- Italian sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) becomes the hottest artist in Rome.
- Simon Schama details the life and most of the works of Italian master sculptor Bernini, including his rivalry with other artists which helped lead to his disastrous design for bell towers at St. Peter's Basillica. The overview of several of his sculpture masterpieces includes The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.—Ron Kerrigan <mvg@whidbey.com>
- Simon argues Bernini changed the nature of sculpture from classical grandeur for immortality but without a soul to a lifelike rendering. Already at 8 Gian Lorenzo Bernini, son of a Florentine artist, impressed the pope as a potential successor to Michelangelo Buenarotti. After good training, he arrived in Rome in 1615, when Caravaggio's unsurpassed expressive painting triumphed. Cardinal Scipione Borghese patronized him. He showed discipline and perfect manners, a charismatic rising star soon knighted and becoming a papal intimus, also venturing in various other art forms, soon dominating Rome's art scene. In architecture Francesco Borromini proved a more then worthy, bitter rival, yet Bernini's charm offensive landed him the commission for the baldacchino above St. Peter's grave in the papal basilica, for which he hired Borromini as assistant but took full credit, typical for his abusive way with collaborators, one even lost his lover to the Cavaliere: Costanza, a Piccolomini, who cuckolded him with his own, talented brother Luigi, whom he nearly beat to death and had Costanza disfigured, yet he alone got off with a fine and was ordered to marry a beautiful lawyer's daughter. Alas his career was wrecked by an ill-conceived project to fit St.Peter's with two giant bell-towers on marshy soil, yet redeemed by respectable cardinal Cornaro's commission for a church statue in its own architectural framing of St. Theresa of Avila, matching the sensual suggestion of her mystical writings.—KGF Vissers
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