Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
A novel exploration of the threads of continuity, rivalry, and self-conscious borrowing that connect the Baroque innovator with his Renaissance paragon
Acclaimed the "Michelangelo of his age," the celebrated Baroque artist Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) consciously imitated his famed Renaissance predecessor's art and aspired to match his achievements in sculpture and architecture. Bernini repeatedly emulated Michelangelo's work and its underlying principles, reconciling them to the changed aesthetic, sacred, and theoretical priorities of his own era. Bernini's Michelangelo is the first book to examine this fundamental artistic relationship. Through close visual analysis of religious sculptures, tomb monuments, the design of New Saint Peter's Basilica, and architectural ornament, Carolina Mangone deftly redefines the originality and modernity of Bernini's imitation of Michelangelo. Using a range of previously unexamined writings--poems, court notices, treatises, and popular manuals--about Michelangelo's art and practice, she also repositions the Renaissance master's place in the central artistic concerns of the Baroque from peripheral to pivotal. Without Michelangelo, there was no Bernini.
Synopsis
Bernini's lifelong imitation of Michelangelo, explored here in depth for the first time, reveals the centrality of Michelangelo's art and its principles in the development of Baroque sculpture and architecture and in the establishment of the Renaissance canon.
Synopsis
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.