Edited by Ivan Gaskell and Henry Lie

Contributors : Henry Lie, Ivan Gaskell, Anthony B. Sigel, Colette Czapski Hemingway, Eugene F. Farrell, Suzanne M. M. Young, Nancy Lloyd, Jeannine O’Grody, Mark S. Weil, Francesca G. Bewer, Kendra Roth, and Jennifer Montagu.

184 pages, 8 1/2 x 11", 207 illustrations. 1999

ISSN 1065-6448 (paper) $10. Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin, vol. VI, no. 3

This volume celebrates the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), the greatest sculptor of the Roman baroque. Focusing on fifteen works from the Fogg Art Museums’ remarkable collection of clay models associated with the artist, noted scientists and art historians meticulously examine the figures themselves, as well as their historical and theoretical contexts.The volume is profusely illustrated in black-and-white, with 15 plates and 192 figures, including a map, photographs, X-radiographs, ICP-MS data, videoprobe photos, and digitally enhanced fingerprint images. A selected bibliography is also included.

Acting as high-tech art sleuths, members of the Art Museums’ Straus Center for Conservation use a variety of technologies to analyze clay composition, modeling techniques, gilding, and latent fingerprints found in the clay. Art historians provide documentary evidence and analysis of the models as components of large-scale Bernini projects, particularly the spectacular series of angels for the Ponte Sant’Angelo and for the Altar of the Blessed Sacrament in St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome. Other noteworthy investigations involve the development of a figure for the Cathedra Petri in St. Peter’s, bronzes related to the Fogg’s recently acquired Countess Matilda of Tuscany, and reattribution of the Personification of Silence, a work once attributed to Bernini.

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