The Baroque period

Early and High Baroque

At the beginning of the 17th century, sculpture in Italy was often in service of the Counter-Reformation, and the frankly propagandist nature of the decoration of the Borghese and Sistine chapels in Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome, reveals this only too clearly. With Stefano Maderno and Camillo Mariani a slightly more imaginative interpretation of the demands of the Council of Trent is to be found, while certain aspects of the work of Pietro Bernini (1562–1629) were to have considerable influence on his son Gian Lorenzo. The first breath of the new Baroque spirit, however, is to be found in the immense vitality of the equestrian monuments in Piacenza (1612–25) by Francesco Mochi; and a comparable fiery vigour is the keynote of the fresco Aurora by Guercino in the Casino Ludovisi, Rome (1621–23). The forms are pierced and opened up, and the momentary, unstable poses, with draperies fluttering and tails lashing, give a vivid movement that releases the figures from the Mannerist spell.

No field was more congenial to the spirit of Baroque art than sculpture carried out on a conspicuous scale. The Baroque artist achieved dramatic pictorial unity by abolishing the traditional limits separating painting, sculpture, and architecture. The solid masses of sculpture and even of architecture were made to move in space by means of such motive forms as undulations; sculpture was transformed by such painter’s devices as richly varied illusionistic textures, coloured materials, and irregularly dappling light effects.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the greatest sculptor of the 17th and 18th centuries, established the sculptural principles for those two centuries in a series of youthful works of unrivalled virtuosity, as the Apollo and Daphne. Stone was now completely emancipated from stoniness by open form and by an astonishing illusion of flesh, hair, cloth, and other textures, pictorial effects that had earlier been attempted only in painting. These qualities made what his contemporaries called his “speaking portraits” seem unprecedentedly alive; portrait sculpture for two centuries was a variation of these innovations. In the statue of St. Longinus in St. Peter’s in Rome, Bernini created the characteristic formula of Baroque sculpture by throwing the draperies into a violent turmoil, the complicated and broken involutions of which are not rationally explained by the figure’s real bodily movement but seem paroxysmally informed by the miracle itself. The passion with which he imbued his sculptured figures, capturing the most transitory states of mind, reached its apogee in the representation of the ecstasy of St. Teresa in the Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome (1645–52) and in the figure of the expiring Ludovica Albertoni in the Altieri Chapel, San Francesco a Ripa, Rome (c. 1674). The former is generally considered the masterpiece of Baroque religious sculpture and shows how Bernini could organize the arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture in an overwhelming effect on the senses that dispels the resistance of the intellect. This ambitious plan was typical of the mature Bernini, whose spiritual and artistic aspirations exceeded the scope of his early secular salon statues. His later works were largely religious and unprecedentedly vast in scale, as in the dazzling Cathedra Petri, which covers the whole end of St. Peter’s in Rome with a teeming multitude of figures.

The tombs of Bernini are magnificent spectacles in which symbolic figures, clothed in sweeping draperies, with rhetorical gesture and expressive features, share in some emotional experience, theatrically depicted. An example is the tomb of Alexander VII in St. Peter’s, Rome. The pontiff, set in a great apse, kneels on a high pedestal about which Charity, Truth, Justice, and Wisdom weep disconsolately while Death, a skeleton, raises the great draperies of polychrome and gold that veil a darkened doorway. Another work, the fountain of the Triton in the Piazza Barberini, Rome, from which all clarity of profile or of shadow, all definiteness of plane, are removed, is also characteristic of Bernini’s style, widely imitated throughout Europe.

Bernini’s art was the basis of all Baroque sculpture, but his example was not always followed, and the work of his more restrained contemporaries, such as Alessandro Algardi(relief of Meeting of Attila and Pope Leo [1646–53]) and the Fleming François Duquesnoy, attracted more approval from theorists of art. The latter’s St. Susanna in Santa Maria di Loreto in Rome, a figure after the antique but enlivened with Berninian textures, was originally made to look toward the observer and, with a gesture, to direct his attention to the altar. The distinction between art and life that the Mannerists had cultivated was banished by this active participation of the statue in the viewer’s space and activities, another important innovation of Bernini.

Late Baroque

In late 17th-century painting, composition became increasingly decorative rather than structural, and there was a loosening of design in the individual figures as well. This dissolution is also to be found in sculpture of the period, such as in the proto-Rococo figures of Filippo Carcani in Rome and, to a lesser extent, in those of Filippo Parodi in Genoa, Venice, and Naples. Outside Venice and Sicily the true Rococo made little headway in Italy.

A more or less classical late Baroque style, best exemplified by the heroic works of Camillo Rusconi in Rome, was dominant in central Italy through the middle of the 18th century. Rusconi’s work had considerable influence outside Italy as well.

The latter half of the century saw the emergence of a much lighter and more theatrical manner in the works of Agostino Cornacchini and of Pietro Bracci, whose allegorical figure Ocean on the Trevi Fountain by Niccolò Salvi (completed 1762) is less artfully dramatic and not as masterfully executed as Bernini’s sculpture. Filippo della Valle worked in a classicizing style of almost French sensibility, but the majority of Italian sculpture of the mid-18th century became increasingly picturesque with a strong tendency toward technical virtuosity. Complex sculptured groups designed by Luigi Vanvitelli for the park of the palace at Caserta (c. 1770) are almost tableaux vivants (“living pictures”) in a landscape setting, while the Cappella Sansevero de’ Sangri in nearby Naples (decorated 1749–66) is one of the most important sculptured complexes of the time. Allegorical groups by Antonio Corradini and Francesco Queirolo vie with each other in virtuosity and include such conceits as fishnets cut from solid marble and the all-revealing shrouds developed by Giuseppe Sammartino. Florentine sculpture of the 18th century is less spectacular, and Giovanni Battista Foggini took back from Rome the compromise style of Ferrarza, while Massimiliano Soldani-Benzi seems to have been instrumental in the brilliant revival there of small-scale bronze statuettes. Giovanni Marchiori worked in Venice with an attractive painterly style, in part based on the wood carvings of Andrea Brustolon; and Giovanni Maria Morlaiter ran the full gamut to a late 18th-century classicism close to the early works of the great Neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova.