May 12, 2022 39Bernini used every trick, from steel
bars to stucco to a sculpted smile, to
make granite seem weightless, and mar-
ble as ductile as bronze. Pestilli, adapt-
ing Milan Kundera, playfully calls the
result “the bearable lightness of being.”
The artist’s personality was another mat-
ter. Nothing could contain Bernini’s
hot- blooded exuberance; when he was
thirty- eight, his mother complained in
a letter to Pope Urban VIII’s cardinal
nephew Francesco Barberini that her
son acted as if he were “master of the
world,” and she begged Barberini, the
second most powerful man in Rome,
for assistance in bringing him to heel.So bottomless was Bernini’s energy
that everyone believed the story about
his swift recovery from a near disaster
in the studio: he had almost completed
a bust of his great patron Cardinal Sci-
pione Borghese when a hairline crack
appeared along its forehead. His biog-
rapher Filippo Baldinucci claims that
Bernini carved a whole new version in
only fifteen days, chiseling away in his
bedroom by night. Pestilli refutes the
tall tale with gusto, reminding read-
ers that elite sculptors, familiar with
marble’s vagaries, were almost always
prepared for this kind of mishap (and
indeed Bernini faced the same prob-
lem a decade later with a bust of Pope
Innocent X). Long before its execution
in stone, the bust had begun as a series
of preparatory drawings that led to
the creation of a full- size clay model.
Assistants would have prepared the
marble block for the master’s final de-
tailing, and only then would he have in-
tervened to give the work its definitive
personality. The fifteen- day miracle
was not a creation from scratch.
Furthermore, as Pestilli points out,
the design, the drawings, and the
model were just as much a part of the
master’s artistry as the final product.
In Bernini’s studio, on occasion, the as-
sistants might also do the detailing: the
leaves and roots that spring from Daph-
ne’s fingers and toes in Bernini’s Apollo
and Daphne, for instance, were done
by Giuliano Finelli, and not all of them
are made of marble. Rather than run
the risk of shattering stone, Finelli used
stucco to complete the laurel leaves and
the finest roots. For all his phenomenal
skill, Bernini recognized that Finelli
had the most delicate hand of all, and
for seven years, from 1622 to 1629, the
younger man was Bernini’s most valued
associate before striking out on his own.
In the case of Cardinal Scipione’s
bust, a spare block had probably been
prepared long before the crack ap-
peared in the original. Marble, even
marmo statuario, is an uneven me-
dium; traces of primordial silt and sand
in the calcium carbonate create charac-
teristic veins in varying shades of gray
or weak points and natural fissures in
the stone. Michelangelo was well along
with a statue of the Risen Christ when a
dark gray vein appeared at eye level in
the center of the figure’s face. He tried
to limit the damage, and thanks to his
skill Jesus exhibits nothing more than
a dark stripe alongside his nose, but
Michelangelo, unable to unsee the flaw,
carved a whole new statue, fine- tuning
its pose in the process.
Cardinal Scipione, to his immense
credit both as a friend of Bernini and
as a connoisseur of the artistic process,
kept both his portrait busts, the cracked
and the whole, displaying them in differ-ent rooms of his suburban villa. Today
they stand side by side in the same space
at the Borghese Gallery, where we can
compare them directly with each other.
The cracked original is more finely
finished—Bernini completed the bust
despite the flaw in the marble and it
shows the effect of more concentrated,
meticulous work, but the second ver-
sion, created more hastily and along
simplified lines, radiates its own spon-
taneous charm. Both communicate the
cardinal’s jovial spirit through his smile
and the button that slips furtively out of
its buttonhole, as if the portly prelate is
bursting out of his cassock.
The fifteen- day bust is only one of
the tall tales told of Bernini by his en-
thusiastic biographers, a yarn genuinely
based on Bernini’s own experience—
we can see the evidence for ourselves.
Many of the other anecdotes, as Pestilli
reveals, are drawn not from life but
from literature, as a way of consecrat-
ing their Gian Lorenzo among the he-
roes of artistic legend and, in one case
at least, among the very saints. Accord-
ing to Domenico Bernini, the sculptor,
only eighteen,wished to portray...Saint Law-
rence in the act of being burned
naked on the grill. In order to ad-
equately reflect in the saint’s face
the pain of his martyrdom and the
effect that the fire must have had
on his flesh, he placed his own leg
and bare thigh against burning
coals.... Even more meritoriously
than the ancient Scaevola, who
placed his hand in fire in order to
punish himself for having erred,
our Gian Lorenzo caused his own
flesh to be burned out of a desire
not to fall into error.None of the artist’s other biogra-
phers tell the story, and Pestilli points
out that the statue—now in the Uffizi
in Florence—shows Lawrence with a
body contorted by pain but a face al-
ready enraptured by visions of Heaven.
But the anecdote allows the scholarly
Domenico to invoke a series of state-
ments about artists and verisimilitude
from authors ancient and modern: Ar-
istotle, Seneca, Quintilian, Dante, right
up to the saintly seventeenth- century
cardinal Federico Borromeo. Bernini
clearly did make faces in a mirror to
prepare for his screaming Damned Soul
and the David who bites his lip in con-
centration, but grimacing for art’s sake
can hardly compare with suffering the
ordeal of burning coals to share in the
martyrdom of one’s own patron saint.It is no wonder that Domenico Ber-
nini became such a scholar. His father
amassed a library of four hundred
books (their titles carefully cataloged
and analyzed by Sarah McPhee^2 ), a
number surpassed in his own day only
by his inveterate rival Francesco Bor-
romini and by the supremely suave
Peter Paul Rubens.
Bernini was distinctive among
Rome’s courtiers for his resolute inde-
pendence. With patrons that included
kings, popes, and cardinals, he moved
in society’s highest circles. He was
never one of them, but in a society that
so often turned upon flattery, he neverstooped. W hen he walked in the Vatican
gardens with Pope Alexander VII, who
dressed down for the occasion in a dou-
blet and hose of white satin, they con-
cocted architectural plans together on
the pages of the same sketchbook, which
still survives in the Vatican Library as
Manuscript Chigi a.I.18. Although the
handwriting of the two is distinct, it is
not always clear who drew which line,
the record of an intimate collabora-
tion. One day, another of Rome’s most
colorful residents, Queen Christina of
Sweden, knocked unannounced on Ber-
nini’s door. Rather than dress to meet
the queen, he appeared in the rough
apron he wore when he was carving.
And yet Bernini was a careful and
prudent dresser. Across the decades,
his portraits show him consistently in
black with a flat white linen collar: sim-
ple, elegant attire. Other artists, like
his father’s (and Caravaggio’s) onetime
master Giuseppe Cesari, the notoriously
vain Cavalier of Arpino, wore flat col-
lars trimmed in elaborate lace, and he
never appeared without the gold chain
of high knighthood. A dandy like the
papal nephew Camillo Pamphilj would
wear a ruff made of yard upon yard of
expensive lace. Bernini, for all his co-
lossal ego, never displayed that kind of
vanity, but he also let people visit his
studio only by appointment, so he could
be seen working in gentlemanly gear.
Queen Christina’s unannounced ap-
pearance was an annoying break of pro-
tocol, but Pestilli shows how masterfully
Bernini handled the situation: appear-
ing in his work clothes gave the queen a
glimpse of his intimate life, a gesture of
friendship to a woman as likely to dress
in men’s clothing as a silken gown. In
Rome’s elaborate social network, each
of them had carved out a unique place.
Pestilli’s final chapter, on Bernini’s
legacy, reveals the artist’s profound
influence on Canova, who saw Apollo
and Daphne in 1780 at the age of
twenty- three. In his diary he declared
that the statue had been “sculpted with
such delicacy that it seems impossible
[to achieve], there are laurel leaves [ex-
ecuted] with wonderful workmanship
[and] the [rendition] of the beautiful
nude is beyond expectation.”
Pestilli also documents Bernini’s
lasting legacy to other artists with a
staggering array of color photographs,
many of which he took himself. He
records late- seventeenth- and early-
eighteenth- century sculptural mon-
uments preserved in some of Rome’s
most inaccessible churches: overlooked
gems like Bernardino Ludovisi’s pyra-
midal funerary monument to Cardinal
Giorgio Spinola in San Salvatore alle
Coppelle, or Lorenzo Ottoni’s theat-
rical balcony of a tomb for Antonio
and Girolama Publicola in their family
church, the intermittently accessible
Santa Maria in Publicolis. How did
Pestilli get through all those perpetu-
ally closed doors? Most of us are lucky
if we manage to sneak into two or three
of them over the decades. Above all, he
trains his observant eye on works from
an era that has received comparatively
little attention from either art histori-
ans or tourists. After Bernini and His
World, with its vast visual encyclopedia
of Baroque sculpture in Rome, ignor-
ing these visual riches will be much
harder to do—and why would anyone
want to? But the real value of the book
is its magical mystery tour through the
mind and art of Gian Lorenzo Bernini,
Rome’s very own Vesuvius. QPrices above do not include shipping and handling.
TO ORDER, go to shop.nybooks.com, call
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CELEBRATED CARICATURESDAVID LEVINE AUTHOR MUG
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The same thirty-three Levine caricatures
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#05-DLVAN • $19.95(^2) Sarah McPhee, “Bernini’s Books,”
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Rowland 38 39 .indd 39 4 / 13 / 22 5 : 47 PM