In the first half of the seventeenth century, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) radically renewed the very idea of the portrait bust. Conceived in the sixteenth century especially as a “state-portrait” with a strong official connotation, the sculpted portrait knew an extraordinary diffusion in Rome in the first half of the seventeenth century, passing down to us, the features not only of popes, cardinals and aristocrats, but also of attorneys, scientists, writers, and a good number of female figures. In just over twenty years – from the middle of the second decade of the century to the end of the thirties – austere, stiffly formal images with a still, clearly Mannerist character were replaced by figures which though sculpted in marble seemed to breath, live and even “converse” with the viewer. In the bust of Costanza Bonarelli, the Bargello possesses the most thrilling and famous testimony of this capital moment in sculpted portraits that, despite the current, growing interest in Bernini and the Baroque figurative civilisation, had not yet been targeted with a specific exhibition in Italy.

Several of these busts were united in North America in the course of last year, on the occasion of the exhibition, Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture, jointly organised by the J. Paul Getty Museum of Los Angeles and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and this has given rise to an Italian edition of this event, though more precisely focussed on Bernini’s youthful portraits that can be dated up to 1640.

Held at the Bargello, which exceptionally loaned Costanza Bonarelli to the North American shows, the exhibition is promoted by the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, the Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città di Firenze, the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, “Firenze Musei” and the Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, curated by Director of the Bargello, Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi, and Andrea Bacchi, Tomaso Montanari and Dimitrios Zikos.

Compared to the show held in Los Angeles (August – October 2008) and in Ottawa (November, 2008 – March 2009), the Florentine exhibition has made several targeted selections and several significant additions. While it was necessary to provide the American public with a much broader picture of reference, through numerous paintings and drawings, in Italy where the Baroque period has been targeted in these past years with many important exhibitions, both monographic and non (take, for example, the very recent show on Bernini the painter, held in Rome), it was decided to concentrate attention on the sculpted portraits, accompanying them with a very select group of paintings of great evocative strength. All of these works are by the greatest contemporary painters that Bernini especially looked to (Rubens, Annibale Carracci, Anthony van Dyck, Diego Velázquez, Simon Vouet, Valentin de Boulogne …), enabling a direct comparison even with several paintings by Bernini himself.

As we have already stated, the Florence exhibition intends to shed light on the most significant phase of Bernini’s production of portraits in his long artistic parabola, that is to say, from his youth up to the end of the fourth decade: the time span in which, among other things, the Bernini magisterium was joined by that, in many respects still unacknowledged, of Giuliano Finelli, Gian Lorenzo’s student and “assistant” who is also present in the exhibition with several of his superb portraits. A careful analysis will therefore be conducted precisely on the founding moment of the fortunes of the sculpted portrait in seventeenth-century civilisation.

The exhibition is divided into two sections, corresponding to the two rooms of the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, which hosts the show.

Room I
Bernini the Portraitist: the beginning and ascent

The task of introducing the show falls to the splendid and famous Portrait of Monsignor Agucchi by Annibale Carracci (by others, attributed to Domenichino), from the Metropolitan Museum of New York and, to a certain degree, forerunner of the “speaking likeness” both in painting and in sculpture, dated to the first decade of the seventeenth century.

We will then enter the heart of the exhibition with an exceptional nucleus of busts sculpted by Bernini in the course of the 1620s, whose psychological eloquence will be introduced by the bust of Antonio Coppola (circa 1612, Rome, San Giovanni dei Fiorentini), among the sculptor’s first trials in the portrait genre, still in part tied to the sixteenth-century tradition, but already surpassed in the portraits dating shortly thereafter of Antonio Cepparelli (Rome, San Giovanni dei Fiorentini), of Cardinal Escoubleau de Sourdis (Bordeaux, Musée d’Aquitaine) and of Cardinal Alessandro Damasceni Peretti Montalto (Hamburg, Kunsthalle). Hence was born a new type of sculpted portrait, capable not only of faithfully rendering the physiognomies of the various personages, but also of capturing their psychological singularity and transmitting their vitality in a completely new way. The patronage of the Barberini family with their numerous family portraits served as vehicle for the young sculptor’s rapid and growing fortunes, definitively sanctioned by the accession to the papal throne of Cardinal Maffeo with the name of Urban VIII (1623). The show features several portraits of him by Bernini, both in sculpture (marble, bronze, porphyry) and in painting. Then, for the first time, it will be possible to draw a direct comparison between the sculpted bust of Virginio Cesarini (Rome, Musei Capitolini) and his splendid portrait painted by Van Dyck (Saint Petersburg, the Hermitage). Here, as well as in the following room, a major role will be played by several youthful portraits by Giuliano Finelli (1601-1653), the already mentioned sculptor from Carrara, who was Bernini’s assistant and then his greatest rival precisely in the portrait genre, between the third and fourth decades of the century. Also thanks to the totally exceptional possibility of being able to present his masterpiece – the bust of Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger (Florence, Casa Buonarroti) – great importance will be attributed to the figure of Finelli with his portraits of Maria Barberini Duglioli, Paris, the Louvre; of Francesco Bracciolini, London, Victoria & Albert Museum; and of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, New York, Metropolitan Museum.

Room II
The “Speaking Likenesses” (1630-1640)

A famous Portrait of a Youth (from the Musée Réattu of Arles) – formerly believed to be a Self-portrait – by French painter Simon Vouet, active in Rome as of 1613 and much admired for his “expressive heads”, introduces the room dedicated to the so-called “speaking likenesses”.

Other marble busts by Giuliano Finelli, which for many will be a revelation, show this sculptor’s central role in the evolution of the portrait-bust in the course of the 1630s and 1640s, that is to say, at the time that Bernini’s attention was turned toward the great worksites of the Barberini pontificate, Saint Peter’s in particular. It is no coincidence that features derived from Finelli’s works can also be found in the early portrait trials of Alessandro Algardi, as exemplified in the exhibition by the Bust of a Gentleman (Berlin, Bode-Museum), one of the most famous sculpted portraits of the entire century. The exhibition ends with the most spectacular tokens of what Rudolf Wittkower defined as the “speaking likeness”: Scipione Borghese (Rome, Galleria Borghese) and Costanza Bonarelli (Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello). These two absolute masterpieces of Bernini’s portraiture will be accompanied by exceptional pictorial testimonies: such as the Portrait of Isabella Brant by Rubens (Florence, the Uffizi), the portraits of Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio (Florence, Galleria Palatina) and of the De Wael Brothers (Rome, Pinacoteca Capitolina) by Van Dyck; the portrait of an unknown Gentleman (Munich, Alte Pinakothek) and that of Duke Francesco I d’Este (Modena, Galleria Estense) by Velázquez. These are, in short, some of the extraordinary pictorial precedents Gian Lorenzo seems to have meditated on to capture their spirit, “promptness” and motion, transferring them, but without “imprisoning them”, into marble.