248 Pages 77 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    272 Pages
    by Routledge

    Bringing together established and emerging specialists in seventeenth-century Italian sculpture, Material Bernini is the first sustained examination of the conspicuous materiality of Bernini’s work in sculpture, architecture, and paint. The various essays demonstrate that material Bernini has always been tied (whether theologically, geologically, politically, or in terms of art theory) to his immaterial twin. Here immaterial Bernini and the historiography that sustains him is finally confronted by material Bernini. Central to the volume are Bernini’s works in clay, a fragmentary record of a large body of preparatory works by a sculptor who denied any direct relation between sketches of any kind and final works. Read together, the essays call into question why those works in which Bernini’s bodily relation to the material of his art is most evident, his clay studies, have been configured as a point of unmediated access to the artist’s mind, to his immaterial ideas. This insight reveals a set of values and assumptions that have profoundly shaped Bernini studies from their inception, and opens up new and compelling avenues of inquiry within a field that has long remained remarkably self-enclosed.

    Contents

    List of Illustrations vii

    Contributors xiii

    Preface xvii

    Acknowledgments xxi

    Abbreviations xxiii

    Obstacles in the Path to a Material Bernini (1900–Present) 1

    Evonne Levy

    PART I: IMMATERIAL/MATERIAL

    The Matter of Metaphor: Truth, Sculpture, and the Word 23

    Maarten Delbeke

    Im/material Bernini 39

    Fabio Barry

    Bernini scultore pittoresco 69

    Carolina Mangone

    Body and Clay: Material Agency from an Early Modern Perspective 105

    Joris van Gastel

    PART II: CLAY BOZZETTI

    What Is a Bozzetto? 123

    Michael Cole

    Bernini’s Bozzetti and the Trope of Fire 147

    Steven F. Ostrow

    The Concept of Bernini’s “Calculated Spontaneity”:

    A Critical Reassessment 169

    Tara L. Nadeau

    vi material bernini

    Bernini/Not Bernini: Reflections on the Role of Technical

    Evidence in the Attribution of Bernini’s Terracottas 187

    C.D. Dickerson III and Anthony Sigel

    Bibliography 219

    Index 239

    Biography

    Evonne Levy is Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto, Canada.

    Carolina Mangone is Assistant Professor at Princeton University, USA.

    '...a timely, stimulating, and significant contribution to scholarship on Bernini and to the study of seventeenth-century European sculpture more generally.' Estelle Lingo, University of Washington, Seattle, USA