Bernini: He Had the Touch by Ingrid D. Rowland | The New York Review of Books Pagina 1 di 11 Bernini: He Had the Touch Ingrid D. Rowland JUNE 4, 2015 ISSUE Portraits of the Soul an exhibition at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, November 6, 2014–February 8, 2015 Bernini: Roma y la Monarquía Hispánica [Bernini: Rome and the Spanish Monarchy] Catalog of the Prado exhibition by Delfín Rodríguez Ruiz Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 189 pp., €42.00 (paper) Bernini’s Beloved: A Portrait of Costanza Piccolomini by Sarah McPhee Yale University Press, 260 pp., $50.00 Barocco a Roma: La Meraviglia delle Arti [The Baroque in Rome: The Wonders of Art] an exhibition at the Fondazione Roma Museo, Palazzo Cipolla, Rome, April 1–July 26, 2015 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Maria Grazia Bernardini and Marco Bussagli Milan: Skira, 445 pp., €42.00 (paper) Bernini at Saint Peter’s: The Pilgrimage by Irving Lavin London: Pindar, 374 pp., £195.00 Bernini: Sculpting in Clay by C.D. Dickerson III, Anthony Sigel, Ian Wardropper, and others Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Yale University Press, 416 pp., $65.00 In 1619, at the ripe age of twenty, Gian Lorenzo Bernini set himself the seemingly impossible challenge of carving the human soul in marble. Two souls, in fact: a blessed soul bound for Heaven and a wicked soul newly damned to Hell, the most insubstantial of beings portrayed in solid stone from the neck up. These two remarkable images, preserved since the seventeenth century in the Spanish embassy in Rome, recently provided the focus for a small but choice exhibition at the Museo del Prado in Madrid. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/04/bernini-he-had-touch/?utm_co... 25/05/2015 Bernini: He Had the Touch by Ingrid D. Rowland | The New York Review of Books Pagina 2 di 11 The Blessed Soul is female, with a Embassy of Spain, Rome/Carolina Marconi classical profile and a classical coiffure, Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Anima dannata (Damned Soul), circa 1619 crowned with a garland of roses frozen forever. Between her parted lips we can just detect a row of perfect teeth, a feat of detailing that the ancient Greeks and Romans regarded as proof of a consummate sculptor—and Bernini had no intention of lagging behind the ancients, or anyone else. The blessed soul’s eyes are carved with irises and pupils upturned toward her heavenly reward, like the pearly-skinned damsels that the painter Guido Reni was churning out at the same moment. In her perfection, the Blessed Soul lacks every trace of personality, but perhaps this is the point; she has been purified of every fault. The Damned Soul, by contrast, is male, and unmistakably individual, from his definite features—heavy brow, corrugated forehead, a wisp of mustache—to his wild expression and his crazy flamelike hair, bristling with horror at what he sees before him. He is a self-portrait of Bernini, making faces in a mirror as he envisions the torments of Hell, and we can see not only his full set of rather sharp teeth but also his tongue, so highly polished that it seems realistically wet. To suggest the infernal flames reflected in the Damned Soul’s dark, intent eyes, Bernini has hollowed out their irises, leaving a pinpoint of white marble in the center of each to capture a fiery gleam. In making his imaginative leap into the Inferno, the young artist may have used the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, where Hell appeared on the fifth day of the first week of a month-long discipline. Loyola sounded the depths of perdition by appealing to the five earthly senses, and so does Bernini’s marble head. Loyola writes: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/04/bernini-he-had-touch/?utm_co... 25/05/2015 Bernini: He Had the Touch by Ingrid D. Rowland | The New York Review of Books Pagina 3 di 11 First Point. The first Point will be to see with the sight of the imagination the great fires, and the souls as in bodies of fire. Second Point. The second, to hear with the ears wailings, howlings, cries, blasphemies against Christ our Lord and against all His Saints. Third Point. The third, to smell with the smell smoke, sulphur, dregs and putrid things. Fourth Point. The fourth, to taste with the taste bitter things, like tears, sadness and the worm of conscience. Fifth Point. The fifth, to touch with the touch; that is to say, how the fires touch and burn the souls. The stench of sulphur and smoke visibly wrinkles the Damned Soul’s nose, making those mephitic vapors easier to imagine than the scent of the Blessed Soul’s crown of roses. Bernini seems to have no doubt about where he and his viewers will end their days. The artist often served as his own model, especially in the early phases of his career. Some two years before carving these souls for the Spanish monsignor Pedro de Foix Montoya, he created a life-sized statue of Saint Lawrence (1617), his name-saint, who was put to death by roasting on a gridiron. To give the martyred deacon’s face a plausible sense of agony, the eighteen-year-old Gian Lorenzo reportedly thrust his own thigh into the fire while watching his face in a mirror (Lawrence himself, on the other hand, with saintly aplomb, was said to have joked, “Turn me over; I think I’m done on this side”). A large-as-life statue of David (1623–1624), loading the slingshot that will bring down Goliath, bites his lip with fierce concentration, as Bernini himself must have done so often when he picked up hammer and chisel, or sank his hands into a slab of clay. Like Saint Lawrence, David must have acted as a kind of alter ego for the young sculptor, a small, fierce man of singular charm who had a burning urge to create, and a colossal libido to match. Like David, marksman, king, and poet, Gian Lorenzo Bernini was precocious, authoritative, and versatile: he had the touch no matter what he put his hand to. He could make limp swags of drapery swirl and throb as if some sort of lifeblood ran through them, like the corkscrew gyres of the cloak that twist around Apollo’s loins as he reaches for the nymph Daphne (1622–1624) and feels her skin turn to bark under his fingertips. Sculpted http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/04/bernini-he-had-touch/?utm_co... 25/05/2015 Bernini: He Had the Touch by Ingrid D. Rowland | The New York Review of Books Pagina 4 di 11 twenty-five years apart, Bernini’s two life-size images of saintly women in ecstasy, Saint Teresa of Avila (1645–1652; see illustration below) and Blessed Ludovica Albertoni (1671–1674), convey their passionate spiritual state by the agitation of their heavy clothing as well as the expressive, elusive hints of faces, hands, and feet. Bernini’s tomb of Pope Alexander VII in St. Peter’s Basilica (1671–1678) shows a gilt bronze skeleton struggling to emerge from a dense shroud of mottled red marble: a human soul is struggling to break free of its carnal clothing, the flesh rendered as a literal curtain of meat. As simple an object as the black-and-yellow marble drape that clings improbably to a Gothic pillar in the Roman church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the tomb monument of a pious widow named Sister Maria Raggi (1647), still flutters after all these centuries in a secret celestial breeze. For so small a man (the fingerprints preserved on his terra-cotta models are surprisingly tiny), Bernini exerted a titanic influence on the arts and the cityscape of seventeenth-century Rome, where he spent nearly the whole of his long life. His father, Pietro, was a Florentine sculptor who worked in Naples before settling in Rome with his growing family when Gian Lorenzo was eight. The elder Bernini modeled his own carving technique on Imperial Roman sculpture, with its copious drill work and high polish, but the son departed quickly from his father’s distinctive style, using rasp and chisel where Pietro drilled and polished. Already executing sculptural commissions as a teenager, Gian Lorenzo quickly branched out from sculpture into painting, architecture, theater, urban planning, and the vast universe of the decorative arts. Fiery and driven, he became all the greater as an artist because he was forced to compete for attention with stupendous rivals: Pietro da Cortona in painting and architecture, Alessandro Algardi in sculpture, and Francesco Borromini, the greatest—and most demanding—architect of them all. The magnet that attracted all these talented souls was papal Rome. By the seventeenth century, thanks to the Protestant Reformation and the rise of Spain and France as nation-states, the city had lost political and religious significance. The papacy compensated for those losses by reinforcing Roman, and Catholic, dominion over the arts. For more than six decades, that dominion depended on the versatile hands and ruthless charm of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, whose skills, already from an early age, included the ability to run a large artistic workshop along with an impressive series of building sites, beginning with the perpetual work in progress of St. Peter’s Basilica. He was notoriously thrifty when it came to paying his subordinates, and several struck out on their own, none more loudly than http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/04/bernini-he-had-touch/?utm_co..