Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture

Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture

Getty Center, Los Angeles

Through Oct. 26

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Gian Lorenzo Bernini was one of those artists who transformed his chosen medium, said Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times. Born in 1598, the sculptor “more or less invented Italian baroque art” before he turned 35. Yet until now “there has never been a major Bernini sculpture show in the United States,” for the simple reason that most of his creations “are unlikely ever to be moved from their Roman museums” or their pedestals in public spaces there. This exhibition unites 28 seminal works by Bernini and his contemporaries to chronicle how the prolific artist “transformed the dreary portrait bust, a tradition largely inert since ancient Rome,” into a showcase for Renaissance humanism. His 1622 marble of Antonio Cepparelli “has long been regarded as a turning point in the history of sculpture portraits.” This psychological representation of a “world-weary” man not only is life-like and emotionally present but also “brilliantly suggests a body whose weight is subtly shifting in space.”

In Bernini’s younger days, his renowned technical skill ensured that his portraits were “much in demand by popes, cardinals, and aristocrats,” said Stephen West in Bloomberg.com. As he matured into middle age, the sculptor created works with more personal meaning. One portrays Bernini’s most important early patron, Scipione Borghese, a portly sophisticate who seems about to speak. Another “breathtaking” visage is of the artist’s mistress, Costanza Buonarelli. “The simple collar of her blouse is open at the neck, exposing the curve of her breast,” and she looks startled, as if someone has just entered the room. “Short of a visit to Rome, the Getty exhibition offers the most concentrated, impressive group of Bernini’s work” you’ll ever see.

That’s actually an understatement, said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. “One of the outstanding displays of 17th-century European sculpture in this country in recent decades,” this exhibition establishes Bernini as the essential artist of his era. In these works, we see him perfecting the “virtuosic naturalism, kinetic emotionalism, and highflying formal glamour” that would liberate the imaginations of sculptors all over Europe. The sources of Bernini’s revolutionary style can seem paradoxical, as “his invention was almost always at the service of a conservative political and religious elite.” But this was just one of the artist’s many fruitful contradictions. There can be no doubt that “his blend of realism and idealism, of fleeting impression and monumentality, instantly expanded the possibilities of sculptural portraiture.”