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| follower of Gianlorenzo Bernini Triton with Shell serving as Salt Cellar ca. 1650-75 gilt copper Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Gianlorenzo Bernini Study for Fontana del Tritone in Piazza Barberini, Rome ca. 1639 drawing Royal Collection, Great Britain |
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| Gianlorenzo Bernini Study for Fontana del Tritone in Piazza Barberini, Rome 1642-43 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Gianlorenzo Bernini Fontana del Tritone 1642-43 marble Piazza Barberini, Rome |
"For so small a man (the fingerprints preserved on his terracotta models are surprisingly tiny), Bernini exerted a titanic influence on the arts and the cityscape of seventeenth-century Rome, where he spent nearly the whole of his long life. His father, Pietro, was a Florentine sculptor who worked in Naples before settling in Rome with his growing family when Gianlorenzo was eight. The elder Bernini modeled his own carving technique on Imperial Roman sculpture, with its copious drill work and high polish, but the son departed quickly from his father's distinctive style, using rasp and chisel where Pietro drilled and polished. Already executing sculptural commissions as a teenager, Gianlorenzo quickly branched out from sculpture into painting, architecture, theater, urban planning, and the vast universe of the decorative arts. Fiery and driven, he became all the greater as an artist because he was forced to compete for attention with stupendous rivals: Pietro da Cortona in painting and architecture, Alessandro Algardi in sculpture, and Francesco Borromini, the greatest – and most demanding – architect of them all."
"The magnet that attracted all these talented souls was papal Rome. By the seventeenth century, thanks to the Protestant Reformation and the rise of Spain and France as nation-states, the city had lost political and religious significance. The papacy compensated for those losses by reinforcing Roman, and Catholic, dominion over the arts. For more than six decades, that dominion depended on the versatile hands and ruthless charm of Gianlorenzo Bernini, whose skills, already from an early age, included his ability to run a large artistic workshop along with an impressive series of building sites, beginning with the perpetual work in progress of St. Peter's Basilica. He was notoriously thrifty when it came to paying his subordinates, and several struck out on their own, none more loudly than Borromini, shocked to discover that he was earning one twentieth of the master's salary."
– Ingrid D. Rowland, from a 2015 review essay in the The New York Review of Books
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| Victor-Jean Nicolle Bernini's Elephant and Obelisk (1667) in Piazza della Minerva, Rome ca. 1775 drawing British Museum |
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| Gianlorenzo Bernini Elephant and Obelisk 1667 marble (elephant) Piazza della Minerva, Rome |
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| Gianlorenzo Bernini Study for Daniel and the Lion ca. 1655 drawing Museum der Bildenden Kunst, Leipzig |
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| Gianlorenzo Bernini Daniel and the Lion 1655-56 marble Chigi Chapel, Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome |
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| Anonymous photographer Bernini's Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (1651) in Piazza Navona, Rome ca. 1870-80 albumen silver print Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Gianlorenzo Bernini Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi 1651 marble Piazza Navona, Rome |
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| Gianlorenzo Bernini Design for Tomb of Pope Alexander VII Chigi (died 1667) ca. 1670 drawing Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Gianlorenzo Bernini Tomb of Pope Alexander VII Chigi 1671-78 marble St Peter's Basilica, Rome |
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| François Spierre Bernini's Cathedra Petri installed (1666) in St Peter's Basilica, Rome before 1681 engraving Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Gianlorenzo Bernini Cathedra Petri (Throne or Chair of St Peter) installed 1666 gilt bronze St Peter's Basilica, Rome |