 Well, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Michelle DiMarzo. I'm the curator of education and academic engagement here at the Fairfax University Art Museum. And it's my pleasure to welcome you all to the final lecture being presented in conjunction with the exhibition, The Holy Name, Art of the J. Zoo, Bernini and His Age, which I'll take this opportunity to remind you is only on view until May 19. Immediately following tonight's lecture, we'll be presenting Ekrasis 6, a series in which Fairfax University MFA students perform poetry and prose works directly in response to works of art. In this case, they'll be performing them in the Bellarmine Hall galleries directly in front of works from the J. Zoo exhibition that inspired their work. So we invite you to join us up in the Bellarmine Hall galleries directly after the lecture, and the galleries will be open until 7 PM tonight. So you have a chance for a little evening sneak peak of the exhibition or a happy return, if you've seen it already. And I'll also mention that our final Art in Focus event will be taking place on May 17 at 11 AM. So please feel free to mark your calendars for that as well. And it's now my pleasure to introduce tonight's speaker, art historian and author, Charles Scribner, who received his PhD from Princeton University and taught Baroque art in their Department of Art and Artiology, and later served on the university's advisory council before joining his father in the family publishing house, Charles Scribner's sons, founded all the way back in 1846. As an art historian, Scribner has lectured widely on Baroque art at universities and museums across the United States, and has also branched into new media, including producing a program for PBS on the subject of Rubens Eucharist apostries, which subsequently became the topic of his first work. Other publications include Rubens Baroque artist, Renaissance Man, as well as genres of vermini impresario of the Baroque, copies of which are available for sale and which he has generously offered to sign for you following the lecture. You all please join me in welcoming Charles Scribner. Thank you. I want to emphasize. I don't get any of the proceeds from the sale of these books. It all goes to the museum. So I hope that encourages sales. And I just caught my eye on this first slide. I felt like I heard in my mind, Dorothy, we are no longer in Heidelberg. Fortunately. Their meaning embodies the Baroque. The consummate impresario, he dominates the 17th century. His audience comprised Europe's leading patrons, proletes, and princes. But Rome was a stage and stage enough. Today, vermini's presence around the eternal city remains as resonant as the ancient ruins. In marble, travertine, bronze, stucco, and gilt, he left his enduring imprint the stamp of genius. Within the walls, he created another realm, one of imagination incarnate that still shapes our experience of Rome and transfigures it. Born in Naples, 1598, Gian Lorenzo arrived in Rome as a six-year-old. His father Pietro was a successful Florentine sculptor, and he'd been called there to work on the full of his burial chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore. Well, like Mozart, vermini Bambino was a prodigy. From his father, he inherited a natural facility with a chisel and ability to shape stone as though it were pasta or dough. Well, perhaps it was from his mother, his Neapolitan mother, that he acquired his fiery personality and dramatic flair. By age 10, he'd been presented to the pope. Who announced this child will be the Michelangelo of his age? Following Michelangelo's example, the boy studied, sketched, and absorbed into his fingers the Greek and Roman masterpieces in the Vatican museums. And one of his earliest sculptures, here carved in about age 12, is this mythological goat, Amalthea, and the infant, Zeus, and Cedar. For centuries, it was cataloged as a Hellenistic piece over 2,000 years old. A deliberate forgery? No, but surely a most precocious debut. Now, his adolescent ambition was then shown stretched to the limit in this faun tease by Puti in the Metropolitan Museum. Its complex configuration suggests that Papa Pietro served as consulting designer. The matterist corkscrew of shapes beckons us, the viewer around it, in seeking an optimum view. But no one vantage point is wholly satisfying. This piece, true to its subject, is one grand sculptural tease. Now, separating the hands of father and son, is it easy? Well, we tend with reason to credit to young John Lorenzo those areas of convincing naturalism, where smooth flesh is supported by a solid structure of bone and sinew. Pietro, Papa, had been warned by a future pope, watch out, the boy will surpass his master, to which the enlightened father and teacher replied, well, I don't mind. In that case, the loser wins. The painter, Anibale Carracci, is said to have urged young Bernini to study Michelangelo's last judgment for two years in order to burn the proper representation of muscular term. Well, two of John Lorenzo's early religious pieces pay homage to the Renaissance master. Here we see St. Lawrence, who meets his fiery martyred harmonic gridiron, and his poses we see as a variation of Michelangelo's Pietà. But his expression is true to life. For Bernini, we read, placed his bare leg and thigh against a burning torch, then sketched his agonized reflection in a mirror. Carved a year or so later, here the St. Sebastian reveals a firmer grasp of Michelangelo as life still courses through the veins of this wounded young saint. And before turning 21, Bernini carved the first of a series of life-sized sculptures of Cardinal Borghese's villa. It shows Aeneas, the founder of Rome, carrying his old father and Pisces from the burning city of Troy, followed at his heel by the infant son, Ascanius. Bernini here translates Virgil's text into a marvel metamorphosis of the three ages of man, a spiral ascent from infancy to manhood to venerable old age. The mannerous torsion, this precarious twisting and piling of forms, still suggests the influence of Papa Pietro. But the brilliant contrasts of skin textures, the effects of age on flesh and bone, these proclaim the son's handiwork. Bernini then raised the human figure to a hybro pitch in his next action for Cardinal Borghese, the Pluto and Proserpina. It's a potted dirt and stone. As the god of the underworld stands at the threshold of Haiti's garden is received by that three-headed dog, Cerberus. And on the brink of consummating is abduction of fair Proserpina. Bernini has transposed, at the right, the manner of St. Malonia's rape of the Sabine women into a strongly frontal composition. This is a return to the Renaissance ideal of sculpture designed for a single primary viewpoint. Now, there are, to be sure, enduring peripheral views of this lusty configuration, but these are the sensual side shows. From Proserpina's tear-stained cheeks to that tactile indentation of Pluto's fingers, grasping her thigh, it's as though Bernini has translated a rubens into marble and color into chiaroscuro. In fact, we might compare it with Ruben's northern chillier rape of Oridia biborius, the North Wind, which, as you see, comes complete at the right with a snowball fight. Bernini's third group for the Villa Borghese describes a little literal metamorphosis from Hobbit. The moment the frightened nymph Daphne, presumed by the love-struck Apollo, is transformed into a laurel tree. About to be overtaken, Daphne cries out to her father, a river god, for help. Change and destroy this body which has given too much delight, she cries. Suddenly, Hobbit writes, her limbs grew numb and heavy. Her soft breasts were enclosed by delicate bark. Her hair turned into leaves, her arms, branches. Her speedy feet took root and her head became a treetop. Everything gone except her grace, her shining. Now before Bernini, only painters had tackled these verses. Adapting the ancient Apollo Belvedere, Bernini brought that classical statue to life as he froze Daphne's cry, her flesh, the marble itself, yielding to branches, bark, roots, and leaves. It is for us to decide which metamorphosis is the more miraculous, the gods or the sculptures. The final Borghese masterpiece is an injection of biblical heroism into the carpels Pagan Pantheon, Bernini's David. It emulates neither Donna Tello's boy triumphant nor Michelangelo's posturing adolescent. No, this David is full grown as we see and fully engaged both physically and psychologically. It's contra posto that wound up body about to spring loose derives both from the ancient discus thrower and from that early Baroque fresco on the right of muscular mythology, the Farnese ceiling, where we see the giant polyphemus preparing to hurl a stone at the youth acus. Well, Bernini has adapted Karachi's image with a brilliant reversal of roles. It is a giant, his youth will kill. For David takes aim at an implied Goliath looming directly behind us, the viewer. The pursed lips and furrowed brow reflect Bernini's own face, which he studied in the mirror, held by Cardinal Barberini. The future poem was present at the creation, but we are present and fully involved in the day anymore. For David is a split second away from hurling the stone toward us, the viewer. The statue penetrates our space and electrically charges it. It's this anticipation of violence that creates the dramatic tension. The David is a milestone in Bernini's art, the first physical and psychological engagement of the viewer. I'm showing from the exhibit up the hill the Cardinal Bellamy, which was done just about the same time as the David, and you can see on the right, Philippe de Montabello in front of the Cardinal, the director in Cardinal, Olfaz. I don't want to go into detail about this, because you can see this in the flesh, literally. But one thing I will point out for Bernini busts, it's unusual in that it's longer and it includes the hands, which you see forward in prayer. And as my mentor Irving Levin was the first to discover, this isn't an accident, because what is represented is that portion of Cardinal Bellamy's body that was presented or appeared without any decay when the coffin was opened, when he was reburied a year before the sculpture was begun in the Jezu. And that was considered a mark, a sign of sanctity. It was during this period that the Bellamy was being advanced for saintdom. And so Bernini is paying tribute to that fact of the uncorrupted body in what he has, if you will, brought to life again in this marvel. Well, by the time of its completion, the Cardinal, who held the mirror, had done the papal tiara as Pope Irving the eighth. The day he took office, he summoned Bernini then old, 24 years old, and announced, your luck is great to see mafia about Bernini pope, but ours is much greater to have Cavalliere Bernini alive in our pontificate. Cavalliere, because he'd already been knighted. Urban was now to give him commissions that would epitomize his triumphal restoration of Rome. This pope proved true to his chosen name. For the next 20 years, he just demonstrated the importance of being urban. He transformed the eternal city into Baroque's, into Europe's Baroque capital. Now, eager as he was to make Bernini his Michelangelo, Urban had him study painting, and this is on the right a painting of the pope by Bernini. Again, on the right, this early self-portrait of the artist reveals his natural facility in the medium. With striking economy of brushstrokes, he models his hands and features. There's an immediacy, a spontaneity, even an impressionistic quality that I think foreshadows the mature Velazquez. On the left is the painting in the Barberini of David, to which I think he's also given his own features, David with the head of Goliath. According to his son, Bernini painted some 200 such pictures. Well, only a dozen or so have so far been identified, but enough to demonstrate that in painting too, he could have earned his place in the annals of art. Still, this painting was to remain a divertimental, a creative diversion, for the major papal commissions that now engaged him were three-dimensionally. At the center of Catholic Christendom, Bernini was commissioned in 1624 to erect over the high altar and tomb of St. Peter a Balanchino, a ceremonial canopy enlarged into a landmark. His chief challenge was to design a structure that would not be dwarfed by the colossal proportions of the Basilica or swallowed up in the void under Michelangelo's dome. His inspired solution was to fuse architecture and sculpture, and rather than reuse the original Salamander colors, so called because they were thought to have come from King Solomon's temple in Jerusalem, Bernini instead imitated and vastly enlarged them. Their rich dark bronze highlighted with gilt creates a colorful contrast with the surrounding walls and indeed the original colors, which you might be able to make out in the little niche above on the right. This Balanchino is crowned by a globe and cross and four huge Barbarini beads on the top of these scroll-like volumes. These exotic baroque flourishes evoke the sensation of soaring up into the heavenly dome, and the entire structure stands some 95 feet tall as high as the Palazzo Farnese. Where was enough bronze to be found? Some of it under the portico of the Pantheon. Local tongues wagged. Quod non fechurund Barbarini. Fechurund Barbarini. What the barbarians didn't do, the Barbarini did. In the center, playful pudding hovered with the papal tiara over the grave of Peter the First Pope. Urban was himself commemorated in all those Barbarini beads, sons and laurel branches that decorate the columns. Laurel, because the Pope was also a published poet. But not all were these contemporaries appointed his inventive hybrid. A canopy cast in bronze effortlessly suspended by angels, poised on freestanding columns. The Peter Ciampelli disapproved of what he called grave breach an architectural etiquette. And two centuries later, an American tourist dubbed it a huge uncouth structure that resembles nothing so much as a colossal four-post bedstead without the curtains. But the critical consensus at its completion, and it had taken nine years, was most favorable. Barbarini was richly rewarded for this miraculous suspension of gravity as a soaring symbol of papal power. He was unveiled in June 1633, just one week after Galileo had been silenced. In each of the four surrounding piers, Barbarini then designed a towering saint in a niche. One of these on the right long ginus, he carved himself. The others were carved by collaborators for already Barbarini was establishing himself in Rome as its artistic impresario. One sculptor said that to work in Rome is to work for Barbarini. The centurion long ginus converted to the foot of the cross is here projected two and a half times life size. This heroic image evolved through some two dozen boats empty, small play sketches which Barbarini modeled with amazing speed. Compared with the early Bonsetto on the left in the Fogg Museum, the final statue as we see more impassioned, more extroverted, more baroque in its appeal to our senses. We're looking up at the cross, long ginus throws out his arms in imitation of Christ like some Caravaggio saint at the moment of divine revelation. And the statue is made up of five blocks of marble and assemblage Michelangelo would have condemned as the word of a cobbler, not a sculptor. According to Michelangelo, a sculpture shouldn't remain true to the original block from which it has been liberated. It should be able to roll downhill without damage. Well, nothing could be further from Barbarini's ideal. Long ginus is thrust into the surrounding space and then Barbarini ruffs up the marble by groove, strokes of the chisel in order to simulate varying textures of skin and fabric when seen from a distance. In effect, the blurred shimmering surfaces that a painter achieves with broken brushstrokes. The internal movements of the soul are expressed by drape-breed and engulfs this classical body in a most unclassical, indeed, supernatural fashion. The hallmark of Barbarini's hyper-rope style. Now, under Pope Urban, Barbarini had little time for private commissions or portraits. One notable exception. For his early patron, Shibioto Borghese, he carved a definitive speaking likeness. His method was to sketch the cardinal while they moved about and taught. This vivid drawing you see in the Morgan Library provides a glimpse of the man behind the marble. And this caricature reveals in a lighter vein Barbarini's genius in catching with a few depth strokes the essence of identity. He solves the problem, the inherent problem, in a portrait bust of amputation, no arms. By turning the shoulders, we see an active way that applies the rest of the body. Small drill holes in the pupils fix the cartel's gaze and engage the viewer. Well, Borghese was happily surprised by the result. In fact, doubly surprised. Before he had finished carving, Barbarini noticed a flaw across the marble. Can you see it straight across the forehead? But he completed it anyway and then ordered a new block and secretly, within two weeks, carved a copy. This he hid behind a cloth during the unveiling of the original. Well, Borghese tried bravely to conceal his disappointment that his stunning bust was flawed. And after prolonging the agony through small talk, presto, Barbarini unveiled the second bust to the cartel's explosive delight. Like his sculptural technique, Barbarini's dramatic timing was flawless. Three years later in 1635, he worked up a far more intimate portrait of his mistress, Costanza Buonorelli, that she was the wife of one of his assistants. And their affair was a stormy one. Barbarini's casual glimpse of this passionate woman with open blouse and hair gathered back in a bun as she looks to the side with lips parted, it's something of a false dawn. We must wait a century and a half for more such informal portrait busts by the great Hudo. Well, their affair ended badly with jealous accusations, violence, and legal threats. The pope himself had to bail out Barbarini and he advised him to settle down and marry. Barbarini stalled for a while, insisting that his statues would be his children and keep his memory alive for centuries. But in the end, he complied, and with typical results, his wife, Catarina and he, were to produce 11 children during the 37 years of marriage. Needless to say, Costanza's bust was given away. Barbarini was made for Rome and Rome was made for him. So proclaimed the urban pope. In this city of mountains, Barbarini left his signature writ in water. The first of these refreshing landmarks is the so-called Bancaccio or Old Boat in La Piazza di Spina. And it makes a virtue of necessity for the low pressure of the water brought in by aqueduct didn't permit spouts higher than ground level. So, Barbarini designed a ship, that ancient symbol for the church, half submerged in a basin. As if rising and falling with the sea, it's cannons spouting water. Urban himself composed verses to explain the symbolism. The papal war machines shoot forth not flames, but water sweet that quench the fires of war. They also quench thirst. Today, a more famous fountain, I think Rome's finest, was erected outside the Pope's founding palace in the Piazza Barbarini, Bernini's Triton. Free from all architectural trappings, this organic sculpture of marble and travertine emerges from water. The sea god Triton's son, Neptune, kneels on the shell, raised as we see by four dolphins. He blows his conch, as in Ovid's Metamorphoses, to signal the end of the great flood and the restoration of order. Wet, bearded Triton's son, lived to the great shell as Neptune ordered, sounding retreat and all the lands of waters heard and obeyed. Triton was also an emblem of literary immortality, an appropriate symbol for urban, the poet pope. The dolphins symbolize beneficence, the Barbarini bees, industriousness and prominence. But these footnotes in no way undermine the unity and clarity of the whole as Bernini's Triton sounds of visual fanfare for a pope, poet and princely patron, distilled in one soaring, sparkling case. It was perhaps the best label sculpture in Rome too. Bernini spent almost 20 years on urban's tomb inside St. Peter's and here again, he took traditional symbols that breathed new life into them. This bronze effigy of the pope is raised on a pedestal, a papal blessing frozen in eternity. Behind him, skeletal death, sits on his sarcophagus and inscribes urban's gilded name in the book of life. Then on either side, we see the gleaming figures of charity and justice. As they lean casually against the sarcophagus, these are the living virtues that survive the deceased pope. And charity on the left. Well, she's been called a Marble Rubens. She's also been recognized as Bernini's mistress, Costanza. The three bronze beads scattered haphazardly over the monument and a dynastic touch of trompe l'oeil, as if liberated from Barbarini's escutcheon. Or have they flown over from the Malbecchino? There, as we saw Bernini, made a sculpture of architecture. Here, he erects a pyramid of three robust statues framing ephemeral death. A visible echo of Dunn's death be not proud. One short sleep pass, we wake eternally, and death shall be no more. Death thou shalt die. Urban's death left his successor innocent to tent with a papacy on the brink of bankruptcy. Such was the price of Rome's and the Barbarini's artistic glorification over the past two decades. It was said of the Emperor Augustus that he found Rome brick and left it marble. Though urban had found Rome stone and left it baroque. As impresario of Barbarini extravagance Bernini fell from favor with the new administration, the fact that his bell tower at the Vatican at St. Peter's was causing cracks in the facade and alarm in the Vatican while this didn't help any. His rivals, including the jealous Borromini, seized their chance. The unfinished tower was pulled down and down with it went Bernini's reputation. While he sought private vindication and stone, he carved an allegorical statue of truth. Her airborne father, Time on the right, well, you see, he never got off the drawing board. But then in another revolution of fortune's will, truth was soon to reveal herself, not through time, but through art. Bernini now turned to private patrons. And for Cardinal Coronaro's family chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria, he carved his most famous sculptural group, the ecstasy of St. Teresa. In this dim, shallow chapel, Bernini admits us to St. Teresa Davilismo's intimate vision, the moment in which a beautiful young angel has withdrawn his golden arrow from her breast. Filled with the love of God, Teresa swoones unconscious, elevated on a cloud, her lips parted, her lip pan dangling at her side. A mystical experience is described in overtly physical metaphors, a visual consummation of the sensual and the spiritual that has elicited mixed responses down the ages, especially as you can imagine from those Prudish Victorians. Well, even in Bernini's own day, one anonymous critic accused him of dragging that most pure virgin not only into the third heaven, but into the dirt, to make a Venus not only prostrate, but prostituted. Yet the vast majority of clergy applauded his achievement, wherein according to his son, he conquered art. Bernini himself considered it his best work. Those who were scandalized literally missed the point. Bernini has faithfully translated into three dimension the saint's own words. Teresa described an angel in bodily form, not tall but short and very beautiful. His face all aflame and his hands, I saw a great golden spear at his tip, a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he pulled it out, I felt he took them with it and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe it made me utter several moments. This is not a physical but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it. Even a considerable share, she concluded. Teresa's tumultuous drapery reveals her state of soul. The fiery cherub's robe flutters like flames. Above frescoed clouds spill over the rim falls materialized below in golden bronze shafts of light suffused by daylight through a concealed tinted window. The columned tabernacle of the open portal of heaven it bows outward as if in response to some divine force within. And then on either side the carnaros gather at their prejuice, meditating on this apparition located deliberately beyond their sight lines. Blessed are they that have not seen yet to believe. And these are not theater boxes as so often described. In fact, Bernini's chapel is theatrical only in the sense that it realistically simulates Teresa's experience so that we, the viewers, may participate vicariously in her ecstasy. The biographer Baldenucci praised Bernini as the first to combine painting, architecture, and sculpture in such a way that forms a pleasing whole. That Bernini himself described this ideal as a bell composto, a beautiful blending of the arts. Meanwhile, Pope Innocent was finally brought around by the clever intervention of his nephew in law, Niccolò Ludivisi. For the piazza La Bona, outside the family palace, Innocent had announced a competition to design a triumphant fountain to feature a recently excavated obelisk. Well, Bernini was pointedly excluded, but Ludivisi prevailed on him to create a model which the prince then secretly set up at the end of a hallway where the Pope would be sure to see it after dinner. The unsuspecting, the innocent Innocent admired him for a full half hour before he realized he'd been set up. This design cannot be by any other than Bernini, he announced, and this is a trick of Prince Ludivisi so that in spite of those who do not wish it, we will be forced to make use of Bernini because whoever would not have his designs executed must be sure not to see them. The Pope was converted. In seeming defiance of gravity, this massive pagan obelisk, the ancient symbol of light, here crowned, as you see at the right, by the Pamphili dove, the Pope's family symbol, it's raised on a hallowed mountain from which spring the four rivers of the world, each symbolizing a continent. Now these beefed up river gods were carved in marble by Bernini's assistants. The maestro himself tackled the travertine mountain and engineering marvel of dovetail blocks that support this massive obelisk, and he also carved the exotic wildlife. Oh, the horse, the lion, the palm tree, crocodile, and even this fanciful armadillo. At the Nile on the right, his head is shrouded since its source was then unknown. Romans like to jest that the Rio reacts in horror at Boromini's façade of San Danyese, but in fact, his gesture signifies America's conversion by the dazzling light of faith. And on a human level, he responds with fearful wonder to the obelisk, which seems about to topple when viewed sharply from below. And there were in fact complaints about its apparent instability. Irredited by these groundless fears, Bernini one day arrived at the piazza, studied his fountain with feigned apprehension, and then ordered his assistants to string ropes and attach the obelisk to the buildings at either side. That done, he studied it again, heaved a great sigh of relief, and then departed smiling. Yet years later, he used to pull down the blinds of his carriage when passing by, lamenting that he was ashamed of it. Well, a showy tour de force, a splashing tabloid reform, rendered permanent in stone. Well, yes, it appears admittedly in hindsight, like years from the profound spirituality of the artist's late style. Yet still, we continue to succumb to that magic of the glistening centerpiece that for the past three and a half centuries has celebrated piazza Navona and Rome as an immovable feast. Its rococo offspring bubbles up a few streets away, the trekkie fountain, which like almost every subsequent fountain fantasy finds its baroque source in Bernini. When, in 1655, cardinal Kiji became Pope Alexander VII, Bernini was finally given full reign as an architect. Here at San Andreas Quirinale, he fully exercised his powers as impresario, now combining and coordinating architecture with painting and sculpture. The English writer, John Evelyn, wrote the hearing heard in Rome about an opera for which Bernini painted the scenes, cut the statues, invented the engines, composed the music, ripped the comedy, and built the theater. Well, San Andreas is, architecturally, a sacred opera in two acts. In the sanctuary framed by these rose-colored columns, the crucified Saint Andrew looks up to his final moments from a painting to a fresco God the Father in the lantern from which natural light as we see materializes into a gloria of gilded shafts and stucco angels. And then Andrew's pure white soul, also a stucco, brings through the pediment and ascends unaccliled to the Holy Spirit in the lantern among the main dome above the congregation. This soaring bell composto fills and defines the oval church with the intrusion of the divine into our own space. It's Bernini's baroque revision of the pantheon, his favorite ancient temple. Now, Bernini's classical setting here offers a telling contrast to Boromini's architectural gem, just a stone who's thrown down the street, San Colomino. Boromini's expressive violation of architectural grammar was anathema to Bernini. Better to be a poor Catholic than a brilliant heretic, Bernini said of that, quarter cutter, some quarters, some cuts. Boromini molded space. To him, architecture was sculpture. To Bernini, architecture provided a setting for his sculpture and it had to conform to a classical canon based on human proportions. And that is why, in his view, sculptors made the best architects. Nowhere is this architectural ideal more clearly articulated than in his Colonnais for St. Peter's, which took more than a decade to complete from 1656 to 1667. Crowned with 90 statues of saints, these 284 freestanding columns four deep enclose at Ovalpiazza. At the center is an obelisk flanked by two candlestick fountains. And he then pinched the wide facade of the basilica with these walls in order to create the illusion of height. This was his optical solution to the loss of his bell towers. Bernini himself described the Colonnais as the embracing arms of mother church. And his concept was as functional as it was symbolic. Evoking a huge open air church under the dome of heaven, the oval space permitted crowds to receive papal blessings dispensed from two distant windows, one above the main portal of the church and the other in the Pope's palace at the right. It still does. If you want to see what a man can do, you must give him a problem Bernini maintained. The highest merit he added goes to the architect who makes use of a defect in such a way that if it had not existed, one would have to invent it. But he faced an apparent insurmountable problem in redesigning the scholar aegia, the staircase to the papal apartments, a dark steep flight that narrowed toward the top. In yet another triumph of illusion, he camouflaged the narrowing by introducing colonnades of seemingly uniform width and then halfway up as we see he broke the tunnel effect by this brilliantly illuminated landing. Down below at the foot of the stairs rears the equestrian monument to the emperor Constantine who founded St. Peter's and it's Bernini's sculptural solution to that awkward transition, a sharp left turn along the ceremonial route from the Basilica to the pope's rooms upstairs. Constantine had been converted to Christianity by a luminous vision of the cross, here recreated by Bernini's visionary blending of marble, stucco, and light. Then inside the Basilica at the far end, he composed a brilliant finale. Four fathers of the ancient church effortlessly raise a huge bronze reliquary in case the cathedral painted the ancient throne of Peter. Now, in fact, St. Peter's is not a cathedral. No, the pope's official seat as bishop of Rome is across the river at the latter room. But Bernini's elevated relic here reinforces its status as the symbolic cathedral of all Christendom. He exploited the bronze columns of the Baldechino now as a frame for the cathedral. Tomb, altar, and throne are mystically combined in a single painterly composition illuminated by a miraculous burst of spiritual sunlight. Bernini brilliantly converted an awkward window, yet another architectural obstacle into the source of radiance. Passing through this oval alabaster lens, natural light is transmuted into golden shafts and a heavenly cloud of witnesses. His cathedral epitomizes what Wagner two centuries later would call a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total artwork, here of painting, sculpture, and architecture that converts dogma into tactile reality. Cast in tons of bronze, this throne hovers weightlessly on patriarchal fingertips as it suspends our disbelief. Work on the colonnaded cathedral was punctuated by Bernini's summons to France in 1665 by young King Louis XIV to design a new Louvre. Well, his Italianate version of the King's palace ultimately fell casualty to French architects. France was not to be ruled from a Roman palazzo. But on a more human scale, Bernini left behind a masterpiece that alone would justify this six-month intermezzo, his portrait bust of the king. It was prepared by dozens of life sketches at over 20 clay borsettis. He sketched Louis and council meetings even on the tennis court in order to attain a speaking likeness as he had done as we sold with Cardinal Borghese. At these, he then discarded when he finally chiseled the brittle marble in the king's presence. He explained that he didn't want to copy himself, but rather create an original. Miracle of miracles, he explained at the end of one setting, that a king so meritorious, youthful, and French should remain immobile for an hour. But the result is the baroque apotheosis of the portrait bust. And to the complaints of those carping French critics that the face didn't look enough like Louis, now there was a symbolic dose of Alexander the Great. The Bernini retorted, my king will last longer than yours. Bernini longed to return to Roman to his neglected children, as he called them, but Pollenet and Cathedra. He was 67 years old, but retired, was nowhere in sight. Once back, he designed an outdoor monument to the frail, peachy pope, not a fountain this time, but an exotic landmark, an obelisk raised on the back of an elephant. An erudite and witty emblem of Pope Alexander's wisdom, the obelisk, and intellectual strength, the elephant, erected outside the church of Santa Maria so propinae. The pope's soul, Bernini then later immortalized inside St. Peter's, and for this final papal tomb, he composed an allegorical frail for faith over death. Once again, he confronted a physical obstacle, a functional doorway which he transformed into the would-be door to Alexander's tomb. And through it, as it were, the skeleton death flies upward, brandishing an hourglass. And now I can testify from personal experience that as a 24-year-old graduate student, I had the sobering experience of escorting on one arm a wobbly, cardinal right from the mass at the Baldequino, on the other arm was his good-looking, young assistant, Father Whirl, who's now the Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, and we were escorting this 80-year-old wobbly cardinal out to his car to go back to his office. And all of a sudden, I looked up and there was Bernini's skeleton overhead, and we were walking through the tomb of Alexander VII to the Cardinal's fiat outside. Of course, the Cardinal's dried fiat's, what else? But so it is a sobering experience to pass under that skeleton. But, and indeed, Alexander himself had a penchant for these memento mori. He slept in the casket, designed, of course, by Bernini, and the 80-year-old plates, decorated with skulls, again, designed by Bernini. Yet this skeleton here is not ultimately terrifying, but really uplifting. For doubling his father's time with wings and an hourglass, he begins to restore Alexander's reputation as he pulls the Jasper shroud to uncover naked truth. Well, she was eventually given a few more clothes and stuck up by a later Prudish poem. Serene and elevated, year to eternity, surrounded by these virtues, the poem humbling deals in prayer bareheaded below a halo of Keejee stars. We have prowled a long way from urban's tomb across the sanctuary on the right. Now it is faith, not fortitude, that permeates Bernini's twilight masterpieces. For the next, quote, Clement the Ninth, Bernini renovated the Ponte San Angelo. Before Mussolini bulldozed his avenue through the borgo, this bridge was the main approach to the Vatican. Ten exquisite angels bearing instruments of the passion line Bernini's Via do Rosa, his penitential prelude for pilgrims to St. Peter's. Originally, two of the angels were carved by Bernini himself, but the pope ordered them kept indoors to be spared exposure to the elements. Bernini then secretly carved one of their replacements for the bridge. He would have the last word. But today, as we see here in Sant'Andrea de la Frate, which was the Bernini family church, the original pair stand in counterpoint, the closest any sculptor has ever come to capturing pure spirit in stone. Consumed by garments of flame there, the attenuated bodies and emotional intensity seem almost neo-gothic. Yet their source was from classical antiquity, the so-called, there's the copy on the bridge by Bernini. Here it is, the so-called Antinous, to which in his youth, Bernini had often turned for inspiration, he said, as to the oracle. The critic, Jakob Burkhardt, described, not as a compliment, their fantastic, unclassical draperies carved with a spoon in almond jelly. But our modern dogma of truth to material is not a valid criterion for judging such creations. For otherwise, as the sculptor Henry Moore observed, a snowman made by a child would have to be praised at the expense of a rodent or a Bernini. Another huge pair of angels this time in bronze frames Bernini's final masterwork at St. Peter's, the altar of the Blessed Sacrament. Completed for the holy year 1675, it combines painting, sculpture, and architecture in one sublime summation of the Eucharist. This bronze tabernacle, the symbolic tomb of Christ, is an elaborate and eloquent reduction of Romante's tempietto outside on the genicolo. There you see it on the left. In this vertically staged drama, Christ is shown crucified at the altar, and then above his body the sacramental bread is buried as it were in the tabernacle tomb on top of which he is resurrected in a bronze statuette before taking his place in heaven in Peter and Aquatola's background painting. Twice life-size, the two angels direct the viewer to the mystery they embrace. One turns in rapt adoration toward the tabernacle, while the other partakes of divinity. Delicately counterpoised and psychologically contrasted, the pair evolve through a virtuoso series of Bozzetti. Here is one of them, and they rank among the glories of Harvard's Fog Museum. Now in his first altar work at St. Peter, perhaps actually earlier as we saw, Bernini had to cast architecture as colossal sculpture of bronze tabernacle erected above an altar itself above a tomb. Now he retranslated sculpture into miniature architecture, a tabernacle in the form of a tomb raised above an altar. And then he confronted the subject of death, face-on in his last full-bodied marvel, Blessed Ludovica Albertoni. The holy woman lies on her deathbed and at the threshold of eternity. The walls of the small memorial chapel converge as we see like wings of a giant triptych open to reveal Bernini's most luminous and painterly tableau. With head thrown back, lips parted, eyes of Turnbudovica clutches her breast. Physical agony and metaphysical turbulence resonate through the folds of her dress. Cherubs float like snowflakes down streams of light from concealed side windows. While the background painting provides the window as it were into Ludovica's ecstatic vision of paradise, the mystical dying that preceded her physical death. A comparison with the Saint Teresa underscores the deepening of Bernini's vision over the quarter century. A tactile apparition has modulated into an internal transposition from body into soul. Diagonists are suppressed into sustained horizontals, architectural isolation, I mean Teresa's tabernacle, has yielded dramatic imminence as Ludovica's pole cascades toward us, the viewer, our perspective channeled by this foreshortened arch. No family effigies are here admitted as eternal witnesses. No, the blessed Ludovica is contemplated by us alone. Requiem internal donae domine, this is Bernini's Requiem. And he approached his own death with no less artistry or imagination. For according to his son Domenico, he undertook a final sculpture an over life-sized bust of the savior. In it, he summarized and condensed his art, Domenico writes, adding that the weakness of his wrist prevented it from embodying the boldness of his idea. This parting work was not intended for his own tomb of simple marble slab in San Antonio Maggiore, but as a gift to Rome's pre-eminent convert, Queen Christina of Sweden, who had exchanged her throne for a mass. Lost for two and a half centuries, the bust was finally identified in 1972 at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia by Irving Leyvin. And now the story gets a little complicated because 72, 30 years later, the original bust almost literally came out of the closet, came out of a back sacristy in a little church of San Sebastiano on the Appian Way in Rome, and there it is. That's the brilliant Bernini original, and I had to write a new edition of my book as I ended with the Rome one. Back in 1991, I had to update it. And in this beautiful bust in Rome, which conforms exactly to the dimensions in the inventory and the same pedestal of Sicilian Jasper, it's absolutely brilliant and wonderful and well worth the trip on the Appian Way, and only a handful of perverse outliers, scholars who cling to the more bizarre bust on the left. I guess they're vision shaped by the age of Picasso. Prefer the Norfolk vision, the version, but the Norfolk Museum, to its great credit, labels it copy after Bernini. Well, it was originally intended to be raised on a pedestal by kneeling angels. Here's a similar drawing by Bernini. Elevated as if one huge white host, the Eucharistic body of Christ, the bread of angels. I want to just add one comment about the newly discovered bust. The hand is so much more prominent and beautifully articulated. And this hand has caused lots of ink to be spilled in scholarly journals, trying to interpret this gesture as some say, warding off the chalice at the Garden of Gethsemane or damning the souls at the Last Judgment. It's just one theory after another. But Bernini's son, Domenico, after saying that it was his father's favorite sculpture, his Veniamino, his darling, his last and favorite child, if you will, Benjamin, he describes, and you can read it in Franco Ramondo's brilliant translation of Domenico's biography, as in Anto di Bernini, in the act of imparting a blessing. And I always think with Bernini, there are depths of meaning, but the surface always makes sense. There's no mystery to the surface of a meaning of a Bernini. And how, in a sculpture, a frozen block of marble, do you convey the act of blessing? Well, anybody who's been to a papal blessing or even a mass knows how the gesture goes, down to the side and across. And what Bernini has done here to convey that sense of movement, just like the David wound up like a Roger Federer backhand about to hurl the stone, he's got the arm off to the left as it's about to complete the sweep across his body and complete the blessing. It's arrested movement. That is how you convey movement in a sculpture. You have to arrest it. And this is why Bernini arrests it off-center so that we may fill in the remaining movement mentally. And so we see the striking realism of the child prodigy here transfigured in the end by this vision of a genius for whom life and art were as inseparable as fact and faith. To the French king and court Bernini had insisted, let nowhere once speak to me of little things. And now, in accounting for his life, he said he would have to deal with the Lord who infinite and superlative in his attributes would not be concerned to count in Venice. At the foot of his deathbed, Bernini set out the painting of the Sangue di Cristo, The Blood of the Redeemer. The deadly fever lasted 15 days. His wit remained undimmed. When paralysis struck his right arm, he declared, it is only right that even before death that arm rest a little that worked so much in life. He had rearranged with his confessor a language of expression and gesture of which he, of course, was the master. In case, as indeed it turned out, he finally lost the power of speech. Moving only his eyes and left hand, Bernini gave his final blessing to his nine surviving children. He died on November 28th, 1680, just short of his 82nd birthday. To his friend, Queen Christina, who had refused to accept so precious a gift while he lived, Bernini bequeathed the bust of the Savior. Christina, as Pope Innocent XI, who was the eighth pope Bernini had served, the value of the artist's estate. 400,000 Scoody, the Holy Father replied, a fortune. Her response? I would be ashamed if he had served me and left so little. But, Bernini left to roam into the world, or be at or be a priceless legacy. And we are all ultimately his heirs and the custodians of the treasures he called his children. Thank you. That was a good question as well. Okay, so if you have any questions, you'll find all the answers in the books. Hi. In the back of the room. But also our wonderful speaker has agreed to answer a few questions. What would you possibly not know after that lecture? So, I'm very happy that you featured the scholar Regia. I've tried and failed for 30 years to visit it. I wonder if you have, and what your impression of it is in real life? And whether you compare it contrasted to Borromean's perspective gallery and the Spada gallery? Yeah, well the Borromean, of course, you have a much Borromean. You know the Borromean, it's an optical illusion. You think you're looking at this long tunnel, right? Column A, but it actually is like five feet long. The scholar Regia, I've been down, but never have. And you can sneak down, or if you go to the Sistine Chapel and kind of wander out the wrong way when they're not looking. Okay. You probably shouldn't have done that. You probably shouldn't have done that. But you know, I was kind of a loose cannon when I was in the Vatican. I was much younger then. Okay, just one more, nobody, no other questions? Does everybody believe that Borromean is better than Borromean? Okay, but most of those, how do our sculptures, I imagine, are subject to decay? So what is the prognosis for their future? They get cleaned up from time to time, just like the buildings. I mean, I remember you probably remember too, the Triton, once I went there, and it was just covered with barnacles and it was brown and it was horrible. And the next year I came back, it was gleaming white and beautiful. The Romans really know how to clean things up. But they have to. Okay, well thank you very much.