Bernini's Busts
- Bernini's Busts
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Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Bust of Constanza Bonarelli (Detail). c. 1636-1638. Museo del Bargello, Florence, Italy. Photo by Nicola Quirico.
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Bernini believed the subject's true expressionwas revealed just before or just after speaking.
The sculptor was unconcerned with what wassaid. The words, marble dust. He looked only
for how the forming of the thought, of feeling,rendered the face. Listened for the expressive
stone silence just before or after it was broken.His lover's lips, just parted. Her artless tongue. [End Page 53]
Jesse Wallis's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in CutBank, New Ohio Review, Rhino, Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Zone 3 and Tampa Review 43/44 ("Setting the Track Record"). He studied writing and film at the University of Iowa and, prior to that, art at Syracuse University and the California Institute of the Arts. After living in Japan for nine years, he returned to his hometown of Phoenix, where he works in human resources for a public school district.
