Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Portrait of Paul V, 1617-18, Carrara marble, height 34 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Portrait of Costanza Bonarelli, 1636-1638, Marble, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Portrait of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, second version, 1632, Marble, Galleria Borghese, Rome, Photography Archives, Special Superintendence for the Historical, Artistic and Ethnoanthropologic Heritage and for the Polo Museale of the City of Rome.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Portrait of Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, 1640-1641, Marble, Musée du Louvre, Paris, Photo © Hervé Lewandowski / Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resouce, New York.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, David, 1623-24, White marble, 170 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Rape of Proserpina, 1621-22, White marble, 255 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius, 1618-19, White marble, 220 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome.

National Gallery of Canada
380 Sussex Drive
613-990-1985
Ottawa
Bernini.
The Birth
of Baroque Portrait Sculpture
November 28, 2008-March 8, 2009

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 1630s.

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.

Art in Baroque Rome
The term “Baroque” refers not to a single style, but to a period and place: 17th century Rome. Beginning around 1600, the city saw a period of enormous creativity that come to influence art across Europe and the Americas. Roman art was diverse. Some artists favoured restraint, respectful of the models offered by Classical Antiquity and the Renaissance; others reinterpreted these models with greater freedom and strove to create new inventions.

Although the Baroque is now commonly associated with artifice, an important strand in the arts during this time was “naturalism,” the interest in capturing the appearance of things. Close observation of nature and its careful description was a routine shared by many artists, part of the collective fascination with materials and appearances. This interest in the material world was balanced by a preoccupation with the spiritual.

The development of the Baroque reflects the period's religious tensions (Catholic versus Protestant); a new and more expansive world view based on science and exploration; and the growth of absolutist monarchies. The Catholic Church was a great patron of the arts, and the period was marked by fervent religious belief. Artists sought to transcend inert matter and convey the immaterial and spiritual – character, soul, the divine — in their works.

Bernini’s Early Career
Gian Lorenzo’s father Pietro was a Florentine who had practiced as a painter before beginning a successful career as a sculptor. After several years working in Naples, where Bernini was born, Pietro took his family to Rome in 1605-06. There Bernini was trained in his father’s workshop from an early age. A prodigy, he was famed for his skill in carving marble and soon received important commissions. These included some twenty busts made when he was in his late teens and early twenties, during which he was most active as a portraitist. By the mid-1620s Bernini had come of age as a sculptor.

Bernini was remarkably attentive to the nature and appearance of different materials. His works convey the weight and quality of cloth worn by his subjects, the cotton marked by a matte surface, silk by its sheen. Their flesh seems soft or aged, pockmarked, sagging, or smooth. In Bernini’s work, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; each bust is highly individual and clearly imparts a sense of the sitter’s unique character. Yet despite their life-likeness, we never really forget that these are works of art carved from stone. This is part of their pleasure: Bernini astounds us with his skill in carving.

Bernini’s Portrait Drawings
Bernini depicted his subjects not as impassive models, but as engaged and responsive beings, aware that they were being observed. The sitters were likely friends, acquaintances, or family members, and the artist’s direct, informal approach was appropriate. In contrast, Bernini’s sculpted portraits depict the elite, placing greater distance between them and the viewer, a more dignified result suitable to their status. These portrait drawings span from the 1620s to the 1640s. His earlier drawings are more precise; his later works show greater freedom, privileging tone and effect over line and detail.

These works are unrelated to the sculptures. While Bernini did make preparatory drawings of his sitters to carve busts, only two now survive. He claimed that he drew his subjects to internalize their features and character and not to produce a model he would copy in stone. “I don’t want to copy myself, but create an original.”

Bernini’s portrait drawings are distinctive. The sitter is shown up close, filling most of the paper’s surface; the torso may be cropped by the edge of the paper, or summarily indicated. With its sense of immediacy, the composition evokes the photographer’s “close-up.” While carefully constructed and executed, Bernini’s handling of the chalk is quick and lively. He preferred to use black and red chalk, often using highlights in white chalk, over buff-coloured paper, which furnished the mid-range of tones.

Speaking Likeness: Intimacy & Immediacy in Bernini’s Portraits
In the early 1630s Bernini, who had temporarily abandoned portraiture, was asked by his patrons Cardinal Scipione Borghese and Pope Urban VIII for portrait busts. The result was a less formal and more intimate portrait that marked a decisive change in Bernini’s approach to the art form. Friend to both men, Bernini allows us the privilege of seeing them through his eyes: as men of power and status, but also as real, complex beings. Taking cues from contemporary painting, Bernini chose to portray his sitters in action. Scipione seems to speak and we listen. Lost in thought, Urban turns his head to acknowledge us, and we sense his right arm shift under his cape, as he begins to motion to us. The fleeting moment is preserved forever in stone. Caught up in their action, we respond as if we are now part of the drama. Viewer and artwork engage one another.

Drawing on a figure of speech used by Bernini’s contemporaries, modern scholars have termed Bernini’s portraits from this period “speaking likenesses.” This refers first to busts such as the Scipione which show the sitter in speech. More broadly, the term refers to Bernini’s ability to make inert marble “speak,” conveying both the illusion of life and the psychological presence of his sitters.

New Sensibilities:
Bernini’s Contemporaries
Beginning in the 1620s, portrait sculpture underwent a revolution: this traditional art form was now re-energized, and busts could be ambitious works of art. Simply by looking at these works, we can sense something of the excitement felt by both artists and patrons for the portrait bust. Bernini played a key part in this, but he was not the only sculptor to explore new possibilities for the portrait. Rome attracted artists from across Italy and Europe, bringing different traditions with them. This gallery presents works by François Duquesnoy (a native of Flanders), Francesco Mochi (from Tuscany), Giuliano Finelli (trained in Naples), and Alessandro Algardi (from Bologna). All strong personalities, they preserved their artistic independence, yet were also capable of drawing upon each other’s work. These sculptors worked within the same broad tradition of naturalism, but each had a distinct sensibility and approached portraiture differently.

Driven by these men, the expectations for portraiture were changing: busts were expected to not only combine life-likeness with psychological depth, but also to engage the viewer. Patrons welcomed this, and the works seen here reflect a profound change in how human personality and self-image were understood.

Bernini’s Triumph: Art for Rome and the Courts of Europe
The Protestant Reformation left the papacy politically and economically weak. To counter this, the popes pursued a policy of cultural politics: the arts were to be used to glorify the Church and papacy. Bernini’s talent was put to use. From the reign of Urban VIII Bernini came to dominate the Roman art world and his fame soon spread beyond the city. Other sculptors, such as Algardi or the brilliant, but short-lived, Melchiorre Cafà, worked in his shadow.

A portrait bust by Bernini was the ultimate in prestige, but few could commission one. Urban VIII and Alexander VII — who particularly favoured the artist — monopolized his talents and were jealous of potential rivals. Bernini’s work became caught up in international politics, and the right to employ him could be granted by the pope as a favour, or won by political pressure. Commissions from England and France testify to the prestige of papal Rome and the spread of its art throughout Europe. Bernini’s work also reached the Americas: in 1686 a bronze version of his Louis XIV was set up in the Place Royale in Quebec City by the colony’s Governor.

Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture is co-organized by the National Gallery of Canada and the J. Paul Getty Museum.