"I have overcome the difficulty of making marble like wax."
Marvellous marble
When does ardour become obsession? When does attraction turn into burning, all-consuming lust? In a dark alcove of Santa Maria Della Vitoria, in Rome, there lays an answer to such a conundrum. For there sits St. Theresa, immortalised in full, ecclesiastical rapture, her full sensuous awakening chiselled and polished into the obdurate marble, her body yielding to a powerful celestial bliss.
Affinity with stone
Every stroke that Gian Lorenzo Bernini took, every indelible score he made on that blessed mineral, told of a man so consumed by his craft, so devoted to enacting a divine proficiency, that the contentious line had indeed, very objectively, been crossed. In the hands of Bernini, stone, as if by miracle, had finally become flesh.
Some artists define the age in which they live. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who shaped and chiselled and molded stone like none other before him, turning hard mineral into visceral, sensual life, was one of those people. Bernini’s universal genius dominated Italian art in the seventeenth century much as the brooding, intense Michelangelo had dominated the sixteenth. It was Bernini who created, virtually single-handed, our very perception of the Rome of the Baroque era.
Bernini, who roamed the lands of central Italy from 1598 to 1680, was born in Naples, but as a child he moved with his family – his father was a minor sculptor - to the heart of the Eternal City. And there he remained for the greater part of his life. The talents of the son were spotted young. By the age of 25, he was an intimate of Pope Urban VIII, dining with him frequently, and that friendship continued for the full 20 years that the Pope remained on his throne. The Pope had been eager to find a second Michelangelo to glorify his papacy and further beautify the Eternal City. Bernini was his man, from first to last. He is “a rare man,” wrote the Pope, “a sublime artificer, born by divine Disposition and for the glory of Rome to illuminate the century”.
Like putty in his hands
First and foremost, Bernini was a sculptor of marble. He could work marble as if it were dough in his hands. He worked at speed, and according to the eyewitness testimony of contemporaries, for hour after long hour without ceasing, in fact, to the point of utter exhaustion. When an assistant once advised him to take a rest, he snapped back, infuriated: “Let me stay here – since I am in love with it.”
Fiery by temperament, Bernini was also jealous of his assistant’s success, and careful, in later life, not to employ sculptors in his workshop who were overly ambitious - or overly talented. But he also had huge confidence in his own abilities.
"From youth I devoured marble,” he said of himself with supreme self-confidence, “and never struck a false blow."
We see him at the height of his powers in a self-portrait which hangs in the Villa Borghese in Rome, the well-barbered goatee beard, the tips of his moustaches finely waxed and, in his eye, a look of ferocious resolve. This was the man who would remake Italian sculpture in the seventeenth century.
Before Bernini, Italian sculpture – in the work of Gianbologna, for example - was characterised by a kind of cold, self-sufficient refinement. Bernini blew all that away. In his great works, the flesh comes to life.
There is such dynamism, and such sensuality, about the surfaces of his sculptures. Everything is so keenly observed. You feel you want to touch this cold simulacrum of human flesh, that it might just be living and breathing after all... Bernini put the spectator in touch with the sculpted form, and with the spaces that they occupied, as never before. He created what his contemporaries described as ‘feeling likenesses’.
It was realism, but of an astonishingly heightened and dramatised kind. In an early statue of David, for example, he catches the giant-killer at exactly the moment before he is about to release the stone from his sling. The pose is tense, theatrical – remember too that Bernini was the exact contemporary of Caravaggio, another man in love with theatrical gesture - and immediate. His love of yielding flesh, and his astonishing ability to capture the way it gets dimpled by the pressure of a hand, is seen at its most astonishing in Apollo and Daphne – see how Apollo presses his fingers into the flesh of Daphne’s stomach - one of the great mythological groups he created as a young man.
Light and shade
Of his immediate predecessors, Bernini loved Raphael, Correggio and Titian. He adored the bold use of painterly colour, and he was acutely aware of the fact that white marble, though he loved to work it, had one fundamental shortcoming: it lacked colour. This is a problem which he strove throughout his long life to overcome. “When someone faints,” he once said, “the pallor which spreads over his face is enough to make him almost unrecognisable, so that one says: ‘he is not himself.’”
So how to compensate for that lack? How to give some sense of colour to cold, white stone? Being a technical master, Bernini had ways of dealing with the problem – by intensifying the play of light and shadow, for example, to heighten the contrast. “In order to imitate nature,” he once noted, “it may be necessary to add that which is not there... Sometimes in a marble portrait in order to represent the dark which some people have around their eyes, one must hollow out the marble and in this way obtain the effect of colour.”
To know Bernini from the inside, we need to enter into the way he related to his favourite material, marble, and to watch him as he worked. All who knew him testified to the keenness of his gaze. “His face, and particularly the eye, has something of an eagle about it,” commented the man who accompanied him to meet Louis XIV of France in 1665. And the need to bring conviction to the representation of human eye was one of the challenges to which he rose most adeptly – see, for example, how he has used the drill to create the sharply drilled irises of Pope Gregory XV in his great portrait bust of 1621. The drill bit, with the finest specifications reserved for the fussiest and most intricate of filigree work, was Bernini’s favourite tool.
"It is as if when he saw, he managed to comprehend both the inner and the outer man."
It is as if when he saw, he managed to comprehend both the inner and the outer man. Before beginning work, he would do innumerable rapid sketches of the sitter in order to capture not only the likeness, but also the character of the subject before him. He wanted to see, and to feel, as if inwardly, man in motion. It was not enough to stand in front of a static sitter. “If a man stands still and immobile, he is never as much like himself as when he moves about,” Bernini once proclaimed. “His movements reveal all those personal qualities which are his and his alone.”
These sketches of a man in action, and this ability he had to capture life on the wing, were then applied to his working of the marble. The result was that a finished bust such as that of Cardinal Scipione Borghese looks not only perfectly finished, but also alive and immediately present to us. The cardinal looks as if he is just about to engage us in conversation – or as if he is listening, acutely, lips slightly parted, with a view to responding. This was a key technique used by Bernini when capturing a likeness: to seize that moment when the person is as if just about to speak, or when he has just finished speaking. “That is when the face looks at its most animated,” he once commented. A similar method is applied to The Ecstasy of St Theresa, the saint’s lips parted, heavy-lidded eyes half closed, and head thrown back, suggesting her whole body had just been jolted by an inescapable rush of erotic delight.
Modelling clay
There was another kind of preparatory device which Bernini used in abundance and like no other: the clay model. Many of his greatest sculptures were preceded by whole series of roughs models in clay, made one after another, until he had worked out a solution to the problem of how a pose worked in relation both to the anatomy of the particular body and the drapery with which it would be clothed.
"He would try out a particular gesture of the hand or a twist of the arm, thinking with his hands as he worked. Was that twist to the left too exaggerated?"
Many of these clay busts, or bozzetti, have survived, and they enable us to re-imagine the various stages through which Bernini’s thinking and making passed. In the case of the celebrated angels made for the Ponte San Angelo, Bernini used both clay models and sketches simultaneously.
Bernini was not only a genius craftsman but also one whose working habits put us all to shame. He would work for seven hours at a stretch on a piece of marble without stopping, in a state of near ecstasy. Such was his intense concentration that a young assistant would stay next to him on the scaffolding just in case he fell. In the words of an early biographer: “The cardinals and princes who came to watch him work would seat themselves without a word and, just as silently, so as not to distract him for a moment, make their departure. He proceeded in this manner for the entire working session and at the end he would be bathed in perspiration...”
“I have overcome the difficulty of making marble like wax,” Bernini declared at the age of seventy-five. And, 350 years later, few of us would dare to disagree.
Ben Nordberg
- Speciality
Skateboarder
- Starting out
Pretty much just same old story. My good friend at the time had a skateboard so we just started doing it around my local area and after a while I just kept at it and started going to the skatepark and the rest is all a blur.
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