The Living Marbles: Gian Lorenzo Bernini and the Birth of the Baroque Portrait (Florence, 4/3/09-7/12/09)

I Marmi Vivi. Gian Lorenzo Bernini e la nascita del ritratto barocco
Florence, Bargello National Museum, April 3 - July 12, 2009

"Several of these busts were united in North America in the course of last year, on the occasion of the exhibition, Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture, jointly organised by the J. Paul Getty Museum of Los Angeles and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and this has given rise to an Italian edition of this event, though more precisely focussed on Bernini’s youthful portraits that can be dated up to 1640. (...)

As we have already stated, the Florence exhibition intends to shed light on the most significant phase of Bernini’s production of portraits in his long artistic parabola, that is to say, from his youth up to the end of the fourth decade: the time span in which, among other things, the Bernini magisterium was joined by that, in many respects still unacknowledged, of Giuliano Finelli, Gian Lorenzo’s student and “assistant” who is also present in the exhibition with several of his superb portraits. A careful analysis will therefore be conducted precisely on the founding moment of the fortunes of the sculpted portrait in seventeenth-century civilisation." [Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi]