Peter's and sexually charged Saint Teresa in Ecstasy his monumental work for Pope Alexander VII and the tumultuous period in the court of Louis XIV. Mormando traces Bernini's work for his first chief patron, Pope Urban VIII, detailing Bernini's power struggles with rival Borromini the critical receptions of and controversies surrounding major commissions such as the baldacchino at St. In one of the few biographies of Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini since his death in 1680, Boston College Italian professor Mormando constructs a comprehensive, extraordinarily vivid portrait of the sculptor known as "the Michelangelo of his age." A child prodigy compulsive about creative achievement, Bernini was, in Mormando's estimation, a superbly technically skilled sculptor who possessed rare psychological insight into the human and mythological subjects he portrayed. No one who has been bewitched by the Baroque should miss it. The result is a seductively readable biography, stuffed with stories and teeming with life-as wild and unforgettable as Bernini’s art. He sets Bernini’s raucous life against a vivid backdrop of Baroque Rome, bustling and wealthy, and peopled by churchmen and bureaucrats, popes and politicians, schemes and secrets. Drawing on archival sources, letters, diaries, and-with a suitable skepticism-a hagiographic account written by Bernini’s son (who portrays his father as a paragon of virtue and piety), Mormando leads us through Bernini’s many feuds and love affairs, scandals and sins. As Franco Mormando’s dazzling biography reveals, Bernini was a man driven by many passions, possessed of an explosive temper and a hearty sex drive, and he lived a life as dramatic as any of his creations. It is perhaps not surprising that this artist who defined the Baroque should have a personal life that itself was, well, baroque. And his artistic vision remains palpably present today, through the countless statues, fountains, and buildings that transformed Rome into the Baroque theater that continues to enthrall tourists today. Sculptor, architect, painter, playwright, and scenographer, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) was the last of the great universal artistic geniuses of early modern Italy, placed by both contemporaries and posterity in the same exalted company as Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo.
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