Simon Schama's Power of Art (2006) s01e02 Episode Script
Bernini
She's in ecstasy all right.
Her head is thrown back, her mouth open.
Her heavy-lidded eyes are half-closed.
An angelic hand is delicately uncovering her breast.
You have to look.
You don't know where to look.
A century after Bernini created this sculpture, a French art lover, doing the tour of Rome, came into this church, peered at the spectacle and said, ''Well, if that's divine love, I know all about it.
'' So, what is this? Surely not an erotic trance, not from the most devout sculptor in Rome.
No one who was the bosom friend of popes, a pillar of the Catholic establishment, could possibly want us to see a nun in the throes of orgasm, could he? It's no good pretending that ecstasy isn't a physical as well as a spiritual experience.
That passion doesn't work through the body as well as the soul.
Bernini knew all about passion.
That's what his art was about.
It was this physical intensity that would transform sculpture.
No one before Bernini had managed to make marble so carnal.
In his nimble hands, it would flutter and stream, quiver and sweat.
His figures weep and shout, their torsos twist and run and arch themselves in spasms of intense sensation.
He could, like an alchemist, change one material into another.
Marble into trees, leaves, hair and, of course, flesh.
The whole point of classical sculpture was to make humans less so, to give mortal flesh the heavyweight smoothness of immortality.
So many of them end up looking divine, but bloodless.
But then, along comes Bernini, and suddenly even Michelangelo's David looks immobile beside Bernini's whirling, twisting tornado.
If sculpture was supposed to convey gravity, Bernini would defy it.
His figures break loose from their plinths, flying away into space.
For as long as anyone could remember, Gian Lorenzo Bernini had startled the people who mattered.
Brought before the Pope when he was just eight, he did a lightning sketch of St Paul's head that prompted the astonished Pope to tip the little boy as the next Michelangelo.
His father, Pietro, was a sculptor from Florence.
Seldom better than competent and sometimes worse.
But in his son, he knew a good thing when he saw it.
''Watch out, Signor Bernini,'' an admiring cardinal said, ''The boy will surpass his master.
'' So, fast out of the starting blocks, our little prodigy.
Here's a playful tour de force.
Two little angels embrace in wide-eyed innocence.
Bernini did this in his teens.
He kept it on display on the landing of his house throughout his life.
And this is his goat, Amalthea, and the infant Jupiter.
A standard bit of mythology transformed into a romp with the shaggiest nanny goat in sculpture.
What makes these little figures burst from their dull, mythological subject matter? They have the hot breath of life in them, lusty, mischievous, nursery school naughtiness.
Bernini arrived in Rome in 1605.
Just at the time that Caravaggio's punchy street dramas were electrifying the Church, giving it a new vision of how to move the flock.
No more remote saints.
Instead, the shock theatre of the earthy passions.
Salvation in the guts.
So how do you top Caravaggio? Answer: you can't, but in sculpture.
This is St Lawrence being barbecued alive for his Christian beliefs.
Bernini was 16 when he did this.
He's trying to catch the moment of transcendent pain when, if we believe the legends, St Lawrence turns to his executioners and says, in a moment of macabre drollery, ''Right, turn me over, boys, this side's done.
'' No wonder he became the patron saint of cooks.
But there's something serious going on here.
As Lawrence's hand touches the flame, a mysterious transformation takes place.
The chroniclers said the smell of scorched flesh turned fragrant.
Pain and sweetness become one.
Torment becomes ecstasy.
A rehearsal, perhaps, for a sweet ordeal to come.
He loved playing with fire, did Bernini.
Couldn't stop himself.
Here he is as a damned soul.
It's a self-portrait.
Bernini has scorched his own arm in a naked flame, screaming in a mirror to get the expression just right.
An extremist for his art, then, but also, perhaps, someone capable of impulsive acts of violence.
Still, it's a drama of the flesh no one, not even Michelangelo, had made quite so gripping.
It was enough to make one bigwig on the Roman scene, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, want to adopt Gian Lorenzo as his personal star property.
Someone who'd make his fabulous new villa, up here on the Pincian Hill, the place to see great art.
How the other red hats would gnash their teeth in envy.
There was something larger than life about Scipione Borghese.
The bull-like neck and head sat atop a jumbo body.
Sly Bernini, using a button that can't quite make it through its hole to give us a feeling for the flesh tight-packed into the satin.
The holy man of the Church is, above all, a physical presence.
He looks more like a chef than His Eminence.
What he was after, Bernini said, was a speaking likeness, because he thought that people gave themselves away most characteristically either just before or after they spoke.
So he works his magic on Scipione.
The little fringe poking out from the Cardinal's hat, the chipmunk cheeks, the fleshy, blubbery lips.
Scipione's nose catching the light in such a way as to suggest a film of sweat.
The natural effusion of a big man in a hot city.
Rome, the holy metropolis, buzzing with worldly ambition.
For the church aristocracy, it's not just the money you've got that counts.
It's also the art.
Painters, sculptors and architects are angling for patrons, and the Rothschilds and the Saatchis of their day, the popes and cardinals, are gambling on the next prize genius.
Bernini, of course, has everything it takes to succeed.
He's witty, charming, extremely well-connected, frighteningly cultured, ferociously disciplined, always delivers when he says he will and he doesn't drink.
In other words, the opposite of Caravaggio.
And how do we know all this? Well, someone had noted Bernini's every move.
Filippo Baldinucci, minor painter, gossip and art critic.
Not that important in himself, but someone who'd collected everything he could from those who knew Bernini, and turned it into his first proper biography.
This is Apollo and Daphne.
It's a story of sexual hunting.
Apollo wants the nymph, Daphne.
She definitely doesn't want him.
He runs after her, and just as he's about to grab her, the gods answer her prayers by turning her into a laurel tree.
It's all-action sculpture.
Apollo breaking his breathless run, his cape and his hair still flying in the wind.
Daphne, who's cornered, isn't rooted to the spot, except botanically, and seems to be climbing into the air, her mouth open wide in a scream.
Hair and fingers already metamorphosing into leafy twigs.
But the tease of the drama is the silky nude that Bernini's made available to us exactly as she disappears inside her protective casing of tree bark.
A painfully thwarted consummation.
It's not just me.
A French cardinal said he wouldn't have it in his house because such a beautiful nude would be sure to arouse anybody who saw it.
Bernini is said to have been really pleased when he heard that.
Bernini is in his early 20s, a superstar.
Someone on whom the mighty and the powerful almost fawn.
One pope, Gregory XV, makes him a knight, so Bernini is known ever after as the Cavaliere.
The next pope, Urban VIII, makes him his best friend.
There's a story that when Cardinal Barberini became Pope Urban VIII, he called Bernini into his apartment and said Bernini is Rome's supreme virtuoso.
The emperor of the arts, and not just in sculpture.
He's also a painter, a master builder and a playwright.
And he has everything, charisma, swarthy good looks, money, status and enemies.
This is Francesco Borromini, taciturn, neurotic, introverted, depressive.
A man of absolutely no social graces whatsoever.
For good and for ill, Borromini would play a pivotal role in Bernini's life.
The two of them would trip over each other's ambitions, spur each other on to ever-greater heights, ever-greater risks.
Borromini was a brilliant architect.
He made walls and balconies curve and bulge where they had no right to.
Ceilings that sing and throb.
Here he is exaggerating perspective.
Making the columns at the back much smaller than they should be in order to make the space much deeper than it really is.
It's all eye wizardry.
If two men were responsible for creating the look of baroque Rome, for making Rome Rome, those two men were Borromini and Bernini.
And they hated each other.
At first, it was a one-way rivalry.
Borromini resented Bernini's popularity, his hogging of the limelight.
It's a bit like Mozart and Salieri.
Only there's no Salieri here, no weaker talent.
They're both geniuses.
Look at these two churches, just 200 yards away from each other, in Rome.
One by Bernini, the other by Borromini.
Here's the Borromini church, San Carlo delle Quattro Fontane.
It's the work of an architect chess master, pure and austere.
Just brick and stucco, no colour or sculpture allowed.
Just mind-blowing designs, worked out from the higher geometry.
The heavenly order of shapes and numbers.
Now, here's the Bernini church.
Loads of colour trowelled on, as if it were a stage set with full theatrical lighting.
It's all look-at-me razzle-dazzle.
Showy, visceral and sexy, just like him.
The rivalry between Bernini and Borromini started in earnest in 1624, when someone had to be appointed the new architect for Saint Peter's, and get to build the baldachino, the enormous canopy over the tomb of Saint Peter, located directly under Michelangelo's great dome.
It's the plummiest job in town.
Now, at this stage, Borromini was far more qualified than Bernini.
He'd trained as an architect and was the obvious candidate for the job.
But guess who got it? Mr Charming, Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
''What, the biggest job in Rome? And he gives it to him, and not me, just because he's the Pope's best friend?" ''I mean, the man knows damn all about buildings.
'' Borromini must have been furious.
Of course, the engineering problems of forging the great canopy, raising this twisty gilt-bronze monster, were a serious stretch for Bernini's competence.
So, wisely, he gets help.
He turns to Borromini, who had no choice but to help.
It was for the greater good of the Church, after all.
Architecture has always been a collaborative exercise, so it's not surprising to find that virtually all the drawings for the baldachino are by Borromini.
Does he get the credit he deserves? Does he hell.
And that, Francesco Borromini neither forgives nor forgets.
It's an unappealing trait, this ungenerous instinct for monopolising the glory.
And it will come back to bite Bernini.
It's not just Borromini who feels it.
The assistant who did that fine leaf-work on Daphne's leaves was so angry at not getting his due that he walked out of the project in a rage.
But then the Cavaliere Bernini always did have a cavalier way with his assistants.
His own mother complained.
So he took what he needed.
Technical expertise, grinding toil and, in the case of one of his assistants, Matteo Buonarelli, his wife.
Her name is Costanza.
Constance.
Did she and Bernini have a laugh in bed about that? Here she is, in 1637, at the height of their affair.
You can see he can't get enough of her.
And from the intensity of all this brimming desire comes an entirely new kind of European sculpture.
Before Costanza, busts had been entirely respectable, and they were usually reserved for tombs.
Only the Romans, a long time before, had used sculpture for informal portraits.
But informal doesn't quite do it for Costanza, does it? How about intimate? For this is a portrait of a woman whose passion is written on her face and her body.
Whose flaring temper just adds fuel to her lover's fire.
This is what we mean by lovingly carved.
It's as though Bernini was reliving his caresses with his chisel.
The falling away of the blouse, perhaps the single, sexiest invitation in all European sculpture.
There's something else unique about this sculpture.
It's the celebration of a spitfire.
Costanza Buonarelli may have been the wife of a lowly assistant sculptor, but she came from a proud, old family, the Piccolomini.
So her jaw is firm, the rosebud mouth is in the act of speaking, and not deferentially.
Everything that was supposed to define womanhood, demure, chaste serenity, is junked for Costanza.
She's a wild thing, and the sculptor is hooked on her temper.
But it's not Costanza's temper that would end up undoing Bernini.
It was his own.
Despite all the genteel charm, Bernini was known to have a low boiling point.
Underneath all those social graces was the bloodthirsty temper of a Neapolitan gangster.
And in one unbelievably shocking episode, he lets it rip.
It started with a rumour.
Costanza, it's whispered, was not so constant after all.
Seems she has a thing about the Bernini boys, since she's sleeping not just with Gian Lorenzo, but with his younger brother, Luigi.
Oh, it's hard to believe, I know, that anyone would want to get their hands on anyone except Mr Fabulous himself.
But could the rumours be true? The trap is set that evening.
Gian Lorenzo says breezily how he has to go off to the country the next day, so he won't be in town.
But he doesn't go into the country, does he? Instead, early next morning, he goes to Costanza's house and waits.
Luigi emerges.
So does Costanza.
That swelling breast Bernini had lovingly carved flattened against Luigi's chest in a passionate embrace.
There's a chase through the streets, across the piazzas, over the bridges, right into Saint Peter's itself.
Where its official architect does his best to murder his own brother.
Gian Lorenzo grabs an iron bar and smashes it against Luigi's body, breaking two ribs.
He's famous as a miracle worker.
This time the miracle is that he hasn't killed his own brother.
It takes a message from their mother to the papal cops to separate them.
And that's not the end of it.
That afternoon, Gian Lorenzo sends a servant to Costanza's house.
He doesn't cut her throat.
Instead, he slashes her perfect face to ribbons.
So the man who has cut stone to create beauty has cut flesh to destroy it.
And what do you suppose is Bernini's punishment for grievous bodily harm and attempted murder? Oh, a really stiff sentence, a 3,000 scudi fine.
Except that his pal, the Pope, waives it.
''Naughty, naughty,'' says the Pope, ''This mustn't happen again.
''So I sentence you to be married.
" ''And, by the way, she just happens to be the most beautiful girl in Rome.
" ''That should keep you out of mischief.
'' Papal wink, papal nudge.
So Bernini is married off to Caterina Tezio, daughter of a Roman lawyer.
For his part in the fight, brother Luigi is banished to Bologna.
Everyone else goes to jail.
The servant who did the razor job and, insult added to injury, Costanza herself, convicted of fornication and adultery.
And what happened to the bust? Well, Bernini's new wife wouldn't have it in the house.
Which is just as well, since Gian Lorenzo couldn't bear to look at it, either.
He might, I suppose, have smashed it.
But luckily, a Medici buyer from Florence snapped it up.
Which is why we're looking at it here in the Bargello Museum in Florence.
The Costanza that once was, and, for us, always will be.
And you're thinking, ''I don't care how good his sculpture is.
''I don't care how important his art is.
" ''What an absolute bastard!" ''Please tell me he doesn't get off scot-free.
'' Well, strangely enough, it's exactly from this moment of the crime against Costanza that things go swiftly downhill for the Cavaliere Untouchable.
And it all went wrong in the place that mattered most for Bernini.
The place that made or broke artists and architects.
The Cathedral of Saint Peter's.
This is the facade of Saint Peter's we all know, but the aggressively confident 17th century popes didn't want to stop with this.
They wanted two great bell towers at each corner, above where we now see the clocks.
It was those bells, after all, that would summon the faithful for papal blessings and make the Christian dream real.
But in the middle, of course, was Michelangelo's great dome.
So the first designs for the towers made them respectfully low.
Safe, squat, one-storey affairs.
The along comes Bernini, constitutionally incapable of deference.
''My towers are going to be taller than your dome'', he says.
Three storeys tall, in fact.
Almost 70 metres above the original pedestals, six times heavier than the original towers.
Problem was, though, Bernini's towers were about to be built on swampy ground.
It's not that Bernini didn't know about this before he got started.
It's just that he's surrounded by yes men who tell him what he wants to hear.
That building tall towers on dodgy ground is no real problem.
What he needs are brutally honest advisors who aren't afraid of spelling out the risks he's taking.
There was one person who knew that building a tall, heavy tower on unstable foundations was asking for trouble.
That person was Borromini.
But it seemed to be beneath Bernini's dignity to ask his rival for advice.
So, without the benefit of Borromini's criticism, Bernini sails straight into disaster.
In July, 1641, Bernini unveiled his first tower to the public.
Two months later, cracks start to appear.
Bernini takes to his bed.
Won't eat.
Gets so ill, he's reported near death.
It gets worse.
The cracks aren't just in the foundation of the bell tower.
They've spread to the facade of the main church itself.
Then, in 1644, disaster.
Pope Urban VIII, Bernini's friend and the staunchest supporter of the bell tower, dies.
There's a new pope, Innocent X, and he sees it as his job to get rid of all the old favourites, like Bernini.
After all, he has a new favourite, Francesco Borromini.
So, after 15 years in Bernini's shadow, Borromini's moment for revenge has at last arrived.
An inquiry is set up to deal with Bernini's towers.
Borromini submits detailed evidence, a lovingly-rendered drawing of Bernini's disaster.
''Well, what do you expect?'' says Borromini.
''The tower's too tall.
It's too heavy for its base supports.
" ''It's too unwieldy.
It's built recklessly on swampy ground.
" ''It's amazing, actually, it hasn't collapsed already.
" ''It's all very well going digging beneath the tower after the event to see how serious the damage is.
" ''If he'd have asked me, since I know a bit about building, I would've told him.
But he didn't.
'' On the 23rd of February, 1646, a meeting was held at the Vatican to discuss the fate of Bernini's south tower.
But the Pope had already made his decision.
Demolish it.
The demolition takes 11 months.
If Bernini had been anywhere near Saint Peter's, he would've seen it and heard it.
The winches, the pulleys, the columns stacked on the roof.
Down came the bell tower, and down with it came Gian Lorenzo Bernini from the height of fame and reputation to something like a laughing stock.
It's 1648.
Bernini is 50, old by the standards of the time.
So how did he survive the humiliation? One visiting English student has him collapsing into despair.
Others have him buckling down to work.
He still does get commissions, but not from the biggest hitters in Rome, not any more.
It would take a miracle now for him to redeem himself.
And then that miracle arrived.
A moment of mind-boggling drama.
A moment that wavers between mystery and indecency.
The body of a saint penetrated.
The arrow withdrawn from its passage, poised to strike again.
Her pain indistinguishable from pleasure.
The gasping woman levitating, defying gravity on rippling cushions of stone.
So, who was it then that gave Bernini the chance to portray a saint in a way no one else had ever dared? You can't imagine a more respectable patron than Cardinal Federico Cornaro, who came from an old aristocratic clan that wanted to build a family chapel in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria.
He would have known about Saint Teresa of Ãvila.
Everyone did.
She died in her native Spain in 1582.
But there was something, many things, actually, which made Teresa an awkward fit for sainthood.
Not least her levitations.
A rapture came over me so suddenly, it almost lifted me out of myself.
I heard these words, ''Now, I want you to speak not with men, but with angels.
'' It's not surprising, then, that of all the modern saints, it was Teresa who still had no chapel devoted to her.
The Cornaro dynasty, who were patrons of her austere order of nuns, the Barefoot Carmelites, jumped in and presented Bernini with the biggest challenge of his career, but also the chance for a spectacular comeback.
It was the most daring drama of the body that he, or any other sculptor in the history of art, had ever conceived, much less executed.
Bernini would certainly have known about Saint Teresa.
Her autobiography was a bestseller in Catholic Rome.
Like everyone else, he would've been startled by the earthy directness of her story.
But above all, he would have been electrified by those moments in which Teresa, in the most graphic words imaginable, describes what happens to her.
Very close to me, an angel appeared in human form.
In his hands I saw a large golden spear.
And at its iron tip, there seemed to be a point of fire.
I felt as if he plunged this into my heart several times, so that it penetrated all the way to my entrails.
When he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out with it, and it left me totally inflamed with a great love for God.
The pain was so severe that it made me moan several times.
Now, if there was one thing that Bernini was not, it was crude.
He understood perfectly well that when Teresa wrote of her raptures, she meant the longing of her soul for a consummated union with God.
It was the way she wrote about it that made it seem as if her soul and her body were the same thing.
All of Bernini's greatest body dramas had featured figures twisting in ascent.
Proserpina's flight from Pluto.
Daphne rising to the sky as if to escape stony doom.
Now it was time for him to make Teresa levitate.
This time, not in escape from penetration, but in craving for it.
It was time to forget about euphemisms.
The only way that Bernini could possibly communicate the flood of her sensation was to make visible what he knew of bodily ecstasy.
The face of a woman at the height of sexual euphoria.
It's as if he's turning his own intimate knowledge of carnal sin into carnal blessing.
So, of course, this isn't the real Teresa, middle-aged nun, rising up her cell wall with sisters hanging on to her habit.
No, this woman is unforgettably beautiful.
A match for the exquisite seraph angel lover.
They are, in their way, a couple.
Smiley face is pointing his arrow not at her breast at all, but rather lower down the torso.
But how to make visible both their union and the tide of engulfing feeling washing through Teresa? And here Bernini has the crucial insight of the whole piece.
He turns her body inside out, so that her covering, her habit, the symbol of chastity and containment, becomes a representation of what's going on inside her.
It's the accomplice of her helpless dissolution into a liquid bliss.
It is, in fact, the climax itself.
A storm surge of churning sensation, cresting and falling as if the marble had been molten.
And these billows pour themselves from the smiling angel directly into Teresa's robe, where they join an ocean of heaving waves that folds into hollows and crevices, like surf breaking on a shore.
There's nothing furtive about any of this.
Bernini wants us to look and look hard.
So much, that he surrounds the performance with an audience, members of the Cornaro family.
Some watching the show, some chatting about what it might mean.
There's every kind of show lighting, fake sun beams, hidden lights at the back.
And, as Teresa climbs to her heights, the earth really does move.
Look down here.
The ground is opening and out pop the dead.
Everything is shaking and quaking, even the columns of the little chapel.
And here, Bernini adds the coup de grâce to all those critics who said he couldn't do architecture.
Not least Borromini, who specialised in weird, counter-intuitive bulges and curves.
''Right,'' said Bernini, ''I'll build you a temple that not just curves and bulges, ''but actually explodes through its columns ''from the sheer uncontainable force of the drama going on inside.
'' The most ambitious thing he'd ever attempted, the bell tower of Saint Peter's, had come crashing down in ignominious failure.
Now, it was time for Teresa to rise up, and carry with her the resurrected reputation of the disgraced Cavaliere Bernini.
And you feel him, when he's done, standing back and saying, ''Right, top that''.
No one ever could.
The Cornaro loved their chapel.
12,000 scudi, no problem, worth every scudo.
Word got round.
The dazzler was back.
Even the sour, old Pope Innocent X began to sweeten on Bernini, as Borromini skulked unhappily through the Vatican corridors.
It's not that Borromini never gets commissions from the Pope again, it's just that it was Bernini who triumphed.
So wherever you go in Rome now, you're really in the Cavaliere's city.
As you approach Saint Peter's over the Ponte Sant'Angelo, you're in the company of Bernini's angels.
And even though he was denied his bell towers at Saint Peter's, he did something much better.
The colonnades which lead us towards the great church, its arms gathering believers to the bosom of the faith.
Inside the church, past the baldachino, you're drawn towards Bernini's great light.
The Holy Spirit at the seat of Saint Peter.
Popes came and went, but Bernini endured.
He gave up sinning, became a model Christian, fathered 11 children.
Never strayed again, they said.
And we're told that when he was troubled, he'd be found at the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, praying before his shrine to Saint Teresa.
And what of the others in this story? Costanza with the cut-up face eventually got out of jail with the help of her long-suffering husband.
Borromini went on to become the great master builder of ever more eccentric and brilliant churches.
But in the end, he never really felt he got true recognition and he never got over Bernini's comeback.
Eaten up by jealousy and disappointment, he ended up by committing suicide.
And what of brother Luigi? Well, he returned to Rome after his exile and, deep into his 60s, he was at it again.
This time caught in flagrante delicto in, guess where? The precincts of the holy church of Saint Peter's.
Where, according to court records, he was arrested for acts of violent sodomy.
To clear the family name and secure a papal pardon for his brother, Bernini created this, the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni.
For me, though, none of those grandstanding jobs in Rome come close to the one work he called, ''The least bad thing I ever did.
'' Why? Because he's managed to make visible, tangible, actually, something we all, if we're honest, know we hunger for, but before which we're properly tongue-tied.
Something which has produced more bad writing, more excruciating poems than anything else you can think of.
No wonder, when art historians look at this, they tie themselves in knots to avoid saying the obvious.
That we're looking at the most intense, convulsive drama of the body that any of us experience between birth and death.
Which is not to say that what we're looking at is just a spasm of erotic chemistry.
It's precisely because it isn't just that.
Because it is somehow a fusion of physical craving and, choose your word, spiritual or emotional transcendence, that Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa is a sculpture that possesses the beholder completely, the longer we stare.
So, perhaps, when that 18th-century French connoisseur looked at Teresa and said, ''If that's divine love, I know it well', he wasn't making a sly joke at all, but doffing his hat to Bernini for using the power of art to make the most difficult, the most desirable thing in the world.
; the visualisation of pure bliss.
Her head is thrown back, her mouth open.
Her heavy-lidded eyes are half-closed.
An angelic hand is delicately uncovering her breast.
You have to look.
You don't know where to look.
A century after Bernini created this sculpture, a French art lover, doing the tour of Rome, came into this church, peered at the spectacle and said, ''Well, if that's divine love, I know all about it.
'' So, what is this? Surely not an erotic trance, not from the most devout sculptor in Rome.
No one who was the bosom friend of popes, a pillar of the Catholic establishment, could possibly want us to see a nun in the throes of orgasm, could he? It's no good pretending that ecstasy isn't a physical as well as a spiritual experience.
That passion doesn't work through the body as well as the soul.
Bernini knew all about passion.
That's what his art was about.
It was this physical intensity that would transform sculpture.
No one before Bernini had managed to make marble so carnal.
In his nimble hands, it would flutter and stream, quiver and sweat.
His figures weep and shout, their torsos twist and run and arch themselves in spasms of intense sensation.
He could, like an alchemist, change one material into another.
Marble into trees, leaves, hair and, of course, flesh.
The whole point of classical sculpture was to make humans less so, to give mortal flesh the heavyweight smoothness of immortality.
So many of them end up looking divine, but bloodless.
But then, along comes Bernini, and suddenly even Michelangelo's David looks immobile beside Bernini's whirling, twisting tornado.
If sculpture was supposed to convey gravity, Bernini would defy it.
His figures break loose from their plinths, flying away into space.
For as long as anyone could remember, Gian Lorenzo Bernini had startled the people who mattered.
Brought before the Pope when he was just eight, he did a lightning sketch of St Paul's head that prompted the astonished Pope to tip the little boy as the next Michelangelo.
His father, Pietro, was a sculptor from Florence.
Seldom better than competent and sometimes worse.
But in his son, he knew a good thing when he saw it.
''Watch out, Signor Bernini,'' an admiring cardinal said, ''The boy will surpass his master.
'' So, fast out of the starting blocks, our little prodigy.
Here's a playful tour de force.
Two little angels embrace in wide-eyed innocence.
Bernini did this in his teens.
He kept it on display on the landing of his house throughout his life.
And this is his goat, Amalthea, and the infant Jupiter.
A standard bit of mythology transformed into a romp with the shaggiest nanny goat in sculpture.
What makes these little figures burst from their dull, mythological subject matter? They have the hot breath of life in them, lusty, mischievous, nursery school naughtiness.
Bernini arrived in Rome in 1605.
Just at the time that Caravaggio's punchy street dramas were electrifying the Church, giving it a new vision of how to move the flock.
No more remote saints.
Instead, the shock theatre of the earthy passions.
Salvation in the guts.
So how do you top Caravaggio? Answer: you can't, but in sculpture.
This is St Lawrence being barbecued alive for his Christian beliefs.
Bernini was 16 when he did this.
He's trying to catch the moment of transcendent pain when, if we believe the legends, St Lawrence turns to his executioners and says, in a moment of macabre drollery, ''Right, turn me over, boys, this side's done.
'' No wonder he became the patron saint of cooks.
But there's something serious going on here.
As Lawrence's hand touches the flame, a mysterious transformation takes place.
The chroniclers said the smell of scorched flesh turned fragrant.
Pain and sweetness become one.
Torment becomes ecstasy.
A rehearsal, perhaps, for a sweet ordeal to come.
He loved playing with fire, did Bernini.
Couldn't stop himself.
Here he is as a damned soul.
It's a self-portrait.
Bernini has scorched his own arm in a naked flame, screaming in a mirror to get the expression just right.
An extremist for his art, then, but also, perhaps, someone capable of impulsive acts of violence.
Still, it's a drama of the flesh no one, not even Michelangelo, had made quite so gripping.
It was enough to make one bigwig on the Roman scene, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, want to adopt Gian Lorenzo as his personal star property.
Someone who'd make his fabulous new villa, up here on the Pincian Hill, the place to see great art.
How the other red hats would gnash their teeth in envy.
There was something larger than life about Scipione Borghese.
The bull-like neck and head sat atop a jumbo body.
Sly Bernini, using a button that can't quite make it through its hole to give us a feeling for the flesh tight-packed into the satin.
The holy man of the Church is, above all, a physical presence.
He looks more like a chef than His Eminence.
What he was after, Bernini said, was a speaking likeness, because he thought that people gave themselves away most characteristically either just before or after they spoke.
So he works his magic on Scipione.
The little fringe poking out from the Cardinal's hat, the chipmunk cheeks, the fleshy, blubbery lips.
Scipione's nose catching the light in such a way as to suggest a film of sweat.
The natural effusion of a big man in a hot city.
Rome, the holy metropolis, buzzing with worldly ambition.
For the church aristocracy, it's not just the money you've got that counts.
It's also the art.
Painters, sculptors and architects are angling for patrons, and the Rothschilds and the Saatchis of their day, the popes and cardinals, are gambling on the next prize genius.
Bernini, of course, has everything it takes to succeed.
He's witty, charming, extremely well-connected, frighteningly cultured, ferociously disciplined, always delivers when he says he will and he doesn't drink.
In other words, the opposite of Caravaggio.
And how do we know all this? Well, someone had noted Bernini's every move.
Filippo Baldinucci, minor painter, gossip and art critic.
Not that important in himself, but someone who'd collected everything he could from those who knew Bernini, and turned it into his first proper biography.
This is Apollo and Daphne.
It's a story of sexual hunting.
Apollo wants the nymph, Daphne.
She definitely doesn't want him.
He runs after her, and just as he's about to grab her, the gods answer her prayers by turning her into a laurel tree.
It's all-action sculpture.
Apollo breaking his breathless run, his cape and his hair still flying in the wind.
Daphne, who's cornered, isn't rooted to the spot, except botanically, and seems to be climbing into the air, her mouth open wide in a scream.
Hair and fingers already metamorphosing into leafy twigs.
But the tease of the drama is the silky nude that Bernini's made available to us exactly as she disappears inside her protective casing of tree bark.
A painfully thwarted consummation.
It's not just me.
A French cardinal said he wouldn't have it in his house because such a beautiful nude would be sure to arouse anybody who saw it.
Bernini is said to have been really pleased when he heard that.
Bernini is in his early 20s, a superstar.
Someone on whom the mighty and the powerful almost fawn.
One pope, Gregory XV, makes him a knight, so Bernini is known ever after as the Cavaliere.
The next pope, Urban VIII, makes him his best friend.
There's a story that when Cardinal Barberini became Pope Urban VIII, he called Bernini into his apartment and said Bernini is Rome's supreme virtuoso.
The emperor of the arts, and not just in sculpture.
He's also a painter, a master builder and a playwright.
And he has everything, charisma, swarthy good looks, money, status and enemies.
This is Francesco Borromini, taciturn, neurotic, introverted, depressive.
A man of absolutely no social graces whatsoever.
For good and for ill, Borromini would play a pivotal role in Bernini's life.
The two of them would trip over each other's ambitions, spur each other on to ever-greater heights, ever-greater risks.
Borromini was a brilliant architect.
He made walls and balconies curve and bulge where they had no right to.
Ceilings that sing and throb.
Here he is exaggerating perspective.
Making the columns at the back much smaller than they should be in order to make the space much deeper than it really is.
It's all eye wizardry.
If two men were responsible for creating the look of baroque Rome, for making Rome Rome, those two men were Borromini and Bernini.
And they hated each other.
At first, it was a one-way rivalry.
Borromini resented Bernini's popularity, his hogging of the limelight.
It's a bit like Mozart and Salieri.
Only there's no Salieri here, no weaker talent.
They're both geniuses.
Look at these two churches, just 200 yards away from each other, in Rome.
One by Bernini, the other by Borromini.
Here's the Borromini church, San Carlo delle Quattro Fontane.
It's the work of an architect chess master, pure and austere.
Just brick and stucco, no colour or sculpture allowed.
Just mind-blowing designs, worked out from the higher geometry.
The heavenly order of shapes and numbers.
Now, here's the Bernini church.
Loads of colour trowelled on, as if it were a stage set with full theatrical lighting.
It's all look-at-me razzle-dazzle.
Showy, visceral and sexy, just like him.
The rivalry between Bernini and Borromini started in earnest in 1624, when someone had to be appointed the new architect for Saint Peter's, and get to build the baldachino, the enormous canopy over the tomb of Saint Peter, located directly under Michelangelo's great dome.
It's the plummiest job in town.
Now, at this stage, Borromini was far more qualified than Bernini.
He'd trained as an architect and was the obvious candidate for the job.
But guess who got it? Mr Charming, Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
''What, the biggest job in Rome? And he gives it to him, and not me, just because he's the Pope's best friend?" ''I mean, the man knows damn all about buildings.
'' Borromini must have been furious.
Of course, the engineering problems of forging the great canopy, raising this twisty gilt-bronze monster, were a serious stretch for Bernini's competence.
So, wisely, he gets help.
He turns to Borromini, who had no choice but to help.
It was for the greater good of the Church, after all.
Architecture has always been a collaborative exercise, so it's not surprising to find that virtually all the drawings for the baldachino are by Borromini.
Does he get the credit he deserves? Does he hell.
And that, Francesco Borromini neither forgives nor forgets.
It's an unappealing trait, this ungenerous instinct for monopolising the glory.
And it will come back to bite Bernini.
It's not just Borromini who feels it.
The assistant who did that fine leaf-work on Daphne's leaves was so angry at not getting his due that he walked out of the project in a rage.
But then the Cavaliere Bernini always did have a cavalier way with his assistants.
His own mother complained.
So he took what he needed.
Technical expertise, grinding toil and, in the case of one of his assistants, Matteo Buonarelli, his wife.
Her name is Costanza.
Constance.
Did she and Bernini have a laugh in bed about that? Here she is, in 1637, at the height of their affair.
You can see he can't get enough of her.
And from the intensity of all this brimming desire comes an entirely new kind of European sculpture.
Before Costanza, busts had been entirely respectable, and they were usually reserved for tombs.
Only the Romans, a long time before, had used sculpture for informal portraits.
But informal doesn't quite do it for Costanza, does it? How about intimate? For this is a portrait of a woman whose passion is written on her face and her body.
Whose flaring temper just adds fuel to her lover's fire.
This is what we mean by lovingly carved.
It's as though Bernini was reliving his caresses with his chisel.
The falling away of the blouse, perhaps the single, sexiest invitation in all European sculpture.
There's something else unique about this sculpture.
It's the celebration of a spitfire.
Costanza Buonarelli may have been the wife of a lowly assistant sculptor, but she came from a proud, old family, the Piccolomini.
So her jaw is firm, the rosebud mouth is in the act of speaking, and not deferentially.
Everything that was supposed to define womanhood, demure, chaste serenity, is junked for Costanza.
She's a wild thing, and the sculptor is hooked on her temper.
But it's not Costanza's temper that would end up undoing Bernini.
It was his own.
Despite all the genteel charm, Bernini was known to have a low boiling point.
Underneath all those social graces was the bloodthirsty temper of a Neapolitan gangster.
And in one unbelievably shocking episode, he lets it rip.
It started with a rumour.
Costanza, it's whispered, was not so constant after all.
Seems she has a thing about the Bernini boys, since she's sleeping not just with Gian Lorenzo, but with his younger brother, Luigi.
Oh, it's hard to believe, I know, that anyone would want to get their hands on anyone except Mr Fabulous himself.
But could the rumours be true? The trap is set that evening.
Gian Lorenzo says breezily how he has to go off to the country the next day, so he won't be in town.
But he doesn't go into the country, does he? Instead, early next morning, he goes to Costanza's house and waits.
Luigi emerges.
So does Costanza.
That swelling breast Bernini had lovingly carved flattened against Luigi's chest in a passionate embrace.
There's a chase through the streets, across the piazzas, over the bridges, right into Saint Peter's itself.
Where its official architect does his best to murder his own brother.
Gian Lorenzo grabs an iron bar and smashes it against Luigi's body, breaking two ribs.
He's famous as a miracle worker.
This time the miracle is that he hasn't killed his own brother.
It takes a message from their mother to the papal cops to separate them.
And that's not the end of it.
That afternoon, Gian Lorenzo sends a servant to Costanza's house.
He doesn't cut her throat.
Instead, he slashes her perfect face to ribbons.
So the man who has cut stone to create beauty has cut flesh to destroy it.
And what do you suppose is Bernini's punishment for grievous bodily harm and attempted murder? Oh, a really stiff sentence, a 3,000 scudi fine.
Except that his pal, the Pope, waives it.
''Naughty, naughty,'' says the Pope, ''This mustn't happen again.
''So I sentence you to be married.
" ''And, by the way, she just happens to be the most beautiful girl in Rome.
" ''That should keep you out of mischief.
'' Papal wink, papal nudge.
So Bernini is married off to Caterina Tezio, daughter of a Roman lawyer.
For his part in the fight, brother Luigi is banished to Bologna.
Everyone else goes to jail.
The servant who did the razor job and, insult added to injury, Costanza herself, convicted of fornication and adultery.
And what happened to the bust? Well, Bernini's new wife wouldn't have it in the house.
Which is just as well, since Gian Lorenzo couldn't bear to look at it, either.
He might, I suppose, have smashed it.
But luckily, a Medici buyer from Florence snapped it up.
Which is why we're looking at it here in the Bargello Museum in Florence.
The Costanza that once was, and, for us, always will be.
And you're thinking, ''I don't care how good his sculpture is.
''I don't care how important his art is.
" ''What an absolute bastard!" ''Please tell me he doesn't get off scot-free.
'' Well, strangely enough, it's exactly from this moment of the crime against Costanza that things go swiftly downhill for the Cavaliere Untouchable.
And it all went wrong in the place that mattered most for Bernini.
The place that made or broke artists and architects.
The Cathedral of Saint Peter's.
This is the facade of Saint Peter's we all know, but the aggressively confident 17th century popes didn't want to stop with this.
They wanted two great bell towers at each corner, above where we now see the clocks.
It was those bells, after all, that would summon the faithful for papal blessings and make the Christian dream real.
But in the middle, of course, was Michelangelo's great dome.
So the first designs for the towers made them respectfully low.
Safe, squat, one-storey affairs.
The along comes Bernini, constitutionally incapable of deference.
''My towers are going to be taller than your dome'', he says.
Three storeys tall, in fact.
Almost 70 metres above the original pedestals, six times heavier than the original towers.
Problem was, though, Bernini's towers were about to be built on swampy ground.
It's not that Bernini didn't know about this before he got started.
It's just that he's surrounded by yes men who tell him what he wants to hear.
That building tall towers on dodgy ground is no real problem.
What he needs are brutally honest advisors who aren't afraid of spelling out the risks he's taking.
There was one person who knew that building a tall, heavy tower on unstable foundations was asking for trouble.
That person was Borromini.
But it seemed to be beneath Bernini's dignity to ask his rival for advice.
So, without the benefit of Borromini's criticism, Bernini sails straight into disaster.
In July, 1641, Bernini unveiled his first tower to the public.
Two months later, cracks start to appear.
Bernini takes to his bed.
Won't eat.
Gets so ill, he's reported near death.
It gets worse.
The cracks aren't just in the foundation of the bell tower.
They've spread to the facade of the main church itself.
Then, in 1644, disaster.
Pope Urban VIII, Bernini's friend and the staunchest supporter of the bell tower, dies.
There's a new pope, Innocent X, and he sees it as his job to get rid of all the old favourites, like Bernini.
After all, he has a new favourite, Francesco Borromini.
So, after 15 years in Bernini's shadow, Borromini's moment for revenge has at last arrived.
An inquiry is set up to deal with Bernini's towers.
Borromini submits detailed evidence, a lovingly-rendered drawing of Bernini's disaster.
''Well, what do you expect?'' says Borromini.
''The tower's too tall.
It's too heavy for its base supports.
" ''It's too unwieldy.
It's built recklessly on swampy ground.
" ''It's amazing, actually, it hasn't collapsed already.
" ''It's all very well going digging beneath the tower after the event to see how serious the damage is.
" ''If he'd have asked me, since I know a bit about building, I would've told him.
But he didn't.
'' On the 23rd of February, 1646, a meeting was held at the Vatican to discuss the fate of Bernini's south tower.
But the Pope had already made his decision.
Demolish it.
The demolition takes 11 months.
If Bernini had been anywhere near Saint Peter's, he would've seen it and heard it.
The winches, the pulleys, the columns stacked on the roof.
Down came the bell tower, and down with it came Gian Lorenzo Bernini from the height of fame and reputation to something like a laughing stock.
It's 1648.
Bernini is 50, old by the standards of the time.
So how did he survive the humiliation? One visiting English student has him collapsing into despair.
Others have him buckling down to work.
He still does get commissions, but not from the biggest hitters in Rome, not any more.
It would take a miracle now for him to redeem himself.
And then that miracle arrived.
A moment of mind-boggling drama.
A moment that wavers between mystery and indecency.
The body of a saint penetrated.
The arrow withdrawn from its passage, poised to strike again.
Her pain indistinguishable from pleasure.
The gasping woman levitating, defying gravity on rippling cushions of stone.
So, who was it then that gave Bernini the chance to portray a saint in a way no one else had ever dared? You can't imagine a more respectable patron than Cardinal Federico Cornaro, who came from an old aristocratic clan that wanted to build a family chapel in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria.
He would have known about Saint Teresa of Ãvila.
Everyone did.
She died in her native Spain in 1582.
But there was something, many things, actually, which made Teresa an awkward fit for sainthood.
Not least her levitations.
A rapture came over me so suddenly, it almost lifted me out of myself.
I heard these words, ''Now, I want you to speak not with men, but with angels.
'' It's not surprising, then, that of all the modern saints, it was Teresa who still had no chapel devoted to her.
The Cornaro dynasty, who were patrons of her austere order of nuns, the Barefoot Carmelites, jumped in and presented Bernini with the biggest challenge of his career, but also the chance for a spectacular comeback.
It was the most daring drama of the body that he, or any other sculptor in the history of art, had ever conceived, much less executed.
Bernini would certainly have known about Saint Teresa.
Her autobiography was a bestseller in Catholic Rome.
Like everyone else, he would've been startled by the earthy directness of her story.
But above all, he would have been electrified by those moments in which Teresa, in the most graphic words imaginable, describes what happens to her.
Very close to me, an angel appeared in human form.
In his hands I saw a large golden spear.
And at its iron tip, there seemed to be a point of fire.
I felt as if he plunged this into my heart several times, so that it penetrated all the way to my entrails.
When he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out with it, and it left me totally inflamed with a great love for God.
The pain was so severe that it made me moan several times.
Now, if there was one thing that Bernini was not, it was crude.
He understood perfectly well that when Teresa wrote of her raptures, she meant the longing of her soul for a consummated union with God.
It was the way she wrote about it that made it seem as if her soul and her body were the same thing.
All of Bernini's greatest body dramas had featured figures twisting in ascent.
Proserpina's flight from Pluto.
Daphne rising to the sky as if to escape stony doom.
Now it was time for him to make Teresa levitate.
This time, not in escape from penetration, but in craving for it.
It was time to forget about euphemisms.
The only way that Bernini could possibly communicate the flood of her sensation was to make visible what he knew of bodily ecstasy.
The face of a woman at the height of sexual euphoria.
It's as if he's turning his own intimate knowledge of carnal sin into carnal blessing.
So, of course, this isn't the real Teresa, middle-aged nun, rising up her cell wall with sisters hanging on to her habit.
No, this woman is unforgettably beautiful.
A match for the exquisite seraph angel lover.
They are, in their way, a couple.
Smiley face is pointing his arrow not at her breast at all, but rather lower down the torso.
But how to make visible both their union and the tide of engulfing feeling washing through Teresa? And here Bernini has the crucial insight of the whole piece.
He turns her body inside out, so that her covering, her habit, the symbol of chastity and containment, becomes a representation of what's going on inside her.
It's the accomplice of her helpless dissolution into a liquid bliss.
It is, in fact, the climax itself.
A storm surge of churning sensation, cresting and falling as if the marble had been molten.
And these billows pour themselves from the smiling angel directly into Teresa's robe, where they join an ocean of heaving waves that folds into hollows and crevices, like surf breaking on a shore.
There's nothing furtive about any of this.
Bernini wants us to look and look hard.
So much, that he surrounds the performance with an audience, members of the Cornaro family.
Some watching the show, some chatting about what it might mean.
There's every kind of show lighting, fake sun beams, hidden lights at the back.
And, as Teresa climbs to her heights, the earth really does move.
Look down here.
The ground is opening and out pop the dead.
Everything is shaking and quaking, even the columns of the little chapel.
And here, Bernini adds the coup de grâce to all those critics who said he couldn't do architecture.
Not least Borromini, who specialised in weird, counter-intuitive bulges and curves.
''Right,'' said Bernini, ''I'll build you a temple that not just curves and bulges, ''but actually explodes through its columns ''from the sheer uncontainable force of the drama going on inside.
'' The most ambitious thing he'd ever attempted, the bell tower of Saint Peter's, had come crashing down in ignominious failure.
Now, it was time for Teresa to rise up, and carry with her the resurrected reputation of the disgraced Cavaliere Bernini.
And you feel him, when he's done, standing back and saying, ''Right, top that''.
No one ever could.
The Cornaro loved their chapel.
12,000 scudi, no problem, worth every scudo.
Word got round.
The dazzler was back.
Even the sour, old Pope Innocent X began to sweeten on Bernini, as Borromini skulked unhappily through the Vatican corridors.
It's not that Borromini never gets commissions from the Pope again, it's just that it was Bernini who triumphed.
So wherever you go in Rome now, you're really in the Cavaliere's city.
As you approach Saint Peter's over the Ponte Sant'Angelo, you're in the company of Bernini's angels.
And even though he was denied his bell towers at Saint Peter's, he did something much better.
The colonnades which lead us towards the great church, its arms gathering believers to the bosom of the faith.
Inside the church, past the baldachino, you're drawn towards Bernini's great light.
The Holy Spirit at the seat of Saint Peter.
Popes came and went, but Bernini endured.
He gave up sinning, became a model Christian, fathered 11 children.
Never strayed again, they said.
And we're told that when he was troubled, he'd be found at the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, praying before his shrine to Saint Teresa.
And what of the others in this story? Costanza with the cut-up face eventually got out of jail with the help of her long-suffering husband.
Borromini went on to become the great master builder of ever more eccentric and brilliant churches.
But in the end, he never really felt he got true recognition and he never got over Bernini's comeback.
Eaten up by jealousy and disappointment, he ended up by committing suicide.
And what of brother Luigi? Well, he returned to Rome after his exile and, deep into his 60s, he was at it again.
This time caught in flagrante delicto in, guess where? The precincts of the holy church of Saint Peter's.
Where, according to court records, he was arrested for acts of violent sodomy.
To clear the family name and secure a papal pardon for his brother, Bernini created this, the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni.
For me, though, none of those grandstanding jobs in Rome come close to the one work he called, ''The least bad thing I ever did.
'' Why? Because he's managed to make visible, tangible, actually, something we all, if we're honest, know we hunger for, but before which we're properly tongue-tied.
Something which has produced more bad writing, more excruciating poems than anything else you can think of.
No wonder, when art historians look at this, they tie themselves in knots to avoid saying the obvious.
That we're looking at the most intense, convulsive drama of the body that any of us experience between birth and death.
Which is not to say that what we're looking at is just a spasm of erotic chemistry.
It's precisely because it isn't just that.
Because it is somehow a fusion of physical craving and, choose your word, spiritual or emotional transcendence, that Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa is a sculpture that possesses the beholder completely, the longer we stare.
So, perhaps, when that 18th-century French connoisseur looked at Teresa and said, ''If that's divine love, I know it well', he wasn't making a sly joke at all, but doffing his hat to Bernini for using the power of art to make the most difficult, the most desirable thing in the world.
; the visualisation of pure bliss.