Rome

??????Rooted and held, and her head became a tree top,

??????Everything gone except her grace, her shining.

??????Apollo loved her still. He placed his hand

??????Where he had hoped and felt the heart still beating

??????Under the bark; and he embraced the branches

??????As if they still were limbs, and kissed the wood,

??????And the wood shrank from his kisses, and the god

??????Exclaimed: “Since you can never be my bride,

??????My tree at least you shall be! Let the laurel

??????Adorn, henceforth, my hair, my lyre, my quiver:

??????Let Roman victors, in the long procession,

??????Wear laurel wreaths for triumph and ovation.…”

??????He said no more. The laurel,

??????Stirring, seemed to consent, to be saying

Yes.

This, one might have thought, would have been an impossible thing to illustrate with sculpture. Sculpture—at least until Bernini—always depicted achieved actions and complete states. Nobody had tried to illustrate in sculpture things in transition, to convey what was incomplete or in the very process of change. Yet in Apollo and Daphne we do see the change from girl to tree happening before our eyes; the bark enveloping and encasing her lithe body; softness giving way to ligneous toughness; movement turning into rootedness. Moreover, the sculpture seems to defy what we know is a chief property of stone: its brittleness. How on earth (one wonders), through what preternatural skill, did Bernini manage to render those brittle stalks and thin, freestanding blades of laurel leaf in marble, without snapping them off? It must have been done with rasps, drills, and abrasive; a hammer blow, the touch of a chisel, would have ruined any of them. And once a leaf was broken, there were no adhesives like epoxy capable of mending it in the early seventeenth century. No sculpture, one feels, could be riskier. Of course, one’s admiration of Bernini’s technique is not confined to enjoying its Last-Supper- carved-on-a-peach-stone virtuosity, which has always been considered to go beyond mere skill. There is no feeling that he has achieved such effects by some sort of trickery or legerdemain. They are there, factual, and it was not magic that put them there. And the rendering of emotion and expression rivals the intensity of the work of the painter Guido Reni, the Italian artist whom, we know, Bernini greatly admired. In years to come, Bernini’s work would deepen and acquire a wider emotional resonance. It, and he, would mature. But already, in his twenties, he showed himself capable of producing one of those works of art that seem to enlarge the scope of human possibility. Anyone who thinks of the young Picasso as a prodigy should reflect on the young Bernini, and be admonished. There was no twentieth-century artist, and certainly none of the twenty-first century, who does not look rather small beside him.

He was a man of the utmost concentration and energy. Even in old age (and he lived to eighty-two), Bernini was quite capable of working on a marble block for seven or eight hours at a stretch. This vitality, which he never lost, combined with astonishing executive powers. He ran a very large studio, and had to, because of the number of commissions in sculpture and architecture, for the highest levels of government and religion, that he confidently undertook and completed. He was by far the most influential sculptor in Rome, or in the seventeenth-century world. Bernini was to become the supreme artist of the Counter-Reformation in sculpture and architecture, as Rubens was in painting.

And, like Rubens, he was a man of strong and deep religious conviction. It is not, of course, true that to create important works of religious art one must be pious. Still less is it true that an artist’s personal piety underwrites the quality of his art as art—much of the world’s vilest, most sugary religious kitsch has been deeply felt and produced by honest and morally impeccable people. But there have been cases, uncommon but real, when deep religious impulses lend an authentic intensity of spiritual feeling to depictions of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, one which detachment or agnosticism cannot provide. Bernini’s was such a case.

The event that set the seal on Bernini’s growing success came on August 6, 1623, with the election of Maffeo Barberini as Pope Urban VIII. Barberini (reigned 1623–44), a Florentine, was a man of the most unbridled political ambition. Indeed, his papacy reached the high-water mark of the extent and power of the Papal States within Italy. It would hardly have been possible for him to remain aloof from politics, not only because the Papacy ruled Rome but also because his reign coincided with twenty-one years of the Thirty Years’ War.

But the patronage of art was also, for him, as important as the prosecution of war. He built extensively in Rome, and some of the results were glorious in their extravagance—notably his own residence, Palazzo Barberini, on the Quirinal (Via delle Quattro Fontane 13). Its initial design—a villa with wings extending into the garden around it—was done by Carlo Maderno; later, the work, interrupted by Maderno’s death in 1629, was taken over by Bernini and Francesco Borromini. Its facade derives, in its essentials, from that mighty prototype of Roman Baroque palaces, the Palazzo Farnese. If he had built nothing else, Maffeo Barberini would deserve a place in architectural history for this private home, but of course he did much more. He was determined to leave a great indelible mark on Rome; like many before him, he chose to do so through its principal church, Saint Peter’s. The man who would do this for him was young Bernini. On the very day of his election, Urban is said to have summoned the sculptor and declared: “You have the great fortune to see Cardinal Maffeo Barberini Pope, Cavaliere; but ours is much greater to have Cavaliere Bernini alive in our pontificate.” Or words, at least, to that effect. Later, Urban would write of his artist, “Rare man, sublime artificer, born by Divine Disposition and for the glory of Rome to illuminate the century.”

Bernini was only twenty-three when he was made a cavaliere, a papal knight. This honor was merely a formal recognition of what everyone who had seen his early sculptures already knew: that, of all the stonecutters and bronze casters working in Europe, Bernini was the most skilled, the most inventive, not only in his technical mastery of materials, but in his astonishing ability to create a concetto or “concept” of sculpture. This gift went far beyond the ability to carve a strong Hercules or a desirable Venus, which was (relatively) easy. It had to do with inventing an entirely new kind of drama from posture, gesture, and expression. It ensured Bernini his first papal commissions, of which the principal ones had to do with Saint Peter’s. In fact, for the half-century after 1623, hardly a year would pass in which Bernini would not be involved in the decoration of this prodigious basilica, and it was Urban who brought him into it as the master of papal works, starting with an enormous monument right below the dome, over the (supposed) burial spot of the Apostle Peter.