Christian Art and Iconography Guide: Bernini

In the Fonseca Chapel,the Albertoni Chapel,and the church of Sant' Andrea al Quirinale,all in Rome,Careri identifies three types of ensemble and links aech to a particular spiritual journey.Using contemporary theories in anthropology,film ,and reception aesthetics,he shows how Bernini's formal mechanisms established an emotional dynamic between the beholder and a specific arrangement of forms.As an inquiry into the ways art in a certain historical context transformed and was transformed by its audience,Bernini:Flights of Love,the Art of Devotion is also a penetrating investigation into the aesthetic principles of multimedia composition.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini is best known as a sculptor. The brilliance of his sculpture is no longer contested. His architecture,by contrast, is not yet as well understood. The number of outstanding studies on Bernini "scultore" that have appeared in the past decade is astounding; all put together, the number of publications on Bernini "architetto" is not as great. My effort in this study is to make a contribution toward the better understanding of this neglected side of the great Baroque artist. More specifically, my aim is to elucidate the nature of Bernini's architecture - its style, principles, and method - more precisely than has hitherto been done. The Square of Saint Peter's, needless to say, is one of the best known monuments in Rome; it is a work of vast conception and scale and vies with the Colosseum on the map of Rome. For this reason alone, it deserves a monograph, but yet another reason justifies the effort. Architecture clearly constitutes a significant part of Bernini's artistic production. But in studying Bernini's architecture, one immediately encounters the difficulty of isolating architecture from the artist's "oeuvre". For architecture and sculpture are inseparably combined in many of his works; and they include not only altars, tombs, certainly better characterized as decorative than architectural, but judgement as to exactly which works of Bernini constitute his architecture is often arbitrary.