Apollo and Daphne
Borghese Gallery, Rome
BERNINI
Saint Theresa
S. Maria della Vittoria, Rome
But Giovanni Bologna, like Cellini, worked at a time when the force of the humanistic revival had spent itself. He lacked two things, either of which might have placed him among the immortals. One was the perfection of taste which kept Praxiteles in the straight way. The other was the philosophic depth which saved Michael Angelo from overstepping the bounds that separate noble from ignoble art.
As it was, Giovanni Bologna’s craftsmanship continually led him astray. He preferred to master a technical difficulty rather than to find the one design which would vitalize an idea or emotion of real worth. The consequence was such a work as the well-known “Rape of the Sabine Women.” Primarily this group is a study in the contrast between the strength and vigour of the male form and the shrinking softness of the female. The knotty muscles of the man are sharply contrasted with the soft flesh of the woman whom he bears off. The work is full of beauties, whether we regard it as a design or a piece of modelling. It was the precursor of a long line of similar statues, particularly in France, where the influence of Giovanni Bologna was considerable. “The Rape of Proserpine” by Girardon at Versailles is a good example.
But Giovanni Bologna’s “Rape of the Sabines,” considered as an incident in the history of sculpture, is superfluous. The world is surfeited with examples of the magnificent conquest of technical difficulties. Looking at it critically, we are struck with the qualities it lacks rather than with the qualities it possesses. In a sentence, it witnesses to the characteristics of the age for which Giovanni Bologna worked—its material outlook, and its utter neglect of that side of human experience which, for want of a better word, we call spiritual or divine.
It is with Giovanni Bologna as with Benvenuto Cellini. Some source of inspiration is lacking. Both have lost the habit of artistic worship. They no longer regard every blow of the chisel as in a very real sense forwarding some extra human end. The statue to them is a statue—nothing more. This had not always been the case. As we know it was no empty phrase when Michael Angelo began one of his sonnets with the words:
“When that which is divine in us doth try
To shape a face, both brain and hand unite
To give, from a mere model frail and slight,
Life to the stone by Art’s free energy.”
Bernini and the Catholic Reaction
Angelo really did believe in the divinity of his art. So did the artists of the age succeeding Cellini, Giovanni Bologna, and Sansovino. And it is this fact which adds an absorbing interest to the sculpture of the period dominated by the counter reformation which the sculpture of the previous half-century did not possess. The painters and sculptors who came under the influence of the wave of religious enthusiasm known as the Catholic Reaction fully realized that their efforts were forwarding a great ideal. The patrons for whom they worked, and the men and women to whom they appealed also felt that art which dealt with such matters was of real consequence.
Looking at the problem after the centuries have cleared the air of the dust of dogmatic discussion, we can see that a lasting settlement of the religious controversy had become a necessity for every country of Europe. We now know that, for one reason and another, peace could only be secured upon a foundation of Protestantism in Scandinavia, in Northern Germany, England, and Scotland. Over the greater part of Southern Europe, Catholicism was finally proved to be essential. Spain, Italy, France, ten of the seventeen provinces of the United Netherlands, Poland, Bohemia and South Germany either declined to be seduced from the authority of the Pope, or eventually returned to the fold.
The fact that the problem was of European rather than national importance, and the memory of the position the Church of Rome had held throughout the middle ages, explains why its regeneration was felt to be a social and political event of the greatest significance. During the first half of the sixteenth century a king like Francis I., and an emperor like Charles V., had reduced the occupant of the Papal chair to the position of little more than a counter in the political game. Now the Roman Church threatened to lead European thought and action as it had during the Crusades.
The seeds of this regeneration were planted in 1542, when Paul III. empowered Caraffa to establish the Inquisition in Rome. At the same time Paul III. sanctioned the Company of Jesus. Caraffa himself became Pope in 1555. His whole policy was inspired by a determination to re-establish the political dominion of the papacy. Caraffa’s successor Pius IV., made an immense step forward when he obtained the sanction of the General Council of the Church to the principle of papal absolutism. A more militant policy was at once possible. Added to this, Pius IV. suggested a return to the older and more subtle forms of political intrigue which the Papacy had used with such effect during the middle ages. The change ushered in an age of emotions. Note the religious origin of the numberless wars which convulsed Western Europe at this time. Is it surprising that the circumstances which brought this great change about added a passion, an imaginative glow, to the art of the later sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries?
For several reasons, the religious enthusiasm which revivified Italian painting and sculpture proved a poor substitute for the civic enthusiasm of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which it replaced. The point we are making now is that for good or ill, the Catholic Reaction added a vitality to art in general, and to sculpture in particular, which had been absent for half a century.
The effects of the Catholic Reaction began to be felt upon Italian art about 1580 a.d. Painting quickly offered its aid in spreading the new ideals. Some time, however, elapsed before a sculptor of sufficient genius arose to express the regenerated enthusiasm for Catholicism by means of the chisel and the marble block. Giovanni Bernini (1598-1680), who was born in the full tide of the Catholic Reaction, made sculpture once more a living, social force. The influence he exercised over his age is comparable with that exercised by Michael Angelo. Bernini was a favourite of Maffeo Barberini (Pope Urban VIII.) and played a great part in the reconstruction of St. Peter’s. He had a large school and with the aid of his assistants produced numberless works. He brought an art which had become alienated from every-day life back to the people.
Bernini’s services to sculpture may be likened to those of Giotto to the sister art. What Giotto did for painting by allying his art with the ideals of the Seer of Assisi, and the Franciscans in the thirteenth century, Bernini did for sculpture by cementing an alliance with the ideals of Ignatius of Loyola and the Order of Jesus. In both cases it is impossible to separate the artist from the general body of thought and emotion which it was his life’s work to express.
Let us look more closely into the ideals which arose with the returning political power of the Church of Rome, and which were destined to find expression in the marbles and bronzes of Bernini.
The necessities imposed upon the men who waged the battle of the Roman church can be gathered from the fourth vow of the Order of Jesus.
“That the members will consecrate their lives to the continual service of Christ and of the Popes, and will fight under the banner of the Cross, and will serve the Lord and the Roman pontiff as God’s vicar upon earth, in such wise that they shall be bound to execute immediately and without hesitation, or excuse, all that the reigning Pope or his successors may enjoin upon them for the profit of souls or for the propagation of the faith, and shall do so in all provinces whithersoever he may send them, among Turks or any other infidels, to furthest Ind, as well as in the region of heretics, schismatics or unbelievers of any kind.”
So far the ideals of the Jesuits were those of the earlier missionary orders of the Roman Church—implicit obedience and whole-hearted devotion. But Ignatius Loyola realized that the times had created a fresh set of circumstances. These circumstances called for a new “regula.” In a letter to Francis Borgia in 1548, the founder of the Jesuit Order wrote—
“It is better to strengthen your stomach and other faculties, than to impair the body and enfeeble the intellect by fasting. God needs both our physical and mental powers for His service; and every drop of blood you shed in flagellation is a loss.”
In other words, for the sake of enlisting the sympathy of those beyond the bounds of the Catholic Church, Loyola was willing to jettison convictions which had been held most strongly in an earlier age. It is all important to realize that these were the very convictions which had militated against a vigorous school of sculpture during the previous papal dominion before the Renaissance. The fresh body of ideals and impulses led to the creation of a new style—the Baroco. Taught by failure, the Jesuit advisers of the Pope now sought the close alliance with the arts exemplified in the sculptures of Bernini.
No more apposite example could be taken than Bernini’s group of “St. Theresa” in S. Maria della Vittoria at Rome. It is an example of all that is best and worst, and most characteristic, in the sculpture of the Catholic Reaction. On the one hand, its striving after the expression of passionate emotion tells of the intensity of faith which animated the militant section of the Church at that time. On the other hand, the vividness with which the scene is portrayed tells of the determination to attract attention and compel comprehension, whatever might be the æsthetic sacrifice.
It is almost impossible for a twentieth-century Englishman to describe the “St. Theresa” group sympathetically. Bernini shows the saint sinking back in an ecstatic swoon on to a marble cloud behind. On one side an angel is discharging an arrow from the quiver of divine love. Perhaps the real spirit of the sculptured scene can be best realized from one of “The Advices which the Holy Mother Theresa of Jesus gave to her children during her life,” which tells of one of these spiritual trances.
“Once” (says the Saint) “when I was in the hermitage of Nazareth at the convent of St. Joseph in Avila, it being the vigil of Pentecost; and while I was reflecting on the exceeding great favour which our Lord had bestowed upon me on that same day twenty years before, I was seized with an ecstasy, and with strong impetuous and interior movements, which quite suspended all my senses.
“While I was in this wonderful rapture, I heard our Lord speaking.”
It is no exaggeration to say that the true Hellene would have shuddered at the very idea of visualizing such a scene. To have translated it into marble would have seemed to the Hellenic sculptor in the last degree immoral. But it was otherwise with the seventeenth-century Italian. For the sake of the message—for the sake of the spiritual thrill conveyed by such a group as the “St. Theresa”—he was willing to dispense with the repose which had been everything to his Hellenic forerunner. The historical critic can only accept the position. To say that Bernini did wrongly, that his influence made for ill, is really beside the point. The times were against him. But we can truly say that, in view of the experience furnished by the Hellenic and Florentine sculptors, an art other than sculpture could have more properly expressed such scenes as the ecstatic transports of Saint Theresa—possibly poetry, possibly music, certainly not sculpture.
Bernini’s reputation, fortunately, does not depend entirely upon works executed as directly under the influence of the Catholic Reaction as the “Saint Theresa” of S. Maria della Vittoria. In estimating his genius we are not compelled to rely entirely upon the long series of colossal groups packed with half-draped nudes in wildly fluttering draperies which issued from his studio. His early work, “Apollo and Daphne,” is an effort of extraordinary ability. The design was wonderfully graceful, and the technical skill with which it was worked out promised more abundant result than Bernini’s life’s work eventually showed. For the rest the admirer of Bernini can point to the magnificent series of fountains which he designed and erected. Of these, the “Fountain of Trevi” stands supreme.
The death of Giovanni Bernini in 1680 marks the end of the last effort to keep Italian sculpture alive. The works of Donatello, of Angelo, of Cellini, of Bologna, live to-day. But vital sculptures embodying national or civic aspirations or the ideals of that truly Italian institution, the Roman Catholic Church, were produced no longer. For more than a century, Italian art effort practically ceased. Foreigners came to the great sources of inspiration in Italy, drank, and returned to carry a measure of the precious fluid to their homes in the North. But the Italian knew that “the outward and the inward man” were not at “one.” He felt that “Beloved Pan” would not bestow that “beauty in the inward soul” which had made Greek sculpture a joy for ever. A single sentence of Mazzini gives the historical explanation:
“The Pope clutches the soul of the Italian nation; Austria the body, whenever it shows signs of life; and on every member of that body is enthroned an absolute prince, viceroy in turn under either of these powers.”