James Hall
Painting in Marble
Bernini: His Life and His Rome
By Franco Mormando
University of Chicago Press 429pp £22.50
Of all the great and still celebrated seventeenth-century artists, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) is the only one to induce both a sporadic smirk and a shudder. Bernini’s best-known work, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1645–52), provokes interest not so much because it is the prototype for overwhelming multimedia ‘total artworks’, but because the implausibly glamorous saint seems to be experiencing multiple orgasms over the altar (the real Teresa was plain and prematurely aged by ascetic practices). Bernini’s best-known deed is a gruesome double crime of passion – the attempted murder of his brother for sleeping with his own mistress (who was the wife of one of his assistants), followed by the slashing of the mistress’s face with a razor by Bernini’s henchman. His cause has not exactly been helped by Jeff Koons being his most high profile and vociferous fan, especially during Koons’s Cicciolina period: ‘I use the baroque to show the public that we are in the realm of the spiritual, the eternal.’ With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Franco Mormando’s biography, Bernini: His Life and His Rome, starts off in breathless, seedy style. The opening section of the first chapter is entitled ‘A TWELVE-YEAR-OLD PREGNANT BRIDE’, and the first word of the text is ‘Pedophilia’. My first thought was: ‘Gadzooks! A scoop worthy of the late News of
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
It is a triumph @arthistorynews and my review @Lit_Review is here!
In just thirteen years, George Villiers rose from plain squire to become the only duke in England and the most powerful politician in the land. Does a new biography finally unravel the secrets of his success?
John Adamson investigates.
John Adamson - Love Island with Ruffs
John Adamson: Love Island with Ruffs - The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
literaryreview.co.uk
During the 1930s, Winston Churchill retired to Chartwell, his Tudor-style country house in Kent, where he plotted a return to power.
Richard Vinen asks whether it’s time to rename the decade long regarded as Churchill’s ‘wilderness years’.
Richard Vinen - Croquet & Conspiracy
Richard Vinen: Croquet & Conspiracy - Churchill’s Citadel: Chartwell and the Gatherings Before the Storm by Katherine Carter
literaryreview.co.uk