About Me
One of the greatest artists of all time: Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680). He was supremely fortunate in his gifts and in his times. He was born in Naples but his father, Pietro, was a Florentine sculptor who taught his gifted son all he knew at the earliest age. When the boy was seven the family moved to Rome, to work for the powerful Borghese and Barberini families; and at eight he was already hard at it with his chisel. At ten he produced his first authenticated work, The Goat Amalthea with the Infant Jupiter and a Faun (Rome, Borghese), an astonishingly accomplished work for anyone, let alone a child of his age. In Rome, he was able to absorb not only the new realism of Caravaggio, which remained the basis of all his work whatever the nature of his designs, he always sought to achieve total verisimilitude in their parts but the revived classicism of the Carracci. He later paid tribute to their example and said that, as a boy, he had done endless drawings of the Greek and Roman statues then to be seen in Rome. Indeed, his feeling for Greek art was such that, until recently, one of his works was classified as Hellenistic from 300 BC.Bernini's character and methods of work were formed early and remained constant until his death in his eighty-second year. He was deeply religious and a fanatic for work and duty. He believed that God had endowed him with unusual gifts and that, in return, he must make exemplary use of them to glorify his Maker and to make the world share his faith. No artist in history ever worked harder and longer. In addition to his genius with a chisel, which has never been equalled, he was an accomplished draughtsman, who also produced over a hundred oil paintings, some of which are now beginning to re-emerge. A superb self portrait in chalk, now at Windsor Castle, shows his long, lean face, huge, penetrating eyes, and unrelenting gaze. Of his eleven children, his sculptor son Domenico summed him up best: 'Aspro di natura, fisso nell'operazione, ardente nell'ira' - 'stern by nature, rock steady in work, warm in anger'.
