The work of Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) has virtually defined the Baroque style in the visual arts. Bernini's famous Square of St. Peter's and Scala Regia at the Vatican transformed both locations into breathtaking theatrical sets, and Bernini's career featured a masterly integration of painting, sculpture, and architecture in one site. 280 color illustrations.

Profiles the whirlwind life of the famed Italian sculptor who is known for his artistic and architectural contributions to the city of Rome.

"A critical translation of the unabridged Italian text of Domenico Bernini's biography of his father, seventeenth-century sculptor, architect, painter, and playwright Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680). Includes commentary on the author's data and interpretations, contrasting them with other contemporary primary sources and recent scholarship"--Provided by publisher.

A novel exploration of the threads of continuity, rivalry, and self-conscious borrowing that connect the Baroque innovator with his Renaissance paragon Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), like all ambitious artists, imitated eminent predecessors. What set him apart was his lifelong and multifaceted focus on Michelangelo Buonarroti—the master of the previous age. Bernini’s Michelangelo is the first comprehensive examination of Bernini’s persistent and wide-ranging imitation of Michelangelo’s canon (his art and its rules). Prevailing accounts submit that Michelangelo’s pervasive, yet controversial, example was overcome during Bernini’s time, when it was rejected as an advantageous model for enterprising artists. Carolina Mangone reconsiders this view, demonstrating how the Baroque innovator formulated his work by emulating his divisive Renaissance forebear’s oeuvre. Such imitation earned him the moniker “Michelangelo of his age.” Investigating Bernini’s “imitatio Buonarroti” in its extraordinary scope and variety, this book identifies principles that pervade his production over seven decades in papal Rome. Close analysis of religious sculptures, tomb monuments, architectural ornament, and the design of New Saint Peter’s reveals how Bernini approached Michelangelo’s art as a surprisingly flexible repertory of precepts and forms that he reconciled—here with daring license, there with creative restraint—to the aesthetic, sacred, and theoretical imperatives of his own era. Situating Bernini’s imitation in dialogue with that by other artists as well as with contemporaneous writings on Michelangelo’s art, Mangone repositions the Renaissance master in the artistic concerns of the Baroque from peripheral to pivotal. Without Michelangelo, there was no Bernini.

"The vitality of Petersson's book is drawn directly from the sculpture of Bernini, an artist now regarded as the true successor of Michelangelo. It differs from others by bringing the reader inside the sculptural process, from genesis to completed form. Frequently Bernini had to solve uniquely interesting problems and his innovative talents never faltered." "As well as presenting the brilliant, flamboyant Bernini, the book simultaneously displays Rome in the throes of its Counter-Reformation renewal, the second birth of the city with the full panoply of its arts, culture, and aberrant activities during Bernini's years in the service of eight popes. In later life he expanded his fame by spending an eventful half year in Paris at the invitation of Louis XIV. The proud and touchy Bernini, then the most celebrated artist in Europe, was in a pitched battle with the arrogant and aggressive French. Yet in Paris as in Rome it is the artistic works that have lasted and are widely known as having redirected the course of European sculpture."--BOOK JACKET. Book jacket.