38 The New York ReviewBernini and His World:
Sculpture and Sculptors in
Early Modern Rome
by Livio Pestilli.
London: Lund Humphries,
288 pp., $99.99In theory, early modern Italians re-
garded sculpture as a lower form of
art, harsh physical labor unsuited to a
gentleman. In fact, like their ancient
forebears, they found something irre-
sistibly magical about the people who
could draw forth life and form from
a block of stone, especially when that
stone was the extraordinary marble of
Carrara, famous since Roman times
as one of Italy’s greatest natural re-
sources. Composed primarily of cal-
cium carbonate compressed from the
bodies of countless ancient sea crea-
tures, Carrara marble, gleaming white
with veins of gray, has an unusually
fine, compact grain that allows a sculp-
tor to chip it away with an oblique blow
of the chisel, carve it in sharp detail,
polish it to a high sheen, and exploit its
unusual tensile strength to project del-
icate shapes boldly into space: the ten-
drils of a Corinthian column, the curls
of a lion’s mane, a fluttering mantle, the
legs and tail of a prancing horse.
Nothing could seem so uncannily
alive to viewers, ancient, medieval, and
early modern, as a marble statue. The
mythical Greek sculptor Pygmalion fell
so in love with his carved Galatea that
he transformed her into a living woman
by force of prayer, just as his crusty
Renaissance colleagues Donatello and
Michelangelo reputedly challenged
their own creations to speak, Do-
natello with a Tuscan imprecation, Mi-
chelangelo with a wistful “Why don’t
you talk?”^1 The spell cast by sculpturemeant that a well- bred, well- educated
woman like Properzia de’ Rossi of Bo-
logna (circa 1490–1530) could progress
from carving tiny figures in cherry pits
to hewing full- scale projects in stone.
(So, too, the contemporary sculptor
Mother Praxedes Baxter O. S. B. puts
her hands to marble, bronze, and steel
in a full Benedictine habit.) Versatile
artists like Michelangelo, Gian Lo-
renzo Bernini, and Antonio Canova
based their immense artistic authority
on their skill with the lowly chisel.
Michelangelo, Bernini, and Canova
are sculptors so distinctive, and dis-
tinct from one another, that we rarely
think of them in company. What could
possibly connect the regal nudity of
Michelangelo’s David to the ectoplas-
mic drapery that swathes Bernini’s
Saint Theresa, or the deep emotions
bodied forth in these statues to the
saucy detachment of Canova’s Pauline
Borghese, Napoleon’s handful of a sis-
ter, lounging on a sculpted cushion so
lightly that she barely dents it, dressed
for conquest in nothing but a brace-
let and an artfully slipping wrap? For
one thing, all three sculptors share a
winning way with marmo statuario,
the most precious grade of marble
from Carrara. But the Roman art his-
torian Livio Pestilli argues that they
share a great deal more than that: all
three emerge from an artistic tradi-
tion rooted as deeply in philosophy
as in practice, as attentive to bodilessdivinity as to the shaping of physical
matter.In Bernini and His World, Pestilli in-
terprets “world” in a broad sense, to
include the entire social and cultural
universe of early modern artistry, a
universe in which the links between
these three epochal creative spirits are
surprisingly direct. Bernini, a child
prodigy, heard himself described from
his earliest years as “the new Michel-
angelo” and cemented the comparison
not by imitating the great master but by
blazing his own path before he, in turn,
set a course for the young Canova.
(The book’s final chapter, on Bernini’s
influence, breaks new ground in show-
ing how closely Canova studied the Ba-
roque master.) Each artist earned his
authority, according to this perceptive
study, by claiming the freedom to do
things his own way. Their originality,
as much as their technical skill, is what
conferred on them the right, in the
eyes of their contemporaries, to stand
among the giants of the past.
Gian Lorenzo’s father, Pietro
(1562–1629), was a Florentine sculp-
tor trained in the immemorial Tuscan
tradition that put drawing, disegno, at
the heart of every artistic endeavor,
even the art of living, for disegno could
mean a strategy as well as a sketch.
After apprenticeships as a sculptor in
Florence and as a painter in Rome (in
a studio that eventually included Ca-
ra vag gio), Pietro moved to Naples in
1584, where he began an active career
as a sculptor in his own right. In 1587,
rather abruptly, he married a twelve-
year- old Neapolitan girl named An-
gelica Galante, quite possibly because
she was already pregnant with the first
of their thirteen children. In rapid suc-
cession, the young couple produced
five daughters, a matter of concern in
an era when each would have to beprovided with a dowry in adulthood,
whether she married or entered a con-
vent as a “bride of Christ.”
Gian Lorenzo broke that sequence
on December 7, 1598, “in order to make
two centuries illustrious by his life,”
as his son and biographer Dome nico
asserts, but also to ease his parents’
worries about making ends meet in the
future. In 1606 the still- growing family
moved to Rome, where Pietro bought
a five- story house near the basilica of
Santa Maria Maggiore, his new work-
place. Gian Lorenzo would live in that
dynastic stronghold, now Via Liberi-
ana 24, until 1642. For all practical pur-
poses, then, the younger Bernini was
a Roman, and would spend virtually
all except the first seven of his eighty-
one years in the Eternal City, but his
volcanic temper and his preternatural
energy linked him eternally in con-
temporaries’ minds to his birthplace.
If Michelangelo swore that he drank in
marble dust with his nursemaid’s milk,
the infant Bernini had clearly downed
the fires of Vesuvius.
For an aspiring New Michelangelo,
that persistent connection with Naples
was problematic. The north–south di-
vide that still splits Italy reflected the
seventeenth century’s political reality
as well as differences of language and
culture: the Kingdom of Naples, the
southern half of the Italian peninsula,
was ruled by a Spanish viceroy, Rome
and the Papal States of central Italy
by a pope with the power to command
armies, and Tuscany by a grand duke—
three radically different monarchs rul-
ing radically different polities. With
250,000 inhabitants, Naples ranked as
one of the world’s largest cities. Its mild
climate permitted a huge population of
indigents, called lazzaroni, to live on
the streets, sustained by a wholesome
diet of bread and fruit.
Pestilli traces Bernini’s repeated
attempts to assume his father’s (and
Michelangelo’s) Tuscan heritage, or at
least to present himself as a scion of
Rome, where the population of ancient
statues proverbially equaled the num-
ber of living people, but those efforts
never really convinced anyone. Bernini
himself claimed that the only remnant
of his childhood in Naples was his vo-
racious love of fruit, but his contem-
poraries knew better. The man and his
creations—his plays, his paintings, his
statues, his drawings, his caricatures,
his terra- cotta models, his tabletop min-
iatures—all of them were pure theater.
Even his sculpted animals bubble
over with personality, from the an-
cient statue of a goat he supplied with
a brand- new smiling head to his own
inventions: the thirsty lion who bends
to drink the waters of the Nile on his
Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Pi-
azza Navona (the king of Spain has a
miniature replica of this beguiling cat
in gilded bronze, standing on a little
chip of porphyry); the same fountain’s
curly- lipped giant armadillo, the por-
trait of a real stuffed creature imported
by the Jesuits from Argentina; and the
sturdy elephant in the Piazza della Mi-
ner va who balances an ancient Egyp-
tian obelisk on his back as if it were the
easiest feat in the world, smirking as he
shows his posterior to the Dominican
convent that commissioned him.The Spell of Marble
Ingrid D. RowlandGian Lorenzo Bernini: The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, circa 1614 –1618Uffizi Gallery, Florence /Art Resource(^1) Giorgio Vasari’s Life of Donatello
reports that the artist told his statue
the Zuccone to “speak, speak, may a
bloody flux take you” (favella, favella,
che ti venga il cacasangue). The an-
ecdote about Michelangelo telling his
Moses to speak is first recorded in 1839;
see Giorgio Masi, “Perché non parli?:
Michelangelo e il silenzio,” in Officine
del nuovo. Sodalizi fra letterati, artisti
ed editori nella cultura italiana fra
Riforma e Controriforma, edited by
Harald Hendrix and Paolo Procaccioli
(Manziana, Italy: Vecchiarelli, 2008).
Rowland 38 39 .indd 38 4 / 13 / 22 5 : 47 PM