Giovanni Guerra (1544-1618) - Rome

Giovanni Guerra
Beheading of Pope Sixtus II
before 1618
drawing
Museo del Prado, Madrid

"Born in Modena, Giovanni Guerra arrived in Rome in 1562, where he became a member of the Accademia di S. Luca.  He established a workshop with Cesare Nebbia (ca. 1536-1614) and together they secured numerous papal commissions.  These included the decoration of the Salone Sisto in the Vatican Library (1585-1589) and that of the Scala Santa at Porta S. Giovanni.  Guerra and Nebbia collaborated in preparing the designs for these decorative schemes, before a large team of assistants executed them.  This workshop procedure was such that only one of Guerra's sequences of paintings is known to be autograph, the frescoes at the Palazzo Cenci, Rome (1590).  His surviving drawings are numerous and are now widely dispersed."

– Nicholas Turner, From Michelangelo to Annibale Carracci: A Century of Italian Drawing from the Prado (2008)

Giovanni Guerra
Ceiling Design with Instruments of the Passion
ca. 1580-1600
drawing
Victoria & Albert Museum

Giovanni Guerra
Design for a Decorative Frame
before 1618
etching
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Giovanni Guerra
Design for a Decorative Frame
before 1618
etching
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Giovanni Guerra
Design after a Fountain in the Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati
ca. 1590-1600
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Giovanni Guerra
Design for a Fountain in a Grotto, with a River God
ca. 1598
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Giovanni Guerra
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego saved from the Fiery Furnace
before 1618
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

Giovanni Guerra
The Dream of Mordecai
before 1618
drawing
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Giovanni Guerra
Ceiling Design with Allegorical Figures and the Arms of Pope Sixtus V 
ca. 1587
with central insert by Domenico Maria Viani added after 1690
St Joseph and the Christ Child
drawing
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Giovanni Guerra
St Paul surrounded by Disciples after his Lapidation at Lystra
before 1618
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Giovanni Guerra
Study for the Story of Esther
before 1618
drawing
Groeningemuseum, Bruges

Giovanni Guerra
Study for the Story of Esther
before 1618
drawing
Groeningemuseum, Bruges

Giovanni Guerra
Study for the Story of Esther
before 1618
drawing
British Museum

Giovanni Guerra
Study for the Story of Esther
before 1618
drawing
British Museum

Bernini in Rome – Artifacts, Prints, Photographs (II)

follower of Gianlorenzo Bernini
Triton with Shell serving as Salt Cellar
ca. 1650-75
gilt copper
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Gianlorenzo Bernini
Study for Fontana del Tritone in Piazza Barberini, Rome
ca. 1639
drawing
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Gianlorenzo Bernini
Study for Fontana del Tritone in Piazza Barberini, Rome
1642-43
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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

Victor-Jean Nicolle
Bernini's Elephant and Obelisk (1667) in Piazza della Minerva, Rome 
ca. 1775
drawing
British Museum

Gianlorenzo Bernini
Elephant and Obelisk
1667
marble (elephant)
Piazza della Minerva, Rome

Gianlorenzo Bernini
Study for Daniel and the Lion
ca. 1655
drawing
Museum der Bildenden Kunst, Leipzig

Gianlorenzo Bernini
Daniel and the Lion
1655-56
marble
Chigi Chapel, Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome

Anonymous photographer
Bernini's Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (1651) in Piazza Navona, Rome
ca. 1870-80
albumen silver print
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Gianlorenzo Bernini
Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi
1651
marble
Piazza Navona, Rome

Gianlorenzo Bernini
Design for Tomb of Pope Alexander VII Chigi (died 1667)
ca. 1670
drawing
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Gianlorenzo Bernini
Tomb of Pope Alexander VII Chigi
1671-78
marble
St Peter's Basilica, Rome

François Spierre
Bernini's Cathedra Petri installed (1666) in St Peter's Basilica, Rome
before 1681
engraving
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Gianlorenzo Bernini
Cathedra Petri (Throne or Chair of St Peter)
installed 1666
gilt bronze
St Peter's Basilica, Rome

Bernini in Rome – Artifacts, Prints, Photographs (I)

Bernardo Fioriti
Bust of Gianlorenzo Bernini
ca. 1660
marble
Philadelphia Museum of Art

François Chéron
Portrait-medal of Gianlorenzo Bernini
(commissioned by Louis XIV)
1674
bronze
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Gianlorenzo Bernini
Bust of Pope Paul V Borghese
(commissioned by Cardinal Scipione Borghese)
1621
marble
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

"Gianlorenzo Bernini was just twenty-three years old when he received one of his first commissions – to make a full-sized bust of Pope Paul V, the recently deceased uncle of his most important patron, Cardinal Scipione Borghese.  In this two-and-a-half foot marble portrait, Bernini depicts the pope almost bareheaded, his hair style in the "tonsure of St. Peter" (a practice that signified renunciation of worldly fashion) and dressed in traditional pontifical vestments.  The thick cope covering his shoulders is richly decorated with embroidery of the patron saints of Rome, the Apostles Peter (holding his keys and a book) and Paul (holding th sword of his martyrdom and a book).  While he is robed in the garments of the papacy, Pope Paul V gazes at the viewer with a natural expression, his face individualized by the slight turn of the head, the delicate contours of his forehead and the tiny wrinkles carved around his eyes.  At this time, Bernini is already making the dynamic sculptures for which he will become famous, yet here his subject requires restraint.  The artist's subdued dynamism can best be seen in the folds of drapery at the sitter's left shoulder, suggesting his body moves underneath.  This bust was kept in the Villa Borghese in Rome until 1893 and then sold.  Its whereabouts have been unknown until its rediscovery in late 2014."

– curator's notes from the Getty Museum

Anonymous photographer
Bernini's Rape of Proserpina in Galleria Borghese, Rome
ca. 1875
albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Gianlorenzo Bernini
Rape of Proserpina
1621-22
marble
Galleria Borghese, Rome

James Anderson
Bernini's Apollo and Daphne in Galleria Borghese, Rome
ca. 1845-55
albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Gianlorenzo Bernini
Apollo and Daphne
1622-25
marble
Galleria Borghese, Rome

James Anderson
Bernini's David in Galleria Borghese, Rome
ca. 1845-55
albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Gianlorenzo Bernini
David
1623-24
marble
Galleria Borghese, Rome

Francesco Faraone Aquila
Bernini's Vision of Constantine in St Peter's Basilica
ca. 1695-1705
etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Gianlorenzo Bernini
The Vision of Constantine
1670
marble
St Peter's Basilica, Rome

Giovanni Battista Falda
Bernini's Fontana del Moro, Piazza Navona, Rome
ca. 1691
etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Gianlorenzo Bernini
Modello for central figure in Fontana del Moro, Piazza Navona, Rome
1653
terracotta
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Paolo Monti
Bernini's Fontana del Moro, Piazza Navona, Rome
1960
photograph
Fondo Paolo Monti

Decorative Italian Scenery in Paint (Eighteenth Century)

Giambattista Tiepolo
Virtue & Nobility bestowing Honors - Aurora dispersing Clouds of Night
(ceiling decoration from Palazzo Mocenigo, Venice)
ca. 1759-61
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"Tiepolo represents the height of uniquely Italian skills.  Only he was able to master and arrange with infinite imagination colors, figures, clouds, and all sort of animals and objects inside luminous skies."

Giambattista Tiepolo
Bozzetto for Apotheosis of a Poet - Allegory of Merit
ca. 1755-60
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Giambattista Tiepolo
Apotheosis of Aeneas
1762
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Agostino Brunias after Robert Adam
Draped Women in Landscape
(decoration for breakfast room at Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire)
1759-60
tempera on canvas
Victoria & Albert Museum

Agostino Brunias after Robert Adam
Draped Women in Landscape
(decoration for breakfast room at Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire)
1759-60
tempera on canvas
Victoria & Albert Museum

Pietro Paltronieri
Capriccio - Antique Ruins at Bologna
ca. 1740
tempera and oil on canvas
National Trust, Shugborough Hall, Staffordshire

Pietro Paltronieri and Biagio Rebecca
Capriccio - Antique Ruins with a Pyramid
ca. 1740
tempera and oil on canvas
National Trust, Shugborough Hall, Staffordshire

"Capriccios represented idealized worlds that were first of all aesthetically pleasing and could arouse the viewer's imagination and sense of wonder: the painter created a bizarre, picturesque world to take the place of reality.  Conceived still within the rococo spirit, their function was mainly decorative.  The veduta ideata was a capriccio with imaginary elements or features added to a real landscape.  In 1759 Count Algarotti, a Venetian, wrote of a painting by his compatriot Canaletto: "A new genre of painting exists which consists in drawing a site from life and adorning it with beautiful buildings taken from here or there, or invented."

Michele Rocca
Rinaldo and Armida
ca. 1720-50
oil on canvas
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

follower of Alessandro Magnasco
Soldiers playing cards in rocky landscape
ca. 1700-1750
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gian Paolo Panini
Fountain of Trevi, Rome
before 1765
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Paolo Monaldi
Peasants near Roman Ruins
ca. 1760
oil on canvas
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Canaletto
San Giorgio Maggiore from the Bacino San Marco, Venice
ca. 1726-30
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"To draw vedute means to study, as painters do, walking around various corners of the countryside or famous city sites, and reproducing with a pen or stylus, or with China ink or watercolors, towns, sylvan dwellings, cities, rivers, and similar views," wrote art historian Filippo Baldinucci in 1681.  The urban veduta with faithful reproductions of reality had already achieved the status of an autonomous genre in 17th-century Holland.  The 18th-century fashion of the Grand Tour created a growing demand for paintings or etchings to be purchased as souvenirs by foreign travelers.  In addition, architects or simple amateurs wanted to own exact, almost documentary reproductions of squares, palaces, monuments, excavations, and ruins.  . . .  In Venice, a popular destination of English intellectuals and collectors, vedute were in very high demand.  Among the Venetian vedutisti, Luca Carlevarijs and Canaletto stand out: the latter, who had trained in Rome, preferred realistic landscapes to scenographic or fanciful ones, which were also prized." 

Canaletto
Fonteghetto della Farina, Venice
ca. 1735
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Carlo Labruzzi
Ruins at Capua
ca. 1789
watercolor
Yale Center for British Art

– texts drawn from European Art of the Eighteenth Century by Daniela Tarabra, translated by Rosanna M. Giammanco Frongia (Getty Museum, 2008)