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  • Bernini’s Biographies: Critical Essays
  • Kristin A. Triff
Maarten Delbeke, Evonne Levy, and Steven F. Ostrow, eds. Bernini’s Biographies: Critical Essays. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2007. xviii + 420 pp. index. append. illus. bibl. $65. ISBN: 978-0-271-02901-6.

Bernini studies have traditionally benefited from the fact that more contemporary biographical sources exist for this artist than for any other from the early modern period. Gianlorenzo Bernini was the subject of two monographic biographies, each begun prior to his death in 1680: the first by the biographer and art critic Filippo Baldinucci (1682), and the second by the artist’s youngest son Domenico (1713). Other contemporary sources include the diary of Paul Fréart de Chantelou, who recorded Bernini’s 1665 trip to Paris in minute anecdotal detail, and various encomiastic essays written during the artist’s lifetime or on the occasion of his death. These sources have long been mined by art historians, to the extent that their content and tone has shaped most modern art historical writing on Bernini. However, little research has been done on these sources as texts per se, [End Page 535] constructed by individuals responding to complex combinations of literary, historical, and personal influences. This collection of essays, which focuses primarily on the vite of Baldinucci and Domenico, provides a welcome recontextualization of these and related writings, expanding the historiography of Bernini’s biographies in particular, and the field of artistic biography as a whole.

Among the most useful components of Bernini’s Biographies is the lengthy prolegomena that precedes the work’s ten interdisciplinary essays. This introductory essay, collectively written by the book’s three editors, begins with an overview of the historiography of artistic biography. As the authors note, the reception and use of artistic biography by art historians has ranged from outright rejection on the grounds of biased or anecdotal irrelevance, to unconditional acceptance as objective, authoritative sources of factual information. Although several Vienna School art historians also sought to examine the implications of what the introduction terms “biography’s historical embeddedness” (6), there was little subsequent examination of the literary nature of artistic biography prior to the last decade of the twentieth century. At this time, scholars began to focus on the influence of various literary genres on Giorgio Vasari’s sixteenth-century Vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori, the generative source for artistic biography in the early modern era. This comparative literary lens informs the essays by Steven Ostrow, John Lyons, Martin Delbeke, and Eraldo Bellini, who draw convincing parallels between Bernini’s biographies and literary genres ranging from apologia to hagiography.

In addition to bringing various methodologies to bear upon the study of Bernini’s vite, this work also seeks to unravel the Gordian knot of the authorship of the biographies. In this effort, it builds upon the pioneering research by Cesare d’Onofrio, who posited that Baldinucci’s biography, though published thirty-one years earlier than that of Domenico, was actually dependent upon an earlier source, most likely an in-progress biography authored by Domenico. More importantly, as the introduction and essays by Tomaso Montanari, Steven Ostrow, and Martin Delbeke document, Bernini himself was directly involved in this enterprise, which in the decade before his death involved a French vita by the artist’s friend Pierre Cureau de la Chambre, and an Italian biography by his eldest son, Pier Filippo. As Ostrow demonstrates in his essay, the close similarities between the direct Bernini quotations recorded by Chantelou in his 1665 journal and those in the vite of Baldinucci and Domenico tend to confirm the authenticity of Bernini’s voice, in part because neither Baldinucci nor Domenico were likely to have been familiar with Chantelou’s journal. Collectively, these essays suggest that the Bernini family, and specifically Gianlorenzo himself, were engaged during the last decade of the artist’s life in a project of encomiastic (auto)biography that sought to rehabilitate a reputation in crisis in the years following Bernini’s unsuccessful trip to France.

Taken as a whole, this collection of essays provides a series of departure points for future studies in the history of Bernini’s biographies...

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