An excess of success
David Ekserdjian
BERNINI: GENIUS OF THE BAROQUE by Charles Avery Thames & Hudson, .£45, pp. 288 There is an apocryphal story told about a don who was asked what his field was, and riposted, 'I do not have a field. I am not a cow.' Most people would indeed be inclined to think of Charles Avery as a specialist in Renaissance sculpture, and might politely wonder whether it was wise of him to slip off the leash and write about the Baroque. However, although there is no denying the fact that his profound knowledge of the earlier period has influenced his approach to Bernini, that is all to the good. It means that his Bernini is fractionally less on his own than is usual; after all, there were tombs and fountains and the rest before he was ever thought of.
None of this diminishes the thrill we experience as the genius — for once that is the right word — of Bernini unfolds before us. Next year is the 400th anniversary of Bernini's birth, and the exhibitions and conferences that milestone will engender are bound to throw up footnote- ish novelties. They are unlikely to sire enough material to put this monograph out of date, and it was wise of Avery — and his publishers — to get in first. It seems incredible how low Bernini's reputation had sunk a century ago, and perhaps the only way to understand his eclipse is to acknowledge the fact that he is not an artist one could ever be indifferent to. Yet Rudolf Wittkower's monograph of 1955 really did bring him in from the cold, so that for some of us he is the only European sculptor, together with Donatello, who can hope to give Michelangelo a run for his money.
Avery is all but exclusively concerned with the sculpture (there is a chapter on the architecture, and drawings are accord- ed the odd mention), but that is more than enough to be going along with. His approach is an artful blend of the chrono- logical and the thematic, and he is remark- ably successful in avoiding the pitfalls of elaborate cross-referencing or unsatisfacto- The tomb of Pope Alexander Vii, St Peter's ry repetition. Sculpture is notoriously diffi- cult to photograph, and the melodramatics of David Finn's snaps are something of a mixed blessing, but in general there is much to admire here, and enough colour to make one understand its importance in this period, even if only in order to set off the white perfection of marble.
Avery has the confidence to approach a big subject, and the stature to see it whole. He is intensely interested in the way sculp- ture comes into being, both in terms of the preparatory stages in terracotta and plaster that lead to the finished work and in terms of the way marble is carved or bronze chased, but he never allows himself to be sidetracked or to slacken the narrative pace. Not being an insider, his bonnet is blessedly bee-free. He is also not averse to chatty asides and purple passages, although these occasionally read as if they had been tacked on rather than evolved naturally.
One broad issue Avery does not really address, but which is crucial to any judg- ment of Bernini's art, is the question of whether he lost his way. The great groups of the Borghese, and above all the Apollo and Daphne, are the products of his youth, for Bernini was the most precocious Wunderkind of them all. He was carving major masterpieces in his late teens and early twenties, and although he remained a remarkable sculptor into advanced old age, it is arguable that he never surpassed those early achievements. What is more, he became so busy with the administration of major projects in connection with St Peter's, the Fountain of the Four Rivers, and the Ponte Sant' Angelo that he inevitably had less time at his disposal to work on lumps of clay and blocks of mar- ble. Many of the great and the good slip into responsibilities in middle age in order to evade the challenges of their profes- sions, but Bernini was not one of them. He just became too successful. One of the problems of the thematic approach is that it does not make it easy to calculate how busy Bernini was at any given stage in his career, but it seems clear that delegation, which was already part of his practice as early as the Apollo and Daphne, only increased as he grew older and grander. In any event, the almost visceral pleasure his virtuosity inspires may be enjoyed in a con- siderable body of work, and it is hard to imagine Rome and the Vatican without his showmanship and wizardry.
Avery devotes some compelling pages to Bernini the man, from which one emerges with a sense that he would have been thrilling to meet, but dangerous to know. He only failed to murder his brother with a crowbar by a whisker, and sent a servant to razor the face of his mistress, all of which suggests that he would have been happier in the company of Al Capone or the Krays than of Pope Innocent X and Louis XIV. On second thoughts, he might have been more struck by the similarities than the dif- ferences.
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