Not content with being the greatest sculptor of his age and one of its most gifted architects, Gian Lorenzo Bernini had some talent as a painter and draftsman. Surviving self-portraits reveal him as the possessor of a positively overstated physique du role. In its most youthful incarnation the face has an air of presumption and entitlement which adulthood will darken with a combativeness that is almost wolfish. Even in the chalk drawing made around his 80th birthday (now in the Royal Collection at Windsor) the glance, under bushy white eyebrows, still smoulders and the slightly parted lips seem poised to challenge or command.
Born in Naples in 1598, Bernini spent almost the whole of his working life in Rome, a city whose profile he memorably refashioned and to whose rulers he became indispensable as an image-maker. The subtitle of Franco Mormando’s vigorous, keenly researched biography is instructive. The Rome most of us go to see belongs as much to this stubborn, tyrannical wizard of the Baroque as to the Caesars, the late-Antique mosaicists or Michelangelo on his Sistine scaffolding.
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