Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Bernini was the great stage director of the Baroque: sculptor, architect and set designer. He designed the colonnades around St Peter’s Square, which embrace visitors, and the baldacchino over the altar in St Peter’s. Tessin the Younger met him during his years in Rome.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini was born in Naples in 1598, the son of the sculptor Pietro Bernini, who moved the family to Rome around 1606. His father taught him sculpture, and he studied ancient statues and Michelangelo’s works in the Vatican. While still young he received commissions from Cardinal Scipione Borghese, for whom he created sculptures such as Apollo and Daphne and David in the 1620s. When his patron Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII in 1623, Bernini gained an almost unique position in Rome. In 1629 he was appointed architect of St Peter’s and became the leading artist in the city, active as sculptor, architect, painter and set designer for over fifty years.
His first major architectural commission was the baldacchino over the papal altar in St Peter’s, 1624–1633, almost thirty metres high and carried on twisted bronze columns. He also designed the Cathedra Petri in the apse. The colonnades around St Peter’s Square, begun in 1656, enclose visitors like two arms and create one of the most famous urban spaces in the world. The church of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale is an oval building in which architecture, sculpture and light work together. On Piazza Navona he created the Fountain of the Four Rivers, and in the Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa shows how he united all the arts into a theatrical whole, the essence of the Baroque idea of the bel composto.
In 1665 Bernini travelled to Paris at the invitation of Louis XIV to design the east façade of the Louvre, but his proposal was rejected in favour of a French solution. He died in Rome in 1680. Bernini shaped Baroque Rome more than anyone else, and his way of directing space, light and movement influenced architects and artists throughout Catholic Europe. For Sweden the connection is concrete: Nicodemus Tessin the Younger met him during his years of study in Rome in the 1670s and saw his workshop. Bernini’s designs for the Louvre and his palace façades were important models when Tessin designed the Royal Palace in Stockholm, and his colonnades inspired plans for the palace’s surroundings.