Bernini: ‘master of the whole world’

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Bernini: His Life and His Rome

By Franco Mormando

In the Preface of Bernini: His Life and His Rome, author Franco Mormando takes readers to the heart of what was important to artists in 17th-century Rome: money. In a useful lesson on the monetary value of a Roman scudo in comparison with today’s US dollars, Professor Mormando estimates that on his death Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), had the equivalent of 12 million US dollars in his bank account. It says much for the value placed on Bernini by his patrons and for Bernini’s ability to save.

In this book, the first English-language biography of Bernini, Professor Mormando, with an easy manner of writing that draws the reader in, paints a picture of Baroque Rome, its characters, hierarchy, architecture, and Bernini’s pivotal role in changing the vista of its religious centrepiece, St Peter’s. What more do we learn from this intimate account of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s life as the ‘Michelangelo of his age’ and ‘the last of the universal artistic prodigies produced by Italy in its glorious Renaissance and Baroque centuries’? Mormando is initially informed by The Life of the Cavalier Gian Lorenzo Bernini, a biography of the artist by Gian Lorenzo’s youngest son Domenico, written during the last years of the artist’s life. Mormando seeks to separate mythological fiction from fact, revealing Domenico’s marketing of the ‘Bernini myth’.

Mormando paints a descriptive picture of Gian Lorenzo’s rise to favour, which began with his father’s move to Rome from Naples in 1606. ‘Lorenzo’ as he was known in adult life, was the first son, and the sixth of 13 children born to the Florentine sculptor Pietro Bernini (1562–1629) – sometimes called Bernino or Barnini – from Sesto Fiorentino, and his much younger Neapolitan wife, Angelica di Giovanni Galente (d.1647), who was about 12 years of age when she married Pietro in Naples in 1587.  Little is known about Angelica (her son may have painted her portrait, c.1620) except for a surprising letter written by her to her nephew Cardinal Francesco Barberini c.1638, with a plea for him to ‘reign in her wild son’. She writes that Gian Lorenzo was behaving in a criminal manner, ‘thinks he is “padrone del mondo”, master of the whole world’. Bernini would be about 40 years of age at this time. This book fills in the details. 

In adult life Bernini moved in the elite and noble circle of popes and kings; they procured his skills and liked his company. But what was it like for Bernini? Mormando suspects that Bernini used the art of dissimulation during meetings, that is, the ‘art of hiding your true self behind a mask’. Reports that in Paris, after warning advice from an Italian acquaintance Abbé Francesco Buti to put on some display of interest, Bernini wept when leaving the presence of King Louis XIV. It makes me warm to him as an adept businessman, giving his all to accepting or declining a job offer.

Mormando argues that dissimulation was the defining characteristic of the Baroque mentality, its code of behaviour. An older contemporary of Bernini, Paulo Scarpi, author of the antipapal history of the Council of Trent stated, ‘I wear a mask, and indeed must do so, for without it no one could live safely in Italy’. I am sure admirers of Caravaggio (1571–1610), would agree; it certainly adds perspective to Baroque era history.

Mormando avoids writing a biography that serves only to highlight the research capabilities of the author without thought for what the reader wants to know. He takes the reader with him to share insight on Bernini, the man, as much as Bernini the sculptor, scenographer, architect, painter, and playwright. The text does focus on areas that Mormando has been able to research well; less on areas of Bernini’s life that are difficult to ascertain.

Chapters on Bernini’s best-known works are filled with informative detail; the behind-the-scenes politics and art of dissimulation that gave contracts to him. At its conclusion many readers might appreciate the disseminating skill of Mormando nearly as much as that of Bernini’s son, Domenico. In the final paragraph we are led not to seek in Rome the marble tomb of Bernini but to his epitaph, the ‘panorama of the city of Rome, from the Vatican to the Villa Borghese’. Well said.

Bernini: His Life and His Rome  by Franco Mormando is published by the University of Chicago Press, 2011. 416 pp., 43 mono illus, £22.50; US$35.00. ISBN: 978-0-226-53852