Bernini and other studies in the history of art

"Bernini and other studies in the history of art" by Richard Norton is a collection of art-historical essays written in the early 20th century. The volume reexamines Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sculpture and architecture while broadening out to issues of portraiture, classical versus Renaissance ideals, and the painter Giorgione. It argues for a fresh appreciation of later Renaissance and Baroque achievement, using close visual analysis, archival traces, and rare illustrations.

The opening of this volume begins with a preface explaining the selection of images—especially Bernini’s sketches for St. Peter’s Piazza and a group of sculptor’s models—followed by an extended essay that challenges modern prejudices against 17th‑century art. It defends Bernini as an original, technically dazzling pathbreaker whose aim was sincere expression, not empty virtuosity, and sketches his character through contemporary portraits and his allegory of Truth unveiled by Time. The narrative then surveys his output: early mythological groups (with reservations about David but high praise for Proserpina and Apollo and Daphne), the emotionally charged religious works (angels, Habakkuk, St. Jerome, Daniel, and especially the Saint Theresa), monumental bronzes (the Baldacchino and Cathedra Petri), fountains alive with movement, and incisive portraiture culminating in princely busts like Louis XIV. At the start of the next section, the author introduces a rare cache of Bernini’s clay models (the Brandegee Collection), noting their immediacy and technical finesse, and opens a study of the Vatican piazza drawings that reveals the symbolic program—cruciform figure and world orb—underpinning the colonnades and their urban setting. (This is an automatically generated summary.)