Bernini's Michelangelo

A novel exploration of the threads of continuity, rivalry, and self-conscious borrowing that connect the Baroque innovator with his Renaissance paragon Gianlorenzo Bernini (15981680), like all ambitious artists, imitated eminent predecessors. What set him apart was his lifelong and multifaceted focus on Michelangelo Buonarrotithe master of the previous age. Berninis Michelangelo is the first comprehensive examination of Berninis persistent and wide-ranging imitation of Michelangelos canon (his art and its rules). Prevailing accounts submit that Michelangelos pervasive, yet controversial, example was overcome during Berninis time, when it was rejected as an advantageous model for enterprising artists. Carolina Mangone reconsiders this view, demonstrating how the Baroque innovator formulated his work by emulating his divisive Renaissance forebears oeuvre. Such imitation earned him the moniker Michelangelo of his age. Investigating Berninis imitatio Buonarroti in its extraordinary scope and variety, this book identifies principles that pervade his production over seven decades in papal Rome. Close analysis of religious sculptures, tomb monuments, architectural ornament, and the design of New Saint Peters reveals how Bernini approached Michelangelos art as a surprisingly flexible repertory of precepts and forms that he reconciledhere with daring license, there with creative restraintto the aesthetic, sacred, and theoretical imperatives of his own era. Situating Berninis imitation in dialogue with that by other artists as well as with contemporaneous writings on Michelangelos art, Mangone repositions the Renaissance master in the artistic concerns of the Baroque from peripheral to pivotal. Without Michelangelo, there was no Bernini.