extensive bibliography (Turin: Allemandi Edizioni, 2022). It supersedes Rudolph Wittkower's catalogue, Bernini: The Sculptor of the Roman Baroque, first published in 1955, but re-published in revised form even after the author's death (in 1971), the last edition being the 4th, London: Phaidon, 1997. Among his early works for the cardinal, as an assistant in his father's workshop, would have been small contributions to decorative pieces for the garden of the Villa Borghese, such as perhaps The Allegory of Autumn (formerly in the Hester Diamond collection in New York). Another small garden ornament work (in the Galleria Borghese since Bernini's lifetime), The Goat Amalthea with the Infant Jupiter and a Faun, was from 1926 until 2022 generally considered by scholars to be the earliest work executed entirely by the young Bernini himself, despite the fact that it is never mentioned in any of the contemporary sources, except for a late reference (1675) as a Bernini work by Joachim von Sandrart, a German visitor to Rome, an attribution that was given no credence until the twentieth century. Indeed, the official 2022 Catalogo generale (vol. 1, Sculture moderne, cat. 41) of the Galleria Borghese, edited by Anna Coliva (former director of the gallery), formally removes the attribution to Bernini completely, on the basis of both stylistic, technical, and historical (documentary) grounds.
Instead, among Bernini's earliest and securely documented works is his collaboration on his father's commission of February 1618 from Cardinal Maffeo Barberini to create four marble putti for the Barberini family chapel in the church of , the contract stipulating that his son Gian Lorenzo would assist in the execution of the statues.F. Mormando, Domenico Bernini's Life of Gian Lorenzo Bernini (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011), p. 282, n. 23. Scholars, however, are still in debate as to which of the four 'putti' came from the hand of Gian Lorenzo. Also dating to 1618 is a letter by Maffeo Barberini in Rome to his brother Carlo in Florence, which mentions that he (Maffeo) was thinking of asking the young Gian Lorenzo to finish one of the statues left incomplete by Michelangelo, then in possession of Michelangelo's grandnephew which Maffeo was hoping to purchase, a remarkable attestation of the great skill that the young Bernini was already believed to possess.I. Lavin, 'Five New Youthful Sculptures by Gianlorenzo Bernini and a Revised Chronology of His Early Works,' Art Bulletin 50 (1968): 223–48, here 236–237. There is no scholarly consensus as to which unfinished Michelangelo statue the Maffeo letter was referring, but evidence all points strongly in the direction of the Palestrina Pietà (now in the Accademia, Florence): see Irving Lavin (†) and Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, "The Palestrina Pietà: Gatherings on the History of 'a Statue Begun by Michelangelo,'" Artibus et Historiae, no. 82, XLI, 2020: 249–65.