Semester:
Offered:
Shawon Kinew
“Truth to material should not be a criterion of the value of a work—otherwise a snowman made by a child would have to be praised at the expense of a Rodin or a Bernini,” so begins Rudolf Wittkower’s monograph on Gian Lorenzo Bernini quoting here Henry Moore. No artist is as synonymous with the Baroque as Bernini; no artist was more exalted in the seventeenth century. From his early mythological works (Apollo and Daphne, The Rape of Proserpina) to the “speaking likenesses” of his portraits in marble to the convulsing forms of his later religious works (The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa of Ávila, Beata Ludovica Albertoni), Bernini transformed the practice of sculpture in radical ways, disregarding the models of his predecessors and blending media, as signaled by Moore above. A study of the sculptor, painter, architect and playwright Bernini remains a methodological and theoretical exercise that challenges scholars and contemporary viewers alike. This seminar is interested in the directness of experience—the in-person study of artworks by the sculptor and his contemporaries at the Harvard Art Museums and on the seventeenth-century writers who observed and knew the artist.