Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Biography

In February 1646 Pope Innocent X ordered the two bell towers of St Peter’s Basilica pulled down, towers that Bernini had built for Urban VIII. The first tower was finished in 1641, and soon afterwards cracks appeared in the façade. The architect also had to pay a fine.

He was born on 7 December 1598 in Naples, the sixth of thirteen children of the Mannerist sculptor Pietro Bernini, a native of Florence, and the Neapolitan Angelica Galante. In 1606 his father received a papal commission for the Pauline Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore and moved the whole family to Rome. There the boy was noticed by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Pope Paul V; his biographers report the words of Paul V: this child will be the Michelangelo of his age. Among the works of about 1615–1620 are pieces regarded as joint efforts of father and son, such as “Faun Teased by Putti” and “Boy with a Dragon”.

For Borghese he made four works between 1619 and 1625: “Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius”, “The Rape of Proserpina”, “Apollo and Daphne” and “David”. Rudolf Wittkower held that they inaugurated a new era in European sculpture. Bernini takes not the outcome of a story but its most tense moment: Apollo has just seen Daphne begin to turn into a tree, and David bites his lip as he twists his body before the throw. Daphne’s mouth is open in fear, Proserpina’s braids have come undone, Pluto’s fingers press into her flesh. At twenty-two he made the bust of Paul V (now in the Getty Museum). Under Gregory XV he received the title of cavaliere, and from then on he was simply “Cavaliere Bernini”.

In 1623 his long-standing patron Maffeo Barberini became pope as Urban VIII. According to tradition, he said: it is a great fortune for you, Cavaliere, that Cardinal Barberini has become pope, but our fortune is greater still that Cavaliere Bernini lives in our pontificate. Until Urban’s death in 1644 Bernini received almost all his commissions from the pope and his family. He ran the papal foundry at Castel Sant’Angelo and the fountains of Piazza Navona, and in 1629, after the death of Carlo Maderno, he became architect of St Peter’s Basilica, with almost no architectural training. The older masters protested. Over the tomb of the apostle he set a gilded bronze baldachin about thirty metres high, on four twisted columns. He then took on the four piers under the dome and carved the statue of St Longinus himself. He also began the tomb of Urban himself. Marble portraits went on alongside: two busts of Scipione Borghese (the second made after a flaw was found in the marble of the first), busts of Urban and Francesco Barberini, and a portrait of Costanza Bonarelli, the wife of his assistant. Commissions also came from outside Rome: from Cardinal Richelieu, the Duke of Modena and King Charles I of England. He carved the bust of Charles from Anthony van Dyck’s triple portrait; it was destroyed in the fire at Whitehall Palace in 1698.

Costanza was his lover. When he learned that she was having an affair with his younger brother Luigi, he chased his brother through the streets of Rome and sent a servant to slash her face with a razor. The servant was jailed, Costanza was also arrested for adultery, and Bernini himself was spared a trial by the pope. In May 1639, at forty, he married Caterina Tezio, a Roman woman of twenty-two, and they had eleven children. One of them was Domenico, his father’s future first biographer.

After Urban’s death in 1644 the new pope, Innocent X Pamphilj, was hostile to the Barberini. Then came the affair of the bell towers. Bernini withdrew into himself; his son linked the unfinished marble group “Truth Unveiled by Time” to this episode: Bernini hoped that time would set everything right. Later inquiries showed that the cracks were caused by Maderno’s weak foundations, and the inquiry of 1680 confirmed this. Bernini did not lose his offices, and work on the decoration of the nave of St Peter’s went on: a coloured marble floor, facing for the walls, dozens of stucco statues and reliefs. Later Pope Alexander VII, by tradition, said that if everything made by Bernini were removed from the basilica, only bare walls would remain. In 1648 he won the Pamphilj commission for the Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona, and his disgrace was over. The Cornaro Chapel in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria (opened in 1651), with the “Ecstasy of Saint Teresa”, belongs to the same period: white marble, a hidden window, gilded rays and boxes with relief portraits of the patron’s family. Contemporaries reproached the scene for excessive sensuality.

Under Alexander VII (1655–1667) Bernini again became the leading artist of Rome. In the space before the basilica he built two oval colonnades of four rows of columns, often compared to arms embracing the crowd. He rebuilt the Scala Regia, the stairway between the basilica and the Vatican Palace, and set the Cathedra Petri, the Chair of St Peter, in the apse. For the Jesuits he built the oval church of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale, with which, his son recalled, his father was especially pleased. For the obelisk at Santa Maria sopra Minerva he devised an elephant on a plinth; the statue itself was carved by his pupil Ercole Ferrata.

In April 1665, at the urging of the pope and the French court, he travelled to Paris: Louis XIV needed an architect for the Louvre. He stayed there about six months. A courtier, Paul Fréart de Chantelou, kept a diary of his visit. The designs for the east façade were rejected, and, as Franco Mormando points out, the memoranda of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the king’s finance minister, speak of security and convenience, not of style. One thing from the trip did survive: the marble bust of Louis XIV. The equestrian statue of the king, made afterwards in Rome, reached Paris in 1685, after the sculptor’s death. The king found it repugnant, and it was recarved as Marcus Curtius.

His last works include the statues of the prophets Habakkuk and Daniel in the Chigi Chapel, the equestrian statue of Constantine (1668), the “Blessed Ludovica Albertoni” (1674) and the tomb of Alexander VII in St Peter’s. Erwin Panofsky saw in the tomb the pinnacle of European funerary art. Bernini worked almost to the end and died in Rome on 28 November 1680.

He was buried in the family vault in Santa Maria Maggiore, beside his parents, without any monument. Only in 1898 was a commemorative plaque with a small bust placed on his house on the Via della Mercede.