BERNINI AND LOUIS XIV.
Bernini received the most flattering and pressing invitations from Louis XIV. to visit Paris. At length, he was persuaded by the great Colbert to undertake the journey, and having with great difficulty obtained permission of the Pope, he set out for France, at the age of sixty-eight, accompanied by one of his sons, and a numerous retinue. Never did an artist travel with so much pomp, and under so many flattering circumstances. By order of the King, he was received everywhere on his way with the honors due to a prince, and on his arrival at Paris, he was received by the king with every mark of distinction, and apartments assigned to him in the royal palace. Louis defrayed all the expenses of his journey, and to immortalize the event, had a medal struck, with the portrait of the artist, and on the reverse, the Muses of the Arts, with this inscription, “Singularis in singularis; in omnibus, unicus.” When he returned to Rome, Louis presented him with ten thousand crowns, gave him a pension of two thousand, and one of four hundred to his son, and commissioned him to execute an equestrian statue of himself, in marble, of colossal proportions. The statue was executed in four years, and sent to Versailles, where it was afterwards converted into Marcus Curtius, and where, as such, it still remains.
BERNINI’S WORKS.
Bernini designed and wrought with wonderful facility; his life was one of continued exertion, and he lived to the great age of eighty-two years, so that he was enabled to execute an astonishing number of works. Richly endowed by nature, and favored by circumstances, he rose superior to the rules of art, creating for himself an easy manner, the faults of which he knew well how to disguise by its brilliancy; yet this course, as must ever be the case, did not lead to a lasting reputation. “The Cav. Bernini,” says Lanzi, “the great architect and skillful sculptor, was the arbiter and dispenser of all the works at Rome, under the pontificates of Urban VIII. and Innocent X. His style necessarily influenced those of all the artists, his cotemporaries. He was affected, particularly in his drapery. He opened the way to caprice, changed the true principles of art, and substituted for them the false. At different times, the study of painting has taken the same vicious course; above all, among the imitators of Pietro da Cortona, some of whom went so far as to condemn a study of the works of Raffaelle, and even to decry, as useless, the imitation of nature.” Bernini lived in splendor and magnificence, and left a fortune of 400,000 Roman crowns (about $700,000), to his children.
BERNINI AND THE VEROSPI HERCULES.
When the Verospi statue of Hercules killing the Hydra was first discovered, some parts of it, particularly the monster itself, were wanting, and were supplied by Bernini. Some years after, in further digging the same piece of ground, they found the hydra that originally belonged to it, which differs very much from Bernini’s supplemental one; yet the latter is given in Maffei’s Statues, and other books of prints, as the antique. The statue was removed from the Verospi palace to the Capitol, where it now is; and the original hydra, with a horned sort of a human face, snakes for hair, and a serpentine body, is there also, in the same court.
FANATICISM DESTRUCTIVE TO ART.
Queen Elizabeth was a bitter persecutor of art; she ordered all sacred pictures in the churches to be utterly destroyed, and the walls to be white-washed, so that no memorial of them might remain. In her reign, it became fashionable to sally forth and knock pictures and images to pieces. Flaxman says, “The commands for destroying sacred paintings and sculpture prevented the artist from suffering his mind to rise to the contemplation or execution of any sublime effort, as he dreaded a prison or a stake, and reduced him to the lowest drudgery in his profession. This extraordinary check to our national art occurred at a time which offered the most essential and extraordinary assistance to its progress.” Flaxman proceeds to remark, “the civil wars completed what fanaticism had begun, and English art was so completely extinguished that foreign artists were always employed for public or private undertakings.”
Charles I. was a great lover and patron of the fine arts, and during his reign they made rapid advances in England; but the blind zeal of the Puritans dispersed his splendid gallery, and destroyed almost every vestige of art. In the Journal of the House, July 23d, 1645, it is “Ordered, that all pictures having the second person of the Trinity, be burnt.” Walpole relates that “one Blessie was hired at half-a-crown a day to break the painted windows in Croydon church.” One Dowsing was employed from June 9th, 1642, to October 4th, 1644, in this holy business, and by calculation it is found that he and his agents had destroyed about 4660 pictures, evidently not all glass, because when they were glass he so specified them.
“The result of this continued persecution,” says Haydon, “was the ruin of high art, for the people had not taste enough to feel any sympathy for it independently of religion, and every man who has pursued it since, who had not a private fortune, and was not supported by a pension, like West, became infallibly ruined.”