Architecture · Classical & Renaissance
1598–1680 · Italian (Neapolitan-Roman)
Roman Baroque
Bernini was the presiding genius of Baroque Rome: sculptor, architect, painter, playwright and stage designer, who worked for eight popes and gave the city much of its present face. He carved marble into flesh, hair and fluttering drapery, and he treated buildings as theatre, fusing sculpture, architecture and hidden light into what is called the bel composto. His colonnade at St Peter's is the largest architectural embrace in Europe.
A bronze canopy ninety feet high on four twisted columns, cast partly from metal stripped off the Pantheon's portico (1623–1634)
St Peter's Basilica, Vatican City
The baldacchino over the high altar; the melting of the Pantheon's bronze prompted the jibe 'what the barbarians did not do, the Barberini did'.
Two great curved arms of Tuscan colonnade, four columns deep, reaching out round an oval piazza with an obelisk at its centre (1656–1667)
Vatican City
The piazza of St Peter's, which he described as the motherly arms of the Church.
A swooning Carmelite nun and a smiling angel with a golden arrow, lit from a hidden window above, with the patron's family watching from theatre boxes (1647–1652)
Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome
The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in the Cornaro Chapel — the textbook example of the bel composto.
Four river gods on a rock in a Roman square, supporting an obelisk, with one figure shading his eyes as if from the church opposite (1648–1651)
Piazza Navona, Rome
The Fountain of the Four Rivers — Nile, Ganges, Danube and Río de la Plata; the story that the figures recoil from his rival's church is a later legend.
A small oval church for Jesuit novices, entered on its short axis, with a marble saint climbing over the pediment towards the light (1658–1670)
Rome, Italy
Sant'Andrea al Quirinale, the building he is said to have been proudest of.
A marble group of a fleeing nymph whose fingers are sprouting leaves and whose toes are taking root (1622–1625)
Galleria Borghese, Rome
Apollo and Daphne, carved for Cardinal Scipione Borghese when the sculptor was in his early twenties.
A ceremonial stair squeezed into an awkward gap, its columns and vault tapering as they climb to fake a grander length (1663–1666)
Vatican Palace
The Scala Regia, a masterpiece of forced perspective linking the basilica to the papal palace.
A Roman palace for a pope's family, with a Triumph of Divine Providence spread across its salone ceiling (1627–1633)
Rome, Italy
Palazzo Barberini, shared with Carlo Maderno and Borromini; the ceiling is by Pietro da Cortona.