Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1: Studies from the Chronicles of RomeCrawford, F. Marion (Francis Marion)
History
Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1: Studies from the Chronicles of Rome
Crawford, F. Marion (Francis Marion)
Rome (Italy) -- Description and travel
the fountain in Piazza Navona, after a design greatly reduced in extent
as well as in beauty, compared with the first he had sketched. But an
account of Bernini would lead far and profit little; the catalogue of
his works would fill a small volume; and after all, he was successful
only in an age when art had fallen low. In place of Michelangelo's
universal genius, Bernini possessed a born Neapolitan's universal
facility. He could do something of everything, circumstances gave him
enormous opportunities, and there were few things which he did not
attempt, from classic sculpture to the final architecture of Saint
Peter's and the fortifications of Sant' Angelo. He was afflicted by the
hereditary giantism of the Latins, and was often moved by motives of
petty spite against his inferior rival, Borromini. His best work is the
statue of Saint Teresa in Santa Maria della Vittoria, a figure which has
recently excited the ecstatic admiration of a French critic, expressed
in language that betrays at once the fault of the conception, the taste
of the age in which Bernini lived, and the unhealthy nature of the
sculptor's prolific talent. Only the seventeenth century could have
represented such a disquieting fusion of the sensuous and the
spiritual, and it was reserved for the decadence of our own days to find
words that could describe it. Bernini has been praised as the
Michelangelo of his day, but no one has yet been bold enough, or foolish
enough, to call Michelangelo the Bernini of the sixteenth century.
Barely sixty years elapsed between the death of the one and birth of the
other, and the space of a single lifetime separates the zenith of the
Renascence from the nadir of Barocco art.
[Illustration: PIAZZA NAVONA]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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