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Vision, Touch, and the Poetics of Bernini's Apollo and Daphne Author(S): Andrea Bolland Source: the Art Bulletin, Vol

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Vision, Touch, and the Poetics of Bernini's Apollo and Daphne Author(S): Andrea Bolland Source: the Art Bulletin, Vol Desiderio and Diletto: Vision, Touch, and the Poetics of Bernini's Apollo and Daphne Author(s): Andrea Bolland Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 82, No. 2 (Jun., 2000), pp. 309-330 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3051379 Accessed: 29/10/2009 07:49 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art Bulletin. http://www.jstor.org Desiderio and Diletto: Vision, Touch, and the Poetics of Bernini's Apollo and Daphne AndreaBolland The gods, that mortal beauty chase, Daphne and to the subtleties of Bernini's statue. Indeed, one Still in a tree did end their race. might even say that the subject and Bernini's treatment of it Apollo hunted Daphne so, not only elicit paradoxical readings but that paradox is at the Only that she might laurel grow. heart of the group's meaning. Rather than undertaking a And Pan did after Syrinx speed, radically new reading, this essay will focus on these paradoxi- Not as a nymph, but for a reed. cal relationships-specifically, the intertwined themes of sen- -Andrew Marvell, from "The Garden"1 suality and antisensuality and of desire and artifice-that by common consensus seem to lie at the heart of the statue In Baldinucci's Gian LorenzoBernini (1682), the Filippo Life of group. marble of and 1) is cast as the group Apollo Daphne (Fig. These themes will be placed in a larger Renaissance critical first After youthful sculptor's great public triumph. invoking tradition in which a crucial role is played by vision and the that mere words cannot describe the topos "meraviglie" touch-senses that Bernini uses to great effect in his statue (marvels) that the in to the sculpture "displayed every part group, and which are central to the literary tradition of the of all," Baldinucci on to describe the statue's eyes goes story. In this critical discourse, poetry, painting, and sculp- reception: ture-sister arts, united by the common end of mimesis- were in that on their address to the [I]mmediately when it was seen to have been finished, unequal ways hinged and on the value to the senses there arose such a cry [se ne sparse un tal grido] that all senses, comparative assigned in their abilities to Rome concurred in seeing it as a miracle [tutta Roma themselves, provoke desire, provide and access to The Renaissance concorse a vederla per un miracolo], and the young artist delight, grant knowledge.10 of sense that of the was not an absolute himself (not yet eighteen years old), when he walked hierarchy (like arts) one: if vision was often exalted for its immaterial through the city, drew after him the eyes of all the people, (hence it was also the sense most and who gazed upon him and pointed him out to others as a spiritual) nature, easily fooled, if touch was the surest of the it could also be prodigy... .2 senses, maligned for its base association with the sexual act. These criteria were The grido described by Baldinucci has barely abated in the particularly significant, since not only did the three arts hold 375 years since the statue's completion-if anything, the in common the deceptions of fiction, but also (as we shall see) clamor has recently increased with the reopening of the Villa Renaissance commentators had located the origins of poetry, Borghese (for which the Apollo and Daphne was made and sculpture, and painting in mythic stories revolving around where it is still displayed), the cleaning and scientific examina- erotic desire. The merging of artist and artwork hinted at in tion of the statue group, and the quadricentennial of Berni- Baldinucci's text (the crowd's desire to see the statue gives way ni's birth. All three of these events generated catalogues to the need to lay eyes on its maker) also takes us back to the containing beautiful photographs, probing essays, and bibliog- intersection of art and myth: if Bernini's own transformation raphies listing such a quantity of secondary literature that one during these watershed years in his career is broadly analo- might reasonably ask if anything remains to be said about the gous to that of Daphne (who, after all, emerges from her Apollo and Daphne.3 (Indeed, one might dispute Baldinucci: metamorphosis immortalized), it was the poet-god Apollo the work's visual meraviglieseem to compel words rather than who would provide the young sculptor with a template from inhibit them.) Yet in spite of the ample documentary evi- which to fashion his mythic-artistic identity and recast the dence relating to the statue group's creation, the picture that poetics of his own art. emerges of its meaning and context is anything but clear. In a series of equally plausible arguments, the Apollo and Daphne is said to celebrate the sense-based pleasures of art (by way of its Bernini, Scipione Borghese, and Maffeo Barberini reference to the paragone debates),4 or to be about the evils of Bernini created the Apollo and Daphne over a three-year sensual poetry (by way of the inscription on its base, warning period, with some interruptions, beginning in the summer of against the bitterness of worldly beauty);5 it is an erotic 1622, when he was twenty-three years old.11 Commissioned by artwork, made for a hedonistic patron,6 or it is a Neoplatonic Cardinal Scipione Borghese, it was the third in a series of allegory of the sublimation of sensual lust into art, made for a life-size marble sculptures he ordered from Bernini to adorn discerning cardinal;7 it is Marinist and Petrarchan in its his luxurious villa outside the Porta Pinciana, the others being imagery,8 or it is anti-Marinist and anti-Petrarchan in its the Aeneas and Anchises (1618-19), the Pluto and Proserpinaof message.9 1621-22 (Fig. 2), and the David (1623-24).12 The group's That these readings can happily coexist in the modern delivery to the Villa Borghese in the fall of 1625 not only literature (and sometimes even appear as parts of the same completed that series of impressive statues, it also effectively argument) testifies to the richness of the story of Apollo and marked the end of Bernini's large-scale work for the cardinal 310 ART BULLETIN JUNE 2000 VOLUME LXXXII NUMBER 2 1 Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apolloand Daphne.Rome, Galleria Borghese (photo: Scala/Art Resource, New York) DESIDERIO AND DILETTO: BERNINI'S APOLLO AND DAPHNE 311 2 Bernini, Pluto and Proserpina.Rome, Galleria Borghese (photo: Alinari/Art Resource, New York) and signaled a turning point in the lives of both patron and which Borghese cannily presented to the new papal nephew, sculptor. 13 Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi), and also poetically, in its subject As has often been noted, Scipione Borghese's status plum- of loss (the immense power held by the cardinal's nephew- meted in early 1621, shortly after the death of his uncle Pope like Daphne's human beauty-is ultimately short-lived, and Paul V and the subsequent accession of the Bolognese pope the eager pursuer of each is in the end but a witness to its Gregory XV (who had not been the cardinal's first choice in transformation).16 Bernini's sculpted metamorphosis also the conclave). 4 While Borghese eventually recovered from coincides with a period of transition in his own career; in the his fall from grace, his role had changed; he was never again mid-1620s his principal source of patronage shifted from the the powerful Cardinal Nephew, responsible for setting the Borghese family-which, between Paul V and Scipione, had taste of the papal court, as he had been when Bernini began employed two generations of Berninis-to the newly ascen- to work for him in the 1610s.15 We may even view Bernini's dant Barberini family, which, after the short summer conclave Apollo and Daphne as an emblem of that change in fortune: following Gregory XV's death in 1623 could claim its own both concretely, in the apparent circumstances of its commis- pope.17 It could even be said that the change marked for the sion (it replaced Bernini's tour de force Pluto and Proserpina, artist a sort of passage into artistic maturity, a symbolic 312 ART BULLETIN JUNE 2000 VOLUME LXXXII NUMBER 2 severing of paternal bonds (it was, after all, Maffeo Barberini- return Cupid wounds Apollo with a golden arrow, inducing the future Urban VIII-who had first prophesied that the love, and wounds Daphne-a young nymph who had already young Bernini would surpass his father, and it was he who declared a desire for perpetual virginity-with a leaden arrow, took almost immediate advantage when this came to pass).18 causing flight from love.
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