Continuing my quest to learn more about Art, I present to you
Bernini — the Pope’s architect, the supreme sculptor of Rome, a
man who practised Jesuitical discipline every day. Where should
we start? Can you look at this picture with an innocent eye? I
thought not. A french aristocratic connoisseur passing through
Rome on the Grand Tour, the Chevalier de Brosses, took on look
at the sculpture and remarked: “Well, if that’s divine love, I
know all about it.” “Gianlorenzo Bernini,” Simon Schama writes
in The Power of Art, “cared a great deal about likeness, to the
point where he redefined it as more than appearance. True
likeness — the kind he wanted to capture in his sculptures — was
the animation of character, expressed in the movements of bodies
and faces.” At the time it was thought that only pictures could
generate “the sense of being in a warm-blooded, living
presence.” Bernini proved that sculpture could as well. “Stone
could be made to pulse with natural action. Out of the smooth,
chill marble would spr