Exhibition Overview
Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Naples, 1598 – Rome, 1680), sculptor, architect, designer, painter, and playwright transformed 17th century art. His contemporaries celebrated him for his skill, daring, and boundless creativity, and his name is now synonymous with the Baroque. This exhibition explores one part of his vast body of work: the sculpted portrait.
Originating in ancient Rome and later revived in the Renaissance, the portrait bust is among the most distinctive forms of Western art. While the likeness was convincing, busts traditionally showed their subject as static, and the result was closer to marble than to flesh. Rejecting this, Bernini instead focused on a moment in time, depicting his sitters as if in the midst of action. The result was not simply a likeness, but a life-likeness. His portraits seem to address us directly, engaging us and thus breaking the boundary between artwork and viewer. Led by Bernini’s example, other sculptors in Rome took up the challenge, creating new expectations for the art form. Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture is the first exhibition to focus on Bernini and his fellow sculptors’ radical innovations, tracing the evolution of the portrait bust from the 1620s through to the end of the century in Rome.
The exhibition brings together roughly 50 works by Bernini and his contemporaries – sculptures in marble, bronze, and porphyry, as well as paintings and drawings – including some 28 by Bernini. The Gallery’s own bust of the Barberini pope Urban VIII carved in 1632 is a focal point of the exhibition, where it will be richly complemented by significant loans from some of the most prestigious galleries in Europe and North America. Several private collectors have also generously agreed to loan works. Many have never been seen outside of Italy and many are unlikely to travel again. Therefore, visitors are presented with a unique opportunity to see these works together for the first time.
The exhibition is organized broadly chronologically, providing a comprehensive overview of Bernini’s artistic development. The broad arc is from precision to greater freedom and abstraction, and the exhibit includes works from his early twenties through to his seventies. During much of this time, Bernini was the most powerful artist in Rome, at times its virtual “artistic dictator,” and his works were famed across Europe. It was a unique life, and his contemporaries looked to Michelangelo – like Bernini a sculptor, painter, and architect – for a comparison. Others claimed that Bernini had surpassed the glories of Antiquity, still revered as the ultimate authority for the arts at this time. Still others condemned him, seeing him as breaking the rules and pushing the arts in unwelcome directions.
Many of the most powerful figures in Rome and Europe chose to have Bernini sculpt their portraits. Assembled here are not only portraits of popes, cardinals, rulers, and generals – but also artists, poets, and servants. They are young and old, Roman, French, and English. Among them are sculptures of three women – portraits, but also stereotypes of the mother, the noble wife, and the lover, three among the few roles publicly permissible to the sex. Bernini’s portrait of his lover Costanza Bonarelli is perhaps his most famous work on display, a record of the artist’s passion.
Thanks to his virtuosic skill, Bernini seems to effortlessly capture different textures and surfaces: silk, cotton, lace, and fur are distinguished, and made to seem unique, particular to that piece of clothing itself. A figure’s flesh is not generic, but specific to him or her: smooth, young, old, lined, tired, healthy, or taut. In Bernini’s hands, everything about a sculpture is particular, unique, and individual. It was more difficult to capture character, and even harder to bring marble to life. Bernini’s innovation lay in chosing to show his sitters caught in a moment in time – engaged in an action which would remain forever open and incomplete, and which calls out for our active participation. Sitters speak, or listen; they motion to us, or bless us; they catch our eyes; one turns, apparently startled. Bernini creates little dramas – stories which involve sculpture and viewer, assigning each their role to play.
The result was a new kind of portraiture, immediately celebrated and emulated. Bernini was the most famous sculptor to pursue this path, but others took up the challenge as well. Among the most talented were Alessandro Algardi and Giuliano Finelli, both rivals to Bernini. The heart of the exhibition illustrates the sudden explosion of creativity as different sculptors experimented with the portrait during the 1620s and ‘30s.
Painting had long pursued a similar path, and Bernini drew upon it in his own works. It had perhaps been the more prestigious medium, but under Bernini and his contemparies sculpture could be as ambitious and complex. Portraits by some of the leading painters of the period – Pietro da Cortona, Andrea Sacchi, Giovan Battista Gaulli, and Philippe de Champaigne – reveal the interplay between the two arts. In emulation of painting, the new sculpture was able to exploit the effects of light and shadow, and created analogies for colour itself – subtly playing with our perception in order to suggest, not show. Also included are Bernini’s drawings, intimate portraits of friends and acquaintances. They are as remarkable for their quality as for the audacity of their approach – sure and incisive images which exploit the medium to its fullest.