The
temporary exhibit I've just seen at the Metropolitan
Museum in NYC was right up my alley! Bernini: Sculpting in
Clay was so informative for the Jane’s Smart Art Guides™ audio guide to the Fountains of Rome, Part
2: Fountains of the Acqua Felice. (Part
1: Fountains of the Acqua Vergine will be available for download in a few weeks!)
Among the fountains I’ll cover in Part 2 are Bernini’s Four Rivers and Il Moro in Piazza Navona, and Il
Tritone in the Piazza Barberini, so it was fascinating to see the artist’s preliminary
terracotta work for many of the marble figures in those fountains.
Bernini: Sculpting in
Clay looks at how Bernini changed the face on Rome during the course of his long 17th century career. The show features 39 of Gian-Lorenzo Bernini’s 52 known works in clay, along
with some 30 related sketches. Besides the fountain sculpture, the exhibit also
considers much of his other sculptural work, including Blessed Ludovica Albertoni (Altieri Chapel, San Francesco a Ripa,
Trastevere) and The Ecstasy of St Theresa
(Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome).
During the first stages of realizing a design, Bernini used
clay to conceptualize his ideas, starting with very loosely worked bozzetti
(from the Italian word abbozzare, “to sketch”). Once he’d
achieved a design he was happy with he usually made a larger, more finished clay figure
called a modello. He might show the modello to a patron or give it to
an assistant to use as a guide for carving the much larger marble figure. In themselves
Bernini’s modelli are awesome works of sculpture displaying a wealth of
texture and details.
On the walls adjacent to the sketches on paper and
the clay models are large pictures of the actual marble sculptures that
resulted, providing real insight into Bernini’s artistic process from start to
finish.
If you’ve seen Bernini’s Four
Rivers Fountain (c.1650), you may remember the beautiful marble lion that
emerges from a cavern in the rock to take a drink from the pool. Here was that
lion, crouching as if to drink from a stream, modelled at half size. Even in clay, one can
sense the power and alertness of the beast, despite the stillness of the moment.
Bernini: Sculpting in
Clay runs through January 6th at the Met, and then can be seen
at the KimbellArt Museum in Ft. Worth
TX, Feb 3rd - April 14th,
1213.
