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Speaker: Estelle Lingo (University of Washington)
Gian Lorenzo Bernini was one of the greatest marble carvers of all time, but a talent for managing marble was not a gift easily managed in life. In 1550 the Florentine sculptor Francesco da Sangallo described marble sculpture as problematically entangled with princes and institutions, without whom a sculptor could not obtain their costly medium or realize their ideas, unlike a painter. Through a long and tumultuous career, Bernini navigated this reality, in the process transforming the visual language of sculpture to meet the needs of his patrons, above all the papacy. The specific ways in which Bernini accomplished this emerged directly from his unchanging passion for carving marble and a stonecarver’s ability to conceal the real forces at work in what we see. Reflecting on the controlled violence and challenging statics of marble carving as material and metaphorical realities, this talk will call attention to overlooked aspects of some of Bernini’s most celebrated works and consider his art and career in relation to period dynamics of power and gender.
Estelle Lingo is Professor Emerita in the School of Art + Art History + Design at the University of Washington in Seattle and a specialist in early modern European art. Her research interests range from the sixteenth century to the present and engage questions of historical visualities, non-textual knowledge, canon formation, media specificity, periodization, gender, and the historiography of Western art history. She is the author of François Duquesnoy and the Greek Ideal (2007) and Mochi’s Edge and Bernini’s Baroque (2017) and is currently completing a new book, To Destroy Caravaggio: Caravaggism, Photography, and Art History. Prof. Lingo is a former fellow and Visiting Professor at I Tatti and was the 2016-18 Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
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