Editors Evonne Levy and Carolina Mangone have brought together leading scholars of Bernini and Baroque sculpture around a disarmingly fundamental question: was Bernini a sculptor of matter (stone, clay, bronze) or nonmatter (light, space, color)? If the answer has long tended toward the latter, then what might be gained by focusing on his engagement with the raw materials of his practice? The result is a compelling collection examining conjunctions of media and theory, process and historiography; it will be of interest to anyone occupied with authorship and the sculpted object.
From the Protestant impulses behind Jacob Burckhardt’s painterly Bernini to the influence of the modernist truth-to-materials credo on Rudolf Wittkower’s transcendent Bernini, Levy lays the volume’s historiographic foundation by tracing the theme of “immaterial pictorialism” (12) in the critical reception of Bernini’s work. Although not all of the volume’s essays move entirely away from an optical, dematerialized Bernini, Levy persuasively argues for the need to reconsider the artist as a maker of physical things.
The essays are tightly interconnected, many by themes drawn from the artist’s biographies, such as the metaphor of “marble-as-wax” (or dough). For Maarten Delbeke, the comparison positions Bernini as a force of nature, able to give life to raw materials, and aligns his works with language, making them doctrinally sound conveyors of truth and virtue. Fabio Barry notes the close connection between the metaphor and the paragone, arguing that they share a transformative core indicative of Bernini’s appeal to the “material imagination” (50), which allows stone—itself understood as frozen ethereal substances—to take on the qualities of paint. Carolina Mangone stresses how the metaphor transforms Bernini from a carver to a modeler, making his sculptural process an additive one akin to painting. Despite the importance of marble-as-wax to Bernini’s mythologization, Michael Cole argues that wax was inimical to Bernini’s preparatory practice and sculptural imagination. The metaphor is thus one example of a theme become productively complex: it may be at the conceptual center of his approach to materials, or it may be skin deep, an aspect of surface rather than structure.
Many of the essays address the significance of sketchy surfaces and the performative sculptural process. Mangone sees the expressively gestural surfaces of works in oil paint, clay, and some bronzes as a register of Bernini’s efforts to cultivate a sculptural equivalent of the pittoresco, tactile painterliness. Joris van Gastel considers clay as the stuff of potters and their vessel-forms defined by a visible surface and shadowy interiority, innately linked to ideas of embodiment. Steven F. Ostrow and Tara L. Nadeau engage with the role of surface in the interpretation of Bernini’s bozzetti. For Ostrow, dynamic designs and sketchy surfaces have beguiled art historians into identifying the bozzetti with an illusory ideal of bravura execution, while Nadeau argues that Bernini’s carefully constructed persona and his biographers’ celebrations of his swiftly transformative passion for marble have been displaced onto works in clay, evading potentially complicated issues of authorship related to workshop practices. Cole argues that sketchy surfaces have, in part, encouraged the conceptual development of a category of object—the bozzetto—whose defining characteristics do not fully accord with surviving works. Finally, C. D. Dickerson III and Anthony Sigel jointly consider surface as an aspect of attribution, examining works in clay where the marks and structures are not indexical of Bernini’s methods.
The stimulus for the volume was the landmark 2012–13 exhibition Bernini: Sculpting in Clay (Metropolitan Museum of Art and Kimbell Art Museum) and the majority of the essays deal with that medium. However, the questions raised about historiography and the interpretation of objects, and Bernini and art theory, establish a touchstone for the study of Bernini and materials. Probing Bernini’s work in his primary medium, stone, what might we make of his relationship to the flecked and sugary block of the David (1623–24), or of his reported use of chalk to give a final touch of life to eyes in his portrait busts? How did he source his marbles, and who assisted him? Given the rich insights offered by this excellent collection we can only hope, along with the editors, that it will inspire further studies of Bernini’s embeddedness in the material world.
