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Stone become flesh
(Globe and Mail) Bernini, the artistic leading light of 17th-century Rome, was undoubtedly one of t
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Tue, 02 Dec 2008 14:11:04 +0000
(Globe and Mail) Bernini, the artistic leading light of 17th-century Rome, was undoubtedly one of the history of art's most impressively gifted figures, with an unbridled creativity and technical facility he unleashed in the sculpture, painting and drawing (the show includes a number of his deft portrait drawings), as well as architecture (he gave us the extraordinary colonnaded embrace of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican) and even the writing of plays. (His only surviving play, Th e Impresario, will be performed at the National Gallery on Jan. 22 and 24.) Like Shakespeare in the literary sphere, Bernini's accomplishment as a sculptor cannot really be explained away by the trajectory of artistic influence before him. Instead, as with Shakespeare, the more you know about his antecedents, the more miraculous his genius at artifice becomes, standing so far above the norm.
His contribution? In part, it was to add to the language of static sculpture the implied element of time, bringing an uncanny life and breath to inert stone or bronze. In Bernini's most famous large narrative sculptures - like his marble carving Apollo and Daphne or his David in Rome's Villa Borghese - he creates the impression of a critical transition frozen at the point of no return. Apollo reaches for Daphne at the moment where she is becoming more tree than woman, her fingers metamorphosing into delicate twigs and leaves, carved to an almost transparent thinness. David, imagined in the moment of his confrontation with Goliath, is about to release the sling that will shift the course of Biblical events, his brow riven with concentration.
In the busts, however, this sense of energy and flavourful gesture must be expressed more economically, delivering thrills of a more understated sort - in the animation of the facial features, say, or the tilt of a head, the sense of the body shifting under its carefully carved draperies. The effect, still, is startling. Most characteristic of Bernini's sculpture is the impression, noted by commentators then as now, that the subjects are caught in mid-speech, their lips often parted slightly as if awaiting their chance to interject. Alone in the gallery with them, it can be a little spooky. (Read full article)
Bernini and the Birth of Baroque
National Gallery of Canada, until March 8, 2009
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