Bernini in the Villa Borghese

The Villa Borghese was the creation of one of seventeenth-century Rome’s most irrepressible characters: Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Pope Paul V and a man whose ruthlessly predatory nature combined with an unerring eye for artistic virtuosity to produce one of the greatest private art collections ever assembled.

This was a prince of the Church more interested in luxury than piety, who lived on an extravagant scale that scandalised even by the standards of the Baroque papacy.

Scipione’s desire for masterpieces was such that he was known to have artists imprisoned in order to confiscate their work.

He had Raphael’s Deposition forcibly removed from its altar in Perugia and carted to Rome — where it still hangs in the gallery today, an act of artistic piracy conducted without the slightest embarrassment. The Cavaliere d’Arpino reportedly had over 100 paintings sequestered by the art-loving cardinal, while Domenichino was thrown in jail until he agreed to sell Borghese his magisterial Diana and the Hunt.

Thanks to his dodgy dealings and ruthless tactics, Scipione’s brilliant collection grew in all directions: ancient sculpture, Renaissance painting, and the new art that was being created right outside his door in the turbulent, brilliant city that Baroque Rome had become.

Carved when Bernini was still barely into his twenties, this magnificent marble portrait of Pope Paul V — Camillo Borghese, uncle of Scipione and the man who had so dramatically welcomed the young artist into the papal orbit — is far more than a formal commission. It is a statement of arrival.

The goateed pontiff stares at us blankly from pupil-less eyes, a commanding and somewhat unapproachable figure appropriate to his status as one of the world’s most powerful princes. He is dressed in vestments elaborately carved with the figures of Saint Peter and Paul.

Portrait busts had been a staple of Italian sculpture since the Renaissance, but Bernini transformed the genre almost from the outset. Where his predecessors had tended to produce a solemn, frontal image, frozen in dignity, Bernini captures Paul V in a moment of life: the Pope turns very slightly, his robes caught mid-movement, his gaze directed just off-centre with the air of a man whose attention has been momentarily drawn by something just out of frame.

The effect, in cold marble, is of a living person rather than a monument.

Look also at the extraordinary technical accomplishment of the surface: the lacy texture of the papal vestments, the delicate differentiation between skin, fabric and jewellery, the subtle creasing at the corners of the eyes. This is Bernini in his early twenties. He had, quite simply, arrived.

A teetering, twisting tangle of bodies, the precarious Aeneas fleeing Troy is the first major work that Gian Lorenzo Bernini would produce for the all-powerful Cardinal Borghese — and the opening statement of a career that would soon transform sculpture in Rome.

Often overshadowed by the spectacular mythological groups that followed, it is nonetheless a remarkably ambitious and accomplished piece, even if it shows the young artist still working within a tradition he would very shortly transcend.

The subject is drawn from The Aeneid, the great Roman epic by Virgil that loomed large in the mythology of the Eternal City. As Troy falls to the Greeks, the hero Aeneas flees the burning city, carrying his aged father Anchises on his shoulders and leading his young son Ascanius by the hand in a potent image of continuity, survival, and destiny.

According to ancient tradition, it is this journey that will ultimately bring Aeneas to Italian shores, where his descendants will found Rome itself. The theme already had a noble pedigree in Italian art, most famously in The Fire in the Borgo by Raphael, where the story is anachronistically woven into the fabric of papal Rome.

Bernini’s interpretation unfolds as a three-figure group designed to be experienced in the round. As you move around it, the composition shifts and re-forms: Aeneas strides forward, his body taut and powerful, bearing a striking resemblance to the Risen Christ by Michelangelo, while the weight of Anchises presses down upon him, and the small figure of Ascanius totters dutifully at his side.

The three figures embody the ages of man — youth, maturity, and old age — bound together in a single precarious motion through space. At first glance, the composition can feel slightly uncertain, its towering, serpentine form an ambitious if not entirely resolved response to the spiralling dynamism of the Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna in Florence’s Loggia dei Lanzi.

There is a sense here of Bernini testing his powers against the great sculptural challenges of the previous generation. And yet, within that striving, the brilliance of his eye and hand is already unmistakable.

Look closely, and the sculpture comes alive in its details. The contrast between Aeneas’ firm, youthful musculature and the stretched, sagging skin of Anchises is handled with extraordinary sensitivity. The old man’s gnarled legs hang heavily, his body both a burden and a responsibility, while his hands clutch tightly at the sacred household gods — the fragile remnants of a lost world. There is tenderness here as well as tension: the protective forward movement of Aeneas, the quiet dependence of his father, the hesitant steps of the child behind.

The work has sometimes been linked to Pietro Bernini, who was still collaborating with his son at this early stage, and scholars have long debated their respective contributions. But the ambition of the conception and the quality of the finest passages of carving leave little doubt as to where the future lay. This is Bernini on the threshold — not yet the master of theatrical illusion he would become, but already pushing against the limits of inherited forms.

The next large-scale mythological work that Gian Lorenzo Bernini produced for Cardinal Borghese marks a quantum leap in his development. In Pluto and Persephone, carved between 1621 and 1622, the young sculptor pushes the material limits of marble to their breaking point, handling stone with a fluency that seems to defy its very nature.

Here, Bernini not only masters the technical challenges of his medium, but demonstrates a growing confidence in transforming complex narratives into sculptural form — condensing an entire myth into a single, devastating instant.

The subject is drawn from classical mythology: the violent abduction of Persephone (Proserpina), daughter of the harvest goddess Ceres, by Pluto, the dark god of the Underworld. Chancing upon the young woman as she gathers flowers in a meadow, Pluto resolves to seize her and make her his queen.

Bernini captures the moment of no return — the instant in which desire turns to possession, and the world of the living gives way to the realm of the dead.

This is a sculpture conceived fully in the round, and it reveals itself only gradually. At first, we encounter the sheer physical force of Pluto, his massive frame striding forward, Persephone lifted helplessly in his arms.

But as you move around the group, the emotional intensity sharpens. Persephone twists and writhes in resistance, her body arching away even as she is pulled inexorably toward her fate.

Tears stream down her face; her mouth opens in a cry; her fingers press desperately against Pluto’s head in a futile attempt to push him away. An unseen wind seems to catch her hair and drapery, heightening the sense of violent motion.

And then there is the detail that has astonished viewers for centuries. Pluto’s hand grips Persephone’s thigh — and the marble yields. His fingers press into her flesh with an uncanny softness, the stone appearing to deform under their weight.

It is perhaps the most shocking illusion in all of Villa Borghese, achieved through a combination of meticulous polishing, which softens the play of light across the surface, and daring undercutting that gives the forms their depth and suppleness. Bernini was just twenty-three years old when he began the work; his contemporaries could scarcely believe what they were seeing.

Only by circling the sculpture do we grasp the full gravity of the scene. At Pluto’s feet crouches Cerberus, the monstrous guardian of Hades. With his presence, the narrative snaps into focus: Persephone has already crossed the threshold. There is no escape. The struggle we witness is already too late: Proserpina’s fate is sealed as unwilling goddess of death’s kingdom.

And yet, as the myth reminds us, this is not a story without consequence beyond the moment of violence. Ceres, grief-stricken at the loss of her daughter, refuses to let the earth bear fruit, plunging the world into barrenness until a compromise is reached. Persephone will return to the land of the living each spring, bringing renewal and growth; her forced descent back to the Underworld will mark the onset of winter.

Bernini captures the most brutal instant of that cycle — the abduction itself — but within it lies the rhythm of the seasons, a myth of loss and return that would resonate across centuries.

So impressed was Cardinal Borghese that he eventually gifted the sculpture to Ludovico Ludovisi, nephew of the newly elected pope, prompting him to commission a replacement from the young artist, a decision that would lead directly to some of Bernini’s most celebrated works. But even among them, Pluto and Persephone retains a singular power.

It is not simply a display of virtuosity, though it is certainly that. It is a moment of transformation — of marble into flesh, of myth into lived experience — and the point at which Bernini’s art begins to astonish not just for what it shows, but for how it makes us feel it.

If the precocious Bernini was consciously taking on the challenge of Raphael in his earlier Aeneas group, the final epic narrative sculpture that he produced for Scipione Borghese saw him aiming his sights even higher in his attempt to fashion a place for himself in the top tier of Italian artists.

The figure of the Biblical David slaying the seemingly immortal Goliath had already produced two of the greatest masterpieces ever essayed in sculpture: Michelangelo’s iconic hero contemplating the task ahead and Donatello’s triumphant, delicate youth resting on the giant’s freshly severed head.

In contrast to Michelangelo’s aloof hero or Donatello’s louche and charming youth, Bernini’s David is a solid, no-nonsense figure. Unlike the earlier Aeneas, David is far from a generic imitation of an earlier prototype and exudes individual personality. His furrowed brows bristle with intensity of purpose and he bites his upper lip in fierce concentration.

Whilst Donatello and Michelangelo went for the moments preceding and succeeding the fight, Bernini went for the dramatic jugular. Here David is portrayed in the midst of his titanic struggle, poised to unleash the slingshot that will take down his fearsome enemy. And we seem to be caught in the crosshairs.

In a fantastic piece of site-specific invention, as the viewer enters the room in which David is housed, we quickly realize that he is launching an attack at an unseen figure behind us, placing us right in the midst of the action.

Criticisms that Bernini has loaded David’s slingshot the wrong way round, whilst certainly accurate, seem rather pedantic in light of the sculpture’s revolutionary inventiveness.

The face of David is famously a self-portrait. Bernini’s friend and patron Cardinal Maffeo Barberini is said to have held a mirror while the sculptor worked, allowing Bernini to study his own expression of concentrated effort.

The intensity in those features — not rage, but absolute focused will — is one of the most psychologically precise things Bernini ever produced, and one of the most remarkable things about a man who spent his career depicting high Baroque emotion at full throttle.

The David marked the end of Bernini’s great first chapter at the Villa Borghese. Barberini was about to be elected Pope Urban VIII, and he intended to make full use of his friend and favourite. The larger stage of the Vatican and the whole of Baroque Rome was waiting.

But the work he produced for Scipione in these years — at an age when most artists are still finding their voice — remains perhaps the most astonishing sustained achievement in the history of sculpture.

The vital energy of the man who gave life to the magnificent Villa and who had the foresight to see in Bernini an era-defining talent was captured with extraordinary vividness in two portrait busts sculpted by the artist in 1632, now at the height of his powers.

Busy at work on the epic commissions ordered by Pope Urban VIII, this was to be the last work that Bernini would sculpt for his first great patron. And it is startling.

The marble features of the powerful and intelligent cardinal positively sparkle with a startling inner life and psychological depth: his penetrating gaze is clearly of someone used to being obeyed, whilst the subtle wrinkles of his plump face are extraordinarily realistic. Unlike the static and reverential portraits of an earlier age, Bernini seems to have caught Borghese in mid-speech, as if he’s just turned his head to make a remark.

To capture the true essence of the Cardinal, Bernini apparently adopted an entirely novel approach to preparation. Instead of having Borghese sit for him, the artist followed Scipione around in order to pin down exactly what it was that made the Cardinal unique, making off-the-cuff sketches of him in the process. Bernini’s dedication bore fruit, producing one of the finest portrait sculptures ever created.