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  • The Art of Religion: Sforza Pallavicino and Art Theory in Bernini’s Rome by Maarten Delbeke
  • Robert Williams
The Art of Religion: Sforza Pallavicino and Art Theory in Bernini’s Rome. By Maarten Delbeke. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2012. Pp. xvi, 241. $124.95. ISBN 978-0-7546-3485-0.)

For all that he is well known, Gianlorenzo Bernini, the greatest artist of seventeenth-century Rome and one of the very greatest who has ever lived, has always been at something of a critical and historiographic disadvantage. He was deliberately left out of Giovanni Pietro Bellori’s Lives (Rome, 1672), a collection of the biographies of leading artists active in Rome. The official excuse was that he was still alive, but no one was fooled: Bellori did not approve of Bernini’s art; he preferred the rigorous classicism of Annibale Carracci, Domenichino, and Nicolas Poussin—the so-called Roman classicists. Bellori’s distaste was shared by the members of the French Academy, thus exerting a powerful influence on European opinion, and in the subsequent century, Bernini was held in contempt by the neo-classicists. To a surprising degree, modern art-historical scholarship has followed along: whereas Caravaggio has managed to overcome the censure that Bellori heaped on him so that we recognize him almost as one of us, Bernini still seems remote to many of our contemporaries—partly due, no doubt, to his lifelong dedication to the Church and the deep, sincere, and absolutely confident religious faith that animates all his work.

Bernini was the subject of two early biographies, one written by the Florentine Filippo Baldinucci for Queen Christina of Sweden, who was a patron and admirer of Bernini; the other written by Bernini’s son, Domenico, and published a generation after the great artist’s death. Tomaso Montanari has shown that these two texts drew upon the same source material, originally assembled as part of an effort to see that Bernini received something like equal exposure in the press. The starting point of Maarten Delbeke’s superb book is the hypothesis that this effort was greatly indebted to the artist’s friend, Cardinal Pietro Sforza Pallavicino (1607–67)—Jesuit theologian, ethical philosopher, and literary theorist. Delbeke presents a learned, penetrating, and judicious account of Pallavicino’s thought and its many points of contact with Bernini’s artistic aims, creating a compelling case that Pallavicino’s writings offer the most insightful contemporary gloss on the master’s work. In so doing, he has rescued Bernini from the undervaluation of his contemporaries and ours, and provided an excellent basis for understanding Bernini’s achievement in relation to the intellectual and spiritual life of his time.

Delbeke’s study is also the first extensive discussion of this major seventeenth-century writer in English; it takes the reader through the principal texts in a manner that is lucid and comprehensive, and that does justice to their complexity [End Page 365] and subtlety. In demonstrating the relation of Pallavicino’s thought to Bernini’s work, it reconstructs a system of art-theoretical values, steeped in theological reflection, that never really received the full articulation it deserved, being swept aside, as it was, by the rationalism of the French Academy. The book is a refreshing antidote to the fetishization of Caravaggio, on the one hand, and the Roman classicists, on the other. It is a masterful demonstration of the ways in which the sources and techniques of intellectual history can be used to illuminate the history of art.

Robert Williams
University of California, Santa Barbara
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