Career of Bernini

Howard Hibbard's precise but involving account of the career of Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) is necessarily the story of one of the most fortunate instances of patronage in Western art. Throughout the book Hibbard balances the advances in Bernini's style and the scope of his ambitions against the importance of a rare degree of privileged access to patronage. Bernini, whose sculptor father had been called to Rome to work for Paul V, was a prodigy who not only received much of his artistic education at the Vatican (where he supposedly drew daily for three years) but may even have been commissioned as a sculptor by the papal family at the age of 11. While stories of the fostering of prodigies by enlightened patrons are the stuff of biographers' public relations efforts (e.g., Michelangelo and the Medici 'sculpture garden'), it is certainly true that Bernini was a prodigy and went on to work for eight successive popes. He

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Category: Arts - C