NEW INSTALLATION TO EXHIBIT THE UNPARALLELED COLLECTION OF GIAN LORENZO BERNINI 'S TERRACOTTA STUDIES IN THE FOGG MUSEUM
Cambridge, Massachusetts-The new installation Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Sketches in Clay will open on February 28, 1998 in a permanent collection gallery of the Fogg Art Museum. In one of its most far-sighted and spectacular purchases ever, the Fogg, in 1937, acquired 27 terracotta sculptures, fourteen of which can be associated directly with greatest sculptor of the Roman Baroque, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Naples 1598-1680 Rome), a fifteenth was added in 1995. These works are studies for some of Bernini's most important projects and cover nearly the whole of the artist's career. They include saints and allegorical figures, but perhaps most memorable are the extraordinarily vivid angels, seemingly descending directly from a heavenly realm in swirls of flowing drapery. Since 1998 marks the quartercentenary of Bernini's birth, the Harvard University Art Museums, as the guardian of this critical body of work, is dedicating a gallery to these clay sculptures. The installation is organized by Ivan Gaskell, Margaret S. Winthrop Curator, and Colette Czapski Hemingway, Andrew W. Mellon Intern, 1996-98, Department of Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts, with contributions by Jeannine O'Grody, National Endowment for the Arts Intern, 1995-96.
The sculptures have not been on public display for many years and they
return to view following the most comprehensive study ever undertaken
of such a body of material. The results of this collaborative research
by members of the Fogg's Department of Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative
Art, and the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies will
inform the innovative installation and will be published in the spring
1998 issue of the Harvard University Art Museums' Bulletin.*
*The revised publication date for the Bulletin featuring Bernini is the
Fall of 1998.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini perfected combining architecture and the plastic arts for the expression of resurgent Catholic devotion. His schemes were produced by a flexible workshop of artists and craftspeople working under his overall supervision. For more than fifty years he worked in and around Rome's principal site of pilgrimage, Saint Peter's Basilica. The creation of tombs and altars, entire chapels and processional ways required a lengthy process of planning and manufacture.
Before giant statues could be carved in marble, or cast in bronze, numerous problems had to be anticipated and solved. As well as sketching on paper, Bernini and his associates worked in swiftly malleable clay. These clay sketches were tools in a collaborative enterprise. Their pressed forms, and raked, prodded, and gouged surfaces embody the inextricability of thought and making. Some might then be used to demonstrate to others in the workshop, or to the patron (often the Pope), how Bernini proposed to proceed. The sketches command attention in their own right, and have been honored by generations of sculptors and amateurs as intimate manifestations of Bernini's own unsurpassed inventive skill.
The Fogg sculptures represent the largest surviving group of sketches by Bernini for some of his most important projects in Rome: the Cornaro Chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria (site of Bernini's renowned Ecstasy of St. Theresa), the Ponte Sant' Angelo, the Chair of St. Peter and the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament (both in Saint Peter's Basilica). Between 1645 and 1652, Bernini designed the architectural and sculptural setting for the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, in the Cornaro family chapel of the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. Members of the Cornaro family contemplate the mystery of a flaming cherub armed with a dart piercing the heart of the saint, an apparition deliberately placed beyond their lines of sight. The Fogg's sketch for this project, Four Members of the Cornaro Family (c. 1647), demonstrates the care with which Bernini conceived these figures (three sixteenth-century cardinals and a doge of Venice) in a low-relief architectural setting. As representations of purely physical reality, they serve as mediators between the observer's world and the spiritual reality revealed by architectural contrivance and sculptural mimesis at the center of the chapel.
In 1667, Pope Clement IX Rospigliosi commissioned Bernini to design the sculptural decoration for the Ponte Sant' Angelo, the Tiber River bridge for pilgrims approaching Saint Peter's Basilica. The result was a harmonization of classical and Christian iconography with resurgent Catholic ideology. Between 1667 and 1669, Bernini worked out his ideas for ten over life-size marble angels, each carrying an instrument of Christ's Passion. Of these ten angels, eight were carved by sculptors under Bernini's direction, while Bernini's own work in marble was confined to the angels holding the Crown of Thorns and the Superscription. Five of the clay sketches in the Fogg installation are studies by Bernini for the angels of the Ponte Sant' Angelo. They offer a unique opportunity to follow the artist's working process. In his earlier of the two Fogg sketches for the Angel Holding the Crown of Thorns, Bernini conceives the angel as a classical nude in an attempt to work out the pose and anatomy of the figure. In this early design (1667-68), the angel stands with its weight on its right leg, a symmetrical counterpart to the pose of the Angel Holding the Superscription. Later on, Bernini abandons this bilateral symmetry in favor of developing the two angels as contrasts in expression, proportion and treatment of drapery.
The Fogg's two clay sketches for the Angel Holding the Superscription relate to Bernini's process of working out the fall of drapery. The early design (1668-69) which shows the drapery folds is subsequently modified in the later design (1669), where the angel's garment is blown open over the right leg, dramatically furling back over the left as though in a gust of wind. Though small in scale, each of the clay sketches is monumental in conception. They are modeled in the humblest of materials, making manifest the intangible realms of saints and angels. Clay, as a medium, has numinous associations with the creation of humankind in the Judeo-Christian and classical traditions that informed Bernini's world view. The heir to an age-old craft tradition of modeling in clay, Bernini took this practice to heights hitherto unexplored, and never since exceeded.
Funding for Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Sketches and Clay was provided by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Seymour Slive Teaching Exhibition Fund of the Harvard University Art Museums.
RELATED EVENTS
Gallery Talks
Gallery talks are free with the price of admission to the Art Museums. Hearing assists are available for gallery talks; arrangements should be made beforehand by phoning (617) 495-8286. To request a sign language interpreter, the public should call (617) 495-2397 using Massachusetts Telephone Relay Service 1-800-439-2370 three weeks in advance of the gallery talk.
Saturday, February 28, 2:00 p.m., Fogg Art Museum
Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Sketches in Clay, with Ivan Gaskell, Margaret S. Winthrop Curator, Department of Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts.
Saturday, March 14, 11:30 a.m., Fogg Art Museum
Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Sketches in Clay, with Colette Czapski Hemingway, Andrew W. Mellon Intern, Department of Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts.
Saturday, May 2, 11:30 a.m., Fogg Art Museum
"Technique and Materials: A Technical Study of Gian Lorenzo Bernini's
Sketches in Clay" with Henry Lie, director, and Anthony Sigel, assistant
conservator of objects and sculpture, Straus Center for Conservation.
Saturday, May 9, 11:30 a.m., Fogg Art Museum
Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Sketches in Clay, with Colette Czapski
Hemingway, Andrew W. Mellon Intern, Department of Paintings, Sculpture,
and Decorative Arts.
Concert
Musica Sacra will present choral masterpieces of the Italian Baroque
including works by Monteverdi, Gesualdo, Carissimi, and Scarlatti. Sunday,
March 8, 5:30 p.m. Fogg Art Museum Tickets will be sold at the door
only. $7; $5 Harvard students and staff and senior citizens. Doors open
one half hour before concerts begins. For further information, please
call (617) 495-4544.
Symposium
Modeled in Mud: Baroque Clay Sculpture, Its Progeny and Afterlife
Saturday, April 18, 9:30 a.m.-5:00 p.m.
Arthur M. Sackler Museum lecture hall, 485 Broadway, Cambridge Free
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, artists and connoisseurs
came to value the sketches and models produced in clay by sculptors working
on large projects completed in other media. Sculptors in the eighteenth
century began to respond to this taste by producing finished works in
clay that exploited the unique qualities of this newly accepted sculptural
medium, and the consequences of this conceptual change subsequently led
to a vast profusion of small clay sculpture and the emergence of the "sketch
aesthetic" in the nineteenth century. This one-day symposium, presented
in conjunction with the exhibition Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Sketches in
Clay, will expose aspects of this development, concentrating on the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from the perspective of both the
artist and the collector.
Moderated by Ivan Gaskell, Harvard University Art Museums, speakers include Malcolm Baker, Victoria and Albert Museum; Maria Giulia Barberini, Museo Nazionale del Palazzo di Venezia, Rome; Aileen Dawson, British Museum; Henry Lie, Straus Center for Conservation, Harvard University Art Museums; Jennifer Montagu, Warburg Institute, London University; Anne Poulet, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Phoebe Dent Weil, independent scholar and conservator, St. Louis.
This symposium has been funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
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The Harvard University Art Museums' facilities are wheelchair accessible. For general information, please call (617) 495-9400. For press information or photographs, please contact Kate McShea Ewen at (617) 495-2397. For more information on events, please contact the Friends, Fellows, and Special Programs Office at (617) 495-4544. World Wide Web: www.artmuseums.harvard.edu.
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The Harvard University Art Museums comprise three museums (Busch-Reisinger Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Museum), all located on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, MA, at the intersection of Quincy Street and Broadway, adjacent to Harvard Yard. The Art Museums are open Monday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., and Sunday 1:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m. Closed holidays. Admission is $5.00; $4.00 for senior citizens; $3.00 for students; free under 18 and on Saturday mornings. For special tour reservations, please call (617) 496-8576. General tours are offered Monday through Friday from September through June. The Fogg tour is at 11:00 a.m.; the Busch-Reisinger tour is at 1:00 p.m.; and the Sackler is at 2:00 p.m.
The Harvard University Art Museums is supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. -end