Bernini and Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture
Busts and Drawings by 17th-century Italian Master: A Preview
This international loan exhibition resides first at Los Angeles, California's J. Paul Getty Museum (August 5-October 25, 2008). Its final destination is the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (November 28, 2008-March 8, 2009). The exposition is the first of Gian Lorenzo Bernini's work in North America as well as one devoted to his portrait busts.
Lenders to the formidable presentation include: the Palazzo Barberini, Galleria Borghese and Museo di Roma in Rome; the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence; the Vatican; the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the Musée du Louvre and Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin; and several private collections.
The Culture of Counter-Reformation Rome
The sobering religious attitude of 17th-century Roman Catholicism was a direct response to the Protestant challenge to papal authority in the previous decades. For the masses who had strayed in their beliefs, the Counter-Reformation papacy employed artists to communicate its message of religious orthodoxy and reconciliation through grand and spiritually evocative visual works. In Bernini, the Catholic Church found its most ardent of Italian representatives.
The Road to Papal Patronage
Born in Naples, the child prodigy Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) trained in the studio of Pietro, his talented father. He matured and became undeniably the most gifted sculptor of 17th-century Europe. Also accomplished in drawing, painting and architecture, he resided in Rome for most of his adult life.
Bernini's artistic virtuosity attracted important commissions from the papal court at Rome. The continued patronage of Cardinal Maffeo Barberini (1568-1644) before and during his pontificate as Urban VIII (r. 1623-1644) led to the sculptor's creation of the magnificent Baldacchino (1624-1633), the overwhelming bronze canopy over the first pope's tomb in Saint Peter's Basilica. Bernini and his team subsequently remodelled the largest church in Christendom. They integrated the master's sculptural and architectural plans into the Vatican's redesign, visible to this very day.
Portraiture
Arranged chronologically, the exhibition addresses the development and innovations of Italian Baroque sculptural portraiture in marble, bronze and porphyry.
Bernini's posthumous Portrait of Francesco di Carlo Barberini (1623) is a marble bust of Pope Urban VIII's uncle. The cardinal's austere countenance in stone is likely the result of the sculptor having carved the monsignor's likeness from a painted portrait of the deceased cleric. Well-versed in the restoration of classical antiquities, Bernini's work was influenced by his familiarity with the stark realism of ancient Roman funerary sculpture. This is evident in the attention paid to signs of age in the prelate's face.
Bernini's marble portrait of Scipione Borghese (1632) demonstrates the artist's perfection of the speaking likeness, an expression that describes the sculptor's ability to have captured the sitter's image and psychological temperament while having suspended both time and action. The art-collecting cleric was Bernini's first important benefactor and the nephew of Pope Paul V (r. 1605-1621).
The unsurpassed talent as a portraitist for which Bernini was known earned him not only the patronage of the Catholic Church but also that of European nobility and royalty, most notably France's King Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715). On display is the sensitive portrait bust of Costanza Bonarelli (ca. 1636-38), the alleged mistress of Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1576-1633), Bernini's sponsor.
Period drawings and paintings complement the superb works on view in Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture. The exhibition concludes with the accomplishments of 17th-century sculptors influenced by the artist, among them Giuliano Finelli (1601/02-1653) and Alessandro Algardi (1598-1654).
Sources:
- Avery, Charles. Bernini: Genius of the Baroque. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1997.
- Bacchi, Andrea, Catherine Hess, et al. Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture (exh. cat.). Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2008.
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