Rome

son, Ascanius, fleeing the burning city of Troy, carrying his aged father, Anchises, who himself carries the penates (household gods) of their lost home. This is a transcription in stone of Virgil’s lines from the Aeneid:

??????“Then come, dear father. Arms around my neck:

??????I’ll take you on my shoulders, no great weight.

??????Whatever happens, both will face one danger,

??????Find one safety.…

??????Father, carry our hearth-gods, our Penates.

??????It would be wrong for me to handle them–

??????Just come from such hard fighting, bloody work–

??????Until I wash myself in running water.”

This sculpture, the spiraling movement of its bodies so strongly indebted to the great Mannerist sculptor Giambologna, was designed for Scipione Borghese’s new villa at the Porta Pinciana in Rome, where it still stands. So was the extraordinary Pluto and Persephone (1621–22), in which the imposingly muscular figure of the king of Hades is seen carrying off the helpless daughter of Zeus and Demeter to be his prisoner and bride in the Underworld: a girl snatched, in Milton’s lines, from

??????…that fair field

??????Of Enna,

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where Proserpin gathering flours

??????Herself a fairer Floure by gloomie Dis

??????Was gather’d, which cost Ceres all that pain

??????To seek her through the World.…

Persephone shrieks in vain; she struggles and wriggles helplessly, enticingly; we even see the marble tear on her cheek, and the yielding flesh of her thigh as Pluto’s fingers sink implacably into it. It is an extremely sexy sculpture, and should be, since its subject is a rape; Scipione Borghese possessed an unsurpassed collection of antique Roman erotica, with which the young sculptor must have been happily familiar. The extraordinary character of this sculpture lies in a mastery over carving which transcends the puritanical mantra of modernism about “truth to material,” as though there were only some things that could legitimately be done with wood or stone, and to go beyond them were a sin. Bernini leaves you in no doubt that stone can represent anything if the shaping hand is skilled enough. Is it wrong for it to look as though it were modeled rather than carved? Assuredly not, the marvelous surfaces and textures of Pluto’s and Persephone’s bodies tell us. Is the effect a lie? Of course, but art itself is a lie—a lie told in the service of truth.

The showpiece of Bernini’s early virtuosity is, however, the Apollo and Daphne, commissioned by Scipione Borghese after he gave the Pluto and Persephone to the pope’s nephew to curry favor with the pontiff. It is a sculptural illustration of one of the more beautiful and poignant moments in classical poetry, which occurs in book one of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Apollo has encountered the nymph Daphne, daughter of the river-god Peneus. The love-god Cupid, witnessing this, fires two arrows from his bow; one sharp and tipped with gold, which pierces Apollo’s vitals, and the other blunt and lead-tipped at Daphne, who at once becomes unreachable by love. Apollo is now compelled always to pursue Daphne, who is likewise doomed always to flee. “But the marriage torches/Were something hateful, criminal, to Daphne,” who entreats her father to “Let me be a virgin always.…” Apollo, of course, has other ideas. She runs,

??????    But Apollo,

??????Too young a god to waste his time in coaxing,

??????Came following fast. When a hound starts a rabbit

??????In an open field, one runs for game, one safety,

??????He has her, or thinks he has, and she is doubtful

??????Whether she’s caught or not, so close the margin,

??????So ran the god and girl, one swift in hope,

??????The other in terror, but he ran more swiftly,

??????Borne on the wings of love, gave her no rest,

??????Shadowed her shoulder, breathed on her streaming hair,

Her strength was gone, worn out by the long effort

??????Of the long flight; she was deathly pale, and seeing

??????The river of her father, cried “O help me,

??????If there is any power in the rivers,

??????Change and destroy the body which has given

??????Too much delight!” And hardly had she finished,

??????When her limbs grew numb and heavy, her soft breasts

??????Were closed with delicate bark, her hair was leaves,

??????Her arms were branches, and her speedy feet