Principais obras de gian lorenzo bernini biography

The Amaltea Goat and the Santoni and Giovani Vigevano busts, works made for churches that are still of incomparable beauty. Between andGian Lorenzo Bernini made four of his main works, which would give him the name of master of sculpture and launch him immediately to fame. We are talking about the four Borghesians. These were sculptures based on mythological and biblical themes, commissioned by Cardinal Borghese.

Among the main paintings in which Gian Lorenzo Bernini developed his work were portraits. Throughout his career as an artist, he made several portraits for high church officials, such as popes, kings and nobles, who, in turn, gave him great wealth. It was also common to see him portray the heroic in the paintings, giving emphasis all the time to expression and magnificence.

At the beginning of his work, Bernini showed great respect for the classic canons influenced by his father. His works of art are full of virtuosity and naturalness with a chiaroscuro effect. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails. When he pulled it out I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God.

It was this depth of emotion that Bernini sought to capture in his statues. The sculpture has fascinated and enamoured both the art-world and ordinary people — causing the diverging appearance of the inner meaning. Simon Schama writes. Scholars have fallen over themselves to warn us that what we are looking at could not possibly be a moment of sensual surrender.

During his early adult life, Bernini did not wish to marry. When pressed by the pope to marry, Bernini replied his artworks were his children. He felt art to be his divine calling and he never suffered from false modesty. However, inBernini began an affair with a married woman called Constanza. He created a passionate portrait bust of her and put it on full display in Several extant works, dating c.

Bernini was therefore presented before Pope Paul V, curious to see if the stories about Gian Lorenzo's talent were true. The boy improvised a sketch of Saint Paul for the marvelling pope, and this was the beginning of the pope's attention on this young talent. Once he was brought to Rome, he rarely left its walls, except much against his will for a five-month stay in Paris in the service of King Louis XIV and brief trips to nearby towns including CivitavecchiaTivoli and Castelgandolfomostly for work-related reasons.

Bernini's works are therefore often characterized as perfect expressions of the spirit of the assertive, triumphal but self-defensive Counter Reformation Catholic Church. Certainly, Bernini was a man of his times and deeply religious at least later in life[ 9 ] but he and his artistic production should not be reduced simply to instruments of the papacy and its political-doctrinal programs, an impression that is at times communicated by the works of the three most eminent Bernini scholars of the previous generation, Rudolf WittkowerHoward Hibbardand Irving Lavin.

Under the patronage of the extravagantly wealthy and most powerful Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the young Bernini rapidly rose to prominence as a sculptor. Another small garden ornament work in the Galleria Borghese since Bernini's lifetimeThe Goat Amalthea with the Infant Jupiter and a Faunwas from until generally considered by scholars to be the earliest work executed entirely by the young Bernini himself, despite the fact that it is never mentioned in any of the contemporary sources, except for a late reference as a Bernini work by Joachim von Sandrart, a German visitor to Rome, an attribution that was given no credence until the twentieth century.

Indeed, the official Catalogo generale vol. Instead, among Bernini's earliest and securely documented work is his collaboration on his father's commission of February from Cardinal Maffeo Barberini to create four marble putti for the Barberini family chapel in the church of Sant'Andrea della Vallethe contract stipulating that his son Gian Lorenzo would assist in the execution of the statues.

Although the Michelangelo statue-completion commission came to principais obras de gian lorenzo bernini biography, the young Bernini was shortly thereafter in commissioned to repair and complete a famous work of antiquity, the Sleeping Hermaphroditus owned by Cardinal Scipione Borghese Galleria BorgheseRome and later c. Also dating to this early period are the so-called Damned Soul and Blessed Soul of c.

Paul Getty Museum. Bernini's reputation, however, was definitively established by four masterpieces, executed between andall now displayed in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. To the art historian Rudolf Wittkower these four works— Aeneas, Anchises, and AscaniusThe Rape of Proserpina —22Apollo and Daphne —and David —24 —"inaugurated a new era in the history of European sculpture.

Bernini's early sculpture groups and portraits manifest "a command of the human form in motion and a technical sophistication rivalled only by the greatest sculptors of classical antiquity. Unlike sculptures done by his predecessors, these focus on specific points of narrative tension in the stories they are trying to tell: Aeneas and his family fleeing the burning Troy ; the instant that Pluto finally grasps the hunted Persephone ; the precise moment that Apollo sees his beloved Daphne begin her transformation into a tree.

They are transitory but dramatic powerful moments in each story. Bernini's David is another stirring example of this. Michelangelo's motionless, idealized David shows the subject holding a rock in one hand and a sling in the other, contemplating the battle; similarly immobile versions by other Renaissance artists, including Donatello 's, show the subject in his triumph after the battle with Goliath.

Bernini illustrates David during his active combat with the giant, as he twists his body to catapult toward Goliath. To emphasize these moments and to ensure that they were appreciated by the viewer, Bernini designed the sculptures with a specific viewpoint in mind, though he sculpted them fully in the round. Their original placements within the Villa Borghese were against walls so that the viewers' first view was the dramatic moment of the narrative.

The result of such an approach is to invest the sculptures with greater psychological energy. The viewer finds it easier to gauge the state of mind of the characters and therefore understands the larger story at work: Daphne's wide open mouth in fear and astonishment, David biting his lip in determined concentration, or Proserpina desperately struggling to free herself.

This is shown by how Bernini portrays her braids coming undone which reveals her emotional distress. The tousled hair of Pluto, the pliant flesh of Proserpinaor the forest of leaves beginning to envelop Daphne all demonstrate Bernini's exactitude and delight for representing complex real world textures in marble form. Peter by another admiring friend of Bernini's, Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi, who became Pope Gregory XV : although his reign was very short he died inPope Gregory commissioned portraits of himself both in marble and bronze by Bernini.

The pontiff also bestowed upon Bernini the honorific rank of 'Cavaliere,' the title with which for the rest of his life the artist was habitually referred. In came the ascent to the papal throne of his aforementioned friend and former tutor, Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, as Pope Urban VIIIand henceforth until Urban's death in Bernini enjoyed near monopolistic patronage from the Barberini pope and family.

The new Pope Urban is reported to have remarked, "It is a great fortune for you, O Cavaliere, to see Cardinal Maffeo Barberini made pope, but our fortune is even greater to have Cavalier Bernini alive in our pontificate. Under Urban VIII's patronage, Bernini's horizons rapidly and widely broadened: he was not just producing sculpture for private residences, but playing the most significant artistic and engineering role on the city stage, as sculptor, architect, and urban planner.

To great protest from older, experienced master architects, he, with virtually no architectural training to his name, was appointed "Architect of St Peter's" inupon the death of Carlo Maderno. From then on, Bernini's work and artistic vision would be placed at the symbolic heart of Rome. Bernini's artistic pre-eminence under Urban VIII and later under Alexander VII meant he was able to secure the most important commissions in the Rome of his day, namely, the various massive embellishment projects of the newly finished St.

Within the basilica he was responsible for the Baldacchinothe decoration of the four piers under the cupola, the Cathedra Petri or Chair of St. Peter in the apse, the Tomb of Countess Matilda of Tuscanythe chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in the right nave, and the decoration floor, walls and arches of the new nave. The Baldacchino immediately became the visual centrepiece of the basilica.

Designed as a massive spiraling gilded bronze canopy over the tomb of St Peter, Bernini's four-columned principais obras de gian lorenzo bernini biography reached nearly 30 m 98 ft from the ground and cost aroundRoman scudi about 8 million US dollars in the currency of the early 21st century. Among the latter is the majestic St.

In the basilica Bernini also began work on the tomb for Urban VIII, completed only after Urban's death inone in a long, distinguished series of tombs and funerary monuments for which Bernini is famous and a traditional genre upon which his influence left an enduring mark, often copied by subsequent artists. Peter's Basilica, represents, according to Erwin Panofskythe very pinnacle of European funerary art, whose creative inventiveness subsequent artists could not hope to surpass.

Despite this busy engagement with large works of public architecture, Bernini was still able to devote himself to his sculpture, especially portraits in marble, but also large statues such as the life-size Saint BibianaChurch of Santa BibianaRome. Bernini's portraits show his ever-increasing ability to capture the utterly distinctive personal characteristics of his sitters, as well as his ability to achieve in cold white marble almost painterly-like effects that render with convincing realism the various surfaces involved: human flesh, hair, fabric of varying type, metal, etc.

These portraits included a number of busts of Urban VIII himself, the family bust of Francesco Barberini and most notably, the Two Busts of Scipione Borghese —the second of which had been rapidly created by Bernini once a flaw had been found in the marble of the first. To Rudolf Wittkower the "beholder feels that in the twinkle of an eye not only might the expression and attitude change but also the folds of the casually arranged mantle".

Other marble portraits in this period include that of Costanza Bonarelli unusual in its more personal, intimate nature. At the time of the sculpting of the portrait, Bernini was having an affair with Costanzawife of one of his assistants, sculptor, Matteo. Indeed, it would appear to be the first marble portrait of a non-aristocratic woman by a major artist in European history.

Beginning in the late s, now known in Europe as one of the most accomplished portraitists in marble, Bernini also began to receive royal commissions from outside Rome, for subjects such as Cardinal Richelieu of France, Francesco I d'Este the powerful Duke of ModenaCharles I of England and his wife, Queen Henrietta Maria. The bust of Charles I was produced in Rome from a triple portrait oil on canvas executed by Van Dyckthat survives today in the British Royal Collection.

The bust of Charles was lost in the Whitehall Palace fire of though its design is known through contemporary copies and drawings and that of Henrietta Maria was not undertaken due to the outbreak of the English Civil War. Inwith the death of Pope Urban with whom Bernini had been so intimately connected and the ascent to power of the fierce Barberini-enemy Pope Innocent X PamphiljBernini's career suffered a major, unprecedented eclipse, which was to last four years.

This had not only to do with Innocent's anti-Barberini politics but also with Bernini's role in the disastrous project of the new bell towers for St. Peter's basilica, designed and supervised entirely by Bernini. The infamous bell tower affair was to be the biggest failure of his career, both professionally and financially. Ineager to finally finish the exterior of St.

Despite the presence of the cracks, work only stopped in July once the papal treasury had been exhausted by the disastrous Wars of Castro. Knowing that Bernini could no longer depend on the protection of a favourable pope, his enemies especially Francesco Borromini raised a great alarm over the cracks, predicting a disaster for the whole basilica and placing the blame entirely on Bernini.

The subsequent investigations, in fact, revealed the cause of the cracks as Maderno's defective foundations and not Bernini's elaborate design, an exoneration later confirmed by the meticulous investigation conducted in under Pope Innocent XI. Nonetheless, Bernini's opponents in Rome succeeded in seriously damaging the reputation of Urban's artist and in persuading Pope Innocent to order in February the complete demolition of both towers, to Bernini's great humiliation and indeed financial detriment in the form of a substantial fine for the failure of the work.

After this, one of the rare failures of his career, Bernini retreated into himself: according to his son, Domenico. Although he received no personal commissions from Innocent or the Pamphilj family in the early years of the new papacy, Bernini did not lose his former positions granted to him by previous popes. Innocent X maintained Bernini in all of the official roles given to him by Urban, including his most prestigious one as "Architect of St.

Peter's, with the addition of elaborate multi-coloured marble flooring, marble facing on the walls and pilasters, and scores of stuccoed statues and reliefs. It is not without reason that Pope Alexander VII once quipped, 'If one were to remove from Saint Peter's everything that had been made by the Cavalier Bernini, that temple would be stripped bare.

If there had been doubts over Bernini's position as Rome's preeminent artist, they were definitively removed by the unqualified success of the marvellously delightful and technically ingenious Four Rivers Fountain, featuring a heavy ancient obelisk placed over a void created by a cavelike rock formation placed in the centre of an ocean of exotic sea creatures.

Bernini continued to receive commissions from Pope Innocent X and other senior members of Rome's clergy and aristocracy, as well as from exalted patrons outside of Rome, such as Francesco d'Este. Recovering quickly from the humiliation of the bell towers, Bernini's boundless creativity continued as before. New types of funerary monument were designed, such as, in the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minervathe seemingly floating medallion, hovering in the air as it were, for the deceased nun Maria Raggiwhile chapels he designed, such as the Raimondi Chapel in the church of San Pietro in Montorioillustrated how Bernini could use hidden lighting to help suggest divine intervention within the narratives he was depicting and to add a dramatically theatrical "spotlight" to enhance the main focus of the space.

One of the most accomplished and celebrated works to come from Bernini's hand in this period was the Cornaro Family Chapel in the small Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. The Cornaro Chapel inaugurated in showcased Bernini's ability to integrate sculpture, architecture, fresco, stucco, and lighting into "a marvellous whole" bel compostoto use early biographer Filippo Baldinucci's term to describe his approach to architecture and thus create what scholar Irving Lavin has called the "unified work of art".

The central focus of the Cornaro Chapel is the Ecstasy of Saint Teresadepicting the so-called "transverberation" of the Spanish nun and saint-mystic, Teresa of Avila. On either side of the chapel the artist places in what can only strike the viewer as theatre boxesportraits in relief of various members of the Cornaro family—the Venetian family memorialized in the chapel, including Cardinal Federico Cornaro who commissioned the chapel from Bernini—who are in animated conversation among themselves, presumably about the event taking place before them.

The result is a complex but subtly orchestrated architectural environment providing the spiritual context a heavenly setting with a hidden source of light that suggests to viewers the ultimate nature of this miraculous event. Nonetheless, during Bernini's lifetime and in the centuries following till this very day, Bernini's Saint Teresa has been accused of crossing a line of decency by sexualizing the visual depiction of the saint's experience, to a degree that no artist, before or after Bernini, dared to do: in depicting her at an impossibly young chronological age, as an idealized delicate beauty, in a semi-prostrate position with her mouth open and her legs splayed-apart, her wimple coming undone, with prominently displayed bare feet Discalced Carmelitesfor modesty, always wore sandals with heavy stockings and with the seraph "undressing" her by unnecessarily parting her mantle to penetrate her heart with his arrow.

Principais obras de gian lorenzo bernini biography: Seus principais projetos arquitetônicos incluem

Matters of decorum aside, Bernini's Teresa was still an artistic tour de force that incorporates all of the multiple forms of visual art and technique that Bernini had at his disposal, including hidden lighting, thin gilded beams, recessive architectural space, secret lens, and over twenty diverse types of colored marble: these all combine to create the final artwork—"a perfected, highly dramatic and deeply satisfying seamless ensemble".

Upon his accession to the Chair of St Peter, Pope Alexander VII Chigi reigned — began to implement his extremely ambitious plan to transform Rome into a magnificent world capital by means of systematic, bold and costly urban planning. In so doing, he brought to fruition the long, slow recreation of the urban glory of Rome—the deliberate campaign for the " renovatio Romae "—that had begun in the fifteenth century under the Renaissance popes.

Over the course of his pontificate, Alexander commissioned many large-scale architectural changes in the city—indeed, some of the most significant ones in the city's recent history and for years to come—choosing Bernini as his principal collaborator though other architects, especially Pietro da Cortonawere also involved. Thus did commence another extraordinarily prolific and successful chapter in Bernini's career.

Bernini's major commissions during this period include St. Peter's Square. In a previously broad, irregular, and completely unstructured space, he created two massive semi-circular colonnades, each row of which was formed of four simple white Doric columns. In addition to being logistically efficient for carriages and crowds, Bernini's design was completely in harmony with the pre-existing buildings and added to the majesty of the basilica.

Often likened to two arms reaching out from the church to embrace the waiting crowd, Bernini's creation extended the symbolic greatness of the Vatican area, creating an emotionally thrilling and "exhilarating expanse" that was, architecturally, an "unequivocal success". Elsewhere within the Vatican, Bernini created systematic rearrangements and majestic embellishment of either empty or aesthetically undistinguished spaces that exist as he designed them to the present day and have become indelible icons of the splendour of the papal precincts.

Within the hitherto unadorned apse of the basilica, the Cathedra Petrithe symbolic throne of St Peter, was rearranged as a monumental gilded bronze extravagance that matched the Baldacchino created earlier in the century.

Principais obras de gian lorenzo bernini biography: Early life Giovanni Lorenzo

Bernini's complete reconstruction of the Scala Regiathe stately papal stairway between St. Peters's and the Vatican Palace, was slightly less ostentatious in appearance but still taxed Bernini's creative powers employing, for example, clever tricks of optical illusion to create a seemingly uniform, totally functional, but nonetheless regally impressive stairway to connect two irregular buildings within an even more irregular space.

Not all works during this era were on such a large scale. Indeed, the commission Bernini received to build the church of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale for the Jesuits was relatively modest in physical size though great in its interior chromatic splendourwhich Bernini executed completely free of charge. Sant'Andrea shared with Piazza San Pietro—unlike the complex geometries of his rival Francesco Borromini —a focus on basic geometric shapes, circles, and ovals to create spiritually intense spaces.

Thomas of Villanova in Castelgandolfo —61Bernini completely eschewed the rich polychrome marble decoration dramatically seen in Sant'Andrea and the Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria, in favour of an essentially white, somewhat stark interior, albeit still much adorned with stucco work and painted altarpieces. At the end of Apriland still considered the most important artist in Rome, if indeed not in all of Europe, Bernini was forced by political pressure from both the French court and Pope Alexander VII to travel to Paris to work for King Louis XIVwho required an architect to complete work on the royal palace of the Louvre.

Bernini would remain in Paris until mid-October. Bernini was popular among the crowds who gathered wherever he stopped, which led him to compare his itinerary to the travelling exhibition of an elephant. But things soon turned sour. It is often stated in the scholarship on Bernini that his Louvre designs were turned down because Louis and his finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert considered them too Italianate or too Baroque in style.

The explicit reasons for the rejections were utilitarian, namely, on the level of physical security and comfort e. His frequent negative comments on various aspects of French culture, especially its art and architecture, did not go down well, particularly in juxtaposition to his praise for the art and architecture of Italy especially Rome ; he said that a painting by Guido Renithe Annunciation altarpiece then in the Carmelite convent, now the Louvre Museumwas "alone worth half of Paris.

Back in Rome, Bernini created a monumental equestrian statue of Louis XIV ; when it finally reached Paris infive years after the artist's deaththe French king found it extremely repugnant and wanted it destroyed; it was instead re-carved into a representation of the ancient Roman hero Marcus Curtius. Bernini remained physically and mentally vigorous and active in his profession until just two weeks before his death which came as a result of a stroke.

The pontificate of his old friend, Clement IXwas too short barely two years to accomplish more than the dramatic refurbishment by Bernini of the Ponte Sant'Angelowhile the artist's elaborate plan, under Clement, for a new apse for the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore came to an unpleasant end in the midst of public uproar over its cost and the destruction of ancient mosaics that it entailed.

The last two popes of Bernini's life, Clement X and Innocent XIwere both not especially close or sympathetic to Bernini and not particularly interested in financing works of art and architecture, especially given the disastrous conditions of the papal treasury.

Principais obras de gian lorenzo bernini biography: Praça São Pedro no Europa. Vaticano

The most important commission by Bernini, executed entirely by him in just six months inunder Clement X was the statue of the Blessed Ludovica Albertonianother nun-mystic. The latter commission is an outstanding confirmation of both Bernini's continuing professional reputation and good health of mind and body even in advanced old age, inasmuch as the pope had chosen him over any number of talented younger architects plentiful in Rome, for this prestigious and most difficult assignment since, as his son Domenico points out, "deterioration of the palace had advanced to such an extent that the threat of its imminent collapse was quite apparent.

Shortly after the completion of the latter project, Bernini died in his home on 28 November and was buried, with little public fanfare, in the simple, unadorned Bernini family vault, along with his parents, in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. The artist recovers the traditional type of the baldachin that had distinguished religious art in Italy for centuries, but he revisits it profoundly because in accordance with Baroque aesthetics the artist imagines a structure capable of fusing together different types of art architecture, sculpture and paintingsince one of the main characteristics of Baroque art lies precisely in the fusion of different art formswhich also happened punctually in painting especially in the large scenic frescoes where the painted scene depicted fake architecture that broke through vaults and walls and where it was not uncommon to find sculptures painted in such a way that they could look real.

The contamination, in the St. These elements return in a masterpiece such as the Ecstasy of St. As with St. Theresa and the angel, in order to let natural light filter in to illuminate the whole group, creating reflections even on the magnificent golden rays that stand behind the two figures and symbolize divine light at this link you can find a detailed in-depth discussion of the work.

Principais obras de gian lorenzo bernini biography: A escultura barroca é

In the former, dating from and commissioned by Urban VIII, two dolphins hold the valves of a large shell on which the triton finds space, blowing into its bucina, from which water gushes forth. These elements fuse together resulting in a sculpture that resembles an architectural structure the dolphins look like a column, the shell a capital. The Fountain exalts another of the founding elements of the Baroque, namely the taste for highly scenic apparatus: Bernini, here, reaches one of the heights of his theatricality, thanks to a combination of several factors such as the upward thrust, the effects created by light and water, the often daring positions of the various elements of the fountain, and the curious appearance of many details the animals, for example.

Bernini was, in essence, the ultimate interpreter of Baroque taste in sculpture, dictating tastes and trends in seventeenth-century sculpture. A visit to St. Longinus, the monumental tombs of the popes, and the Capitoline Museums where the great statue of Urban VIII towers and where the marvelous Medusa can be admired. The Uffizi, on the other hand, preserves an early work, the Martyrdom of St.

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