Giovanni Bernini
Biography of Greatest Baroque Italian Sculptor noted for the Scuptures Aeneas and Anchises, Pluto and Proserpine, David, Apollo and Daphne.
Visual Arts Information

Apollo and Daphne (1622)

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Giovanni Bernini (1598-1680) and the Baroque

Artists and theorists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries believed that a small amount of sculpture of the very highest quality had survived from antiquity, and that this alone provided a standard for their contemporaries. Little attempt was made to separate the different styles or periods of antiquity until the second half of the eighteenth century, when it was gradually realized that many of the canon were in fact Roman copies of Greek sculptures, or of the later Hellenistic period. However, even before they made formal distinctions sculptors showed an instinctive preference for one style or another, or interpreted the same object according to their own leanings. One of the great European sculptors in the history of art, Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), for example, was attracted to the dramatic naturalism of what is often called the Hellenistic baroque style of Pergamese groups of the second and first century BCE, like the Vanquished Gaul Killing Himself and his Wife, while the classical sculptor Duquesnoy was drawn towards the Vatican Antinous or Hermes, a Roman imitation of a Greek original of probably the fifth century BCE. On the other hand, the Apollo Belvedere was the prototype for works as different in style as the figure of Apollo in Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, and Canova's Perseus.

Like the words 'gothic' and 'rococo', 'baroque' was originally a term of abuse, meaning grotesque, deformed or over-elaborate. It carried with it the implication that the baroque style stood in opposition to the true classical principles of art and sought transitory effects that appealed to man's meaner desires, The academies of art that had grown up in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw themselves as the custodians of the true classical tradition, whose principles were being threatened by the pursuit of a virtuosity that lured artists and patrons away from more demanding and elevated conceptions. The academies felt themselves to be the guardians of eternal values that had found their highest expression in antiquity, and they stood for an art which was restrained, simple and austere. Baroque sculptors, on the other hand, would have argued that the initial function of both fine art painting and sculpture was to seduce the eye of the beholder by convincing him of the reality of the scene before him.

In practice the distinction between classical and baroque artists is less clear cut, and even Bernini believed himself to be working in the tradition of Michelangelo and antiquity, His baroque naturalism is more a reaction against the aestheticism of mannerist sculpture than against the classical ideal; his work repudiates the elegant curves and balletic grace of his predecessors by an aggressive concreteness and naturalism. The contrast can be seen by comparing the figure of Neptune (c.1580-85) by Alessandro Vittoria, one of the best of the later mannerist sculptors, with Bernini's Neptune and Triton (c.1621). The contrapposto, or turning movement, of Vittoria's figure makes the sculpture 'work' from all angles, and it is clearly an object to be handled and admired for its changing contours. The movement is confined within one plane and there is no thrust in anyone direction, while the modelling is more delicate than powerful. Bernini's version still retains something of the mannerist contrapposto, but the thrust of the figure is behind the trident which carries the impetus of the action beyond the plane of the pedestal, as if calming the waters of the pond which it was originally intended to surmount, as can be seen from a seventeenth century engraving of Cardinal Montalto's garden. Vittoria's Neptune was, therefore, designed as a statue complete in itself, while Bernini's group was intended to be an active part of its setting, bringing the pond into an allegorical conceit.

Bernini's most important achievement was to destroy the autonomy of sculpture by attempting to create an illusion of reality that had previously been considered within the province of painting. Painting by its nature was suited to deceiving the eye, and to achieve a comparable effect in sculpture required a virtuosity that Bernini was almost alone in possessing. He had the facility, in Sir Joshua Reynolds's words, to make stone 'sport and flutter in the air'. and he brought into the range of sculpture the depiction of a moment in time, gestures in transition and a pictorial background to the figures, by treating the relatively intractable materials of sculpture as if they were entirely malleable. Posterity dealt harshly with his facility and the argument against Bernini which was to condemn him to unpopularity until the beginning of this century was succinctly expressed by Reynolds in his Discourse on Sculpture:

Instead of pursuing the study of that ideal beauty with which he had so successfully begun, he turned his mind to an injudicious quest of novelty; attempted what was not within the province of the Art, and endeavoured to overcome the hardness and obstinacy of his materials: which even supposing he had accomplished, so far as to make this species of drapery appear natural, the ill-effect and confusion occasioned by its being detached from the figure to which it belongs, ought to have been a sufficient reason to have deterred him from that practice.

Only with the twentieth century has the classical prejudice against the 'impurity' of his methods been overcome and he can now take his place amongst the greatest Old Masters.

Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini was born in 1598, his father being a sculptor who had worked on many projects in Rome. Equally skilful with stone and bronze, Bernini's gifts revealed themselves even in his early teens and by the age of twenty he had established himself as the foremost sculptor in Rome. He was taken up by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the Pope's nephew, who was engaged, in the years 1613-15. in building the Villa Borghese and filling it with antiquities. Scipione Borghese was typical of the Roman connoisseurs who emerged at the beginning of the seventeenth century: aristocratic, aesthetic in inclination and of wide classical learning. He epitomizes the relaxed feeling in Rome after the early austerity of the Counter-Reformation, as Church Militant became Church Triumphant.

Bernini's sculptures for Scipione Borghese form a clearly defined phase in his work, and they show a rapid development from the late mannerist style of his father Pietro, who probably helped him with some of his earliest works, to a complete mastery of movement and gesture. The first of the series, the Aeneas and Anchises of 1617-19, has the serpentine movement of Giovanni da Bologna (Giambologna) (1529-1608), but it is rather uncertain in conception, perhaps because its original placing against the wall as a relief inhibited its movement in space. This was followed by the Neptune and Triton, a transitional work to the full-blooded baroque of the Pluto and Proserpine. As with the Aeneas and Anchises, the composition of the Pluto and Proserpine depends upon its being placed against a wall so that the beholder comes upon it directly from the front; the figure of Pluto is then seen to be advancing towards him. But now the group stands arbitrarily in the centre of the room where it was moved in the late eighteenth century. Unlike the Neptune and Triton, which is raised on a plinth to dominate the Montalto pond, the Pluto and Proserpine was intended to be seen at eye level, and the god appears to be stepping boldly off the pedestal while Proserpine struggles helplessly, looking outside the group for help. The composition depends not on an abstract movement but on the relationship between the figures of Pluto and Proserpine; the purposeful strength of the former is contrasted with the latter's discordant gestures, through the counterpoint of balance against unsteadiness, and firmness against softness.

The explanation for Bernini's astonishing transformation in these years is perhaps to be found in the painting of the period; indeed the very feebleness of the sculpture of the period in Rome led him to look at the achievements of painters, such as Annibale Carracci's spectacular ceiling of the Farnese Gallery, which surpassed the Sistine Chapel in its illusionistic complexity. Bernini borrowed motifs from the Farnese ceiling, but it was more important to him as an example of the reconciliation of convincing naturalism with heroic monumentality. Carracci reveals his debt to Michelangelo and the Greek art of antiquity in his figures, but they are modelled with a greater attention to colour and texture, while his use of painted caryatids and pictures-within-pictures legitimized Bernini's experiments with illusion. It is also evident that Bernini had taken the opportunity to study Hellenistic works like the Vanquished Gaul Killing Himself and His Wife, the Dying Gaul and the Laocoon.

In the David (1623), the spectator is brought further within the orbit of the sculpture, for in contrast to Michelangelo's High Renaissance version, David is seen at the point of releasing the stone, which he aims - if the spectator is correctly positioned - directly at or above him. As an example of dramatic naturalism it is striking, but it lacks the poetic feeling of the masterpiece of the Borghese series, the Apollo and Daphne (1622-5), where virtuosity is subordinated to the poetic rendering of metamorphosis. The transformation of Daphne is shown taking place as if Apollo were still in hot pursuit, and Bernini has shown with remarkable sensitivity Daphne's terror and Apollo's sudden bewilderment.

With the completion of the Borghese sculptures, Bernini was to move away from the circle of the aristocratic connoisseurs into the service of the papal policy. The Roman Church was in the throes of reform in the early seventeenth-century, and Bernini's entry into its service was to coincide with the final victory of the progressives who were sympathetic to the popular teachings of Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits. Ignatius Loyola and Teresa of Avila were both canonized in 1622, a year which marks not only the beginning of a fully baroque religious style, but also of a new iconography based on the lives of more recent saints and martyrs. The text book of this phase was Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, which Bernini is known to have used. It advocated a concrete form of religious experience, based on the tangibility of punishment and suffering. The religious man had to cleanse his soul by reliving the Passion of Christ and forcing his body to undergo the torments of hell through all his senses, so that he should be continually aware of his own mortality. His models of conduct were to be not only the modern saints but the holy men of the early Church who had achieved wisdom through self-denial. It is hard for us to reconcile this self-denying ethic with the ostentation of the high baroque, but Bernini would have seen no contradiction, for artists revealed the divine to men through their senses, regardless of their education or language.

Urban VIII, who ascended to the pontificate in 1623, inherited the traditional papal role of developing the city of Rome in a manner worthy of the centre of Christendom, and in particular the problem of St Peter's which was still far from complete. Urban VIII was the ideal patron for Bernini, for he was sympathetic to the religious fervour of the Jesuits, while at the same time he saw the value of a magnificent display of temporal power. He took Bernini into service in 1624, and from then on the sculptor was permanently employed by the papacy under successive popes until his death. His work in St Peter's did not allow him to return to the Ovidian subjects of his youth, and it caused a fundamental shift in the formal basis of his work. He extends his concern for pictorial illusion into a total manipulation of the environment. In the Cathedra Petri and the Cornaro Chapel for example, the sculptural groups are enclosed within a new order of reality, which controls the light that falls upon them and the space they inhabit. The transition to a scenographic conception of sculpture can be seen in one of his earliest commissions in St Peter's, the baldacchino (1624-33), or canopy, which has both an architectural and symbolic function, acting as a kind of frame for the high altar of the Cathedra Petri (1657-66), which was planned at the same time as the baldacchino but not begun until twenty four years after the latter was completed. With the baldacchino the boundary between sculpture and architecture in Bernini's work becomes indeterminate, and later even painting was incorporated into Bernini's conception, In the words of his contemporary Baldinucci, it was 'Common knowledge that he was the first who undertook to unite architecture, sculpture and painting in such a way that they together make a beautiful whole'.

Not all of Bernini's commissions for St Peter's required such a complex solution and in the colossal figure of St Longinus he returned to the Renaissance problem of placing a figure within a niche. Just as the Apollo and Daphne shows the moment of Daphne's metamorphosis, so the St Longinus shows the Roman soldier's moment of conversion, his sudden vision of divine light. The figure is contained within the niche, but is placed frontally with arms spread out creating a jagged silhouette. The draperies play a vital part in the expression of emotion and they are carved with a largeness of form that allows them to be seen clearly from far away. The one surviving bozzetto shows the first idea to have been more classical, with the out-flung arm balanced by the curve of the body away from it. but the final work is more dramatic and original. A study of Bernini's preliminary sketches shows that he very frequently used a classical pose as a starting point for the development of the composition, although the final solution may bear little trace of the original idea.

By contrast with the Longinus, the Cathedra Petri is so complex in its interaction of media that it is best described in Baudelaire's words as a 'mise-en-scene'. The architectural structure that frames the altar is dissolved by a symbolic vision of the elevation of the chair of St Peter. The window at the top is transformed into the divine light that bursts with a sudden radiance through the clouds, as the four fathers of the Church elevate St Peter's throne. As a solution to the problem of creating a climax grand enough for the immensity of the interior, it is a stunning achievement, but, in itself, it is too bombastic to be wholly satisfactory as a work of art.

The most successful of Bernini's scenographic works is the earlier Cornaro Chapel (1647-52), which shows the conversion of St Teresa, watched by members of the Cornaro family. This work should be seen not as a sculptured altar, but as a completely unified side-chapel in which the donors are shown as participants in the sacred drama. St Teresa and the angel are shown as if suspended on a cloud above the altar, the whole scene within the niche being illuminated from heaven by a concealed window. In the chapel itself, in side-boxes, the Cornaro family, past and present, sit discussing the vision as if they were watching a theatrical performance. The architecture of the chapel is surfaced with different coloured marbles, and an illusionistic painted ceiling, made under Bernini's supervision, adds another order of reality to the scene below. It has been remarked many times since the eighteenth century that Teresa's ecstasy seems to be more sexual than spiritual, but this misapprehension only serves to underline the concrete physical nature of St Teresa's description of her revelation.

The Cathedra Petri (if we can dissociate it from the baldacchino, or indeed from the total concept of the interior of St Peter's), and the Cornaro Chapel represent the full exuberance of Bernini's middle years, when every project was a challenge to his ingenuity and to the vast resources he had available to him. As with many great artists his final years were more contemplative in mood and in his last works his virtuosity is tempered by a more subtle and profound human feeling. In the Death of the Blessed Lodovica Albertoni (1671-4) in the Altieri Chapel of St Francesco a Ripa, Bernini still uses a concealed light source but the tortured angularity of the drapery has a delicacy that reminds one of his early sculptures, and the pose recalls the classical Ariadne in the Vatican which was greatly admired by the academic artist Nicolas Poussin.

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