I loved the book Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane. It was very well written, and painted what I thought to be a very fair picture of what the artist’s life. I had the same hope for this one here.
It didn’t deliver.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini was one of the Master’s of the Italian Baroque. When one thinks of the Baroque, one only really needs two names: Caravaggio and Bernini (yes, that’s an oversimplification. But its not wrong). Caravaggio is the more important of the two figures, having pretty much invented cinematography. If something Bernini could have done would have had something of that applicable of an impact on the modern world, he would have won between the two.
I love the work of Bernini. Being in the presence of his statues fills me with a sense of awe. So it can’t be the subject matter that brings me to this opinion. A bit of it was the writing style. The author seems to struggle with chronology. On page 80, he is already speaking of Bernini’s demise, with 250 more pages of the book to go. Of course, the book then settles back to other things. There is also the case of Donna Olympia Maidalchini, who is introduced in her relevance to the narrative around page 150. But she is mentioned as early as page 20, even though she wasn’t really involved with that part of Roman history! In a similar way, the book does not manage to get a figure anywhere close to where it is mentioned in the text, with the worst example being 300 pages off! In anything but an art history book, this would be a little bit more manageable. But if you are going to talk about a sculpture it is annoying, to have to constantly flip back to a picture of it. And in some of these cases, I saw no reason as to why the images couldn’t be closer to the corresponding text. Perhaps the publisher phoned it in. The one picture that is close to the text that mentions it is a photo showing you what Bernini’s writing looked like. And for all the beauty of Bernini’s statues, a lot of his more famous works are not shown off in this book, and those that are are not even shown in their entirety. Someone doesn’t get it.
I know the Baroque very well, so why did this book leave me feeling confused?
Bernini was born in 1598, his last major work was the Tomb of Alexander VII, which was completed in 1678, when he would have been 80. Bernini would die just two years later. I remember standing beneath that statue and wondering to what extent an 80 year old could even have said to have worked on something of that magnificence. The book didn’t really answer that question, except in that it mentioned that another statue, the more famous Apollo and Daphne had parts of it done by another sculptor.
Although to be fair, this came very close to becoming a part of my DNF list.
Bernini is great. Read a better book about him.
Failures in Polymathy 