With the newly completed greatest church in Christendom opening on to a cramped piazza, the sickly visionary Pope Alexander VII enlisted the prickly genius of the Baroque, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, to transform the area in front of the new basilica
Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) dominated Europe like no other artist of his time (no mean feat in the age of Rubens, Rembrandt and Velá´zquez). The sheer volume and variety of Bernini’s work in Rome are dizzying, ranging from monuments and statues to fountains, chapels and churches, palaces and piazzas. He is synonymous with the Rome of Baroque drama, highly emotional piety, thrilling vistas and the feeling, though no longer the reality, that the Holy City remains caput mundi, the “head” or capital of the world.
The many self-portraits Bernini painted and drew show piercing eyes, a dark piratical look and a sense of tremendous physical and intellectual energy. Voluble and volatile, Bernini was very much his Neapolitan mother’s son, for all his pride in his Florentine ancestry.
Bernini had a strong desire to combine all the arts in order to produce an overwhelming emotional response. One of his early biographers, his friend Filippo Baldinucci, made the point that it was “common knowledge that he was the first to unite architecture, sculpture and painting in such a way that they together make a beautiful whole”.
