As one scholar has commented, "What Shakespeare is to drama, Bernini may be to sculpture: the first pan-European sculptor whose name is instantaneously identifiable with a particular manner and vision, and whose influence was inordinately powerful ..."[1] In addition, he was a painter (mostly small canvases in oil) and a man of the theatre: he wrote, directed and acted in plays (mostly Carnival satires), for which he designed stage sets and theatrical machinery.

[5] In 1606 his father received a papal commission (to contribute a marble relief to the Cappella Paolina of Santa Maria Maggiore) and so moved from Naples to Rome, taking his entire family with him and continuing in earnest the training of his son Gian Lorenzo.

[7] Once he was brought to Rome, he rarely left its walls, except (much against his will) for a five-month stay in Paris in the service of King Louis XIV and brief trips to nearby towns (including Civitavecchia, Tivoli and Castelgandolfo), mostly for work-related reasons.

[14] Also dating to this early period are the so-called Damned Soul and Blessed Soul of c. 1619, two small marble busts which may have been influenced by a set of prints by Pieter de Jode I or Karel van Mallery, but which were in fact unambiguously catalogued in the inventory of their first documented owner, Fernando de Botinete y Acevedo, as depicting a nymph and a satyr, a commonly paired duo in ancient sculpture (they were not commissioned by nor ever belonged to either Scipione Borghese or, as most scholarship erroneously claims, the Spanish cleric, Pedro Foix Montoya).

[19] Unlike sculptures done by his predecessors, these focus on specific points of narrative tension in the stories they are trying to tell: Aeneas and his family fleeing the burning Troy; the instant that Pluto finally grasps the hunted Persephone; the precise moment that Apollo sees his beloved Daphne begin her transformation into a tree.

The viewer finds it easier to gauge the state of mind of the characters and therefore understands the larger story at work: Daphne's wide open mouth in fear and astonishment, David biting his lip in determined concentration, or Proserpina desperately struggling to free herself.

The tousled hair of Pluto, the pliant flesh of Proserpina, or the forest of leaves beginning to envelop Daphne all demonstrate Bernini's exactitude and delight for representing complex real world textures in marble form.

Designed as a massive spiraling gilded bronze canopy over the tomb of St Peter, Bernini's four-columned creation reached nearly 30 m (98 ft) from the ground and cost around 200,000 Roman scudi (about 8 million US dollars in the currency of the early 21st century).

[30] Beginning in the late 1630s, now known in Europe as one of the most accomplished portraitists in marble, Bernini also began to receive royal commissions from outside Rome, for subjects such as Cardinal Richelieu of France, Francesco I d'Este the powerful Duke of Modena, Charles I of England and his wife, Queen Henrietta Maria.

[34] A few months after completing Urban's tomb, in 1648 Bernini won (through furtive manoeuvring with the complicity of the pope's sister-in-law Donna Olimpia) the Pamphilj commission for the prestigious Four Rivers Fountain on Piazza Navona, marking the end of his disgrace and the beginning a yet another glorious chapter in his life.

[36] Bernini presents the spectator with a theatrically vivid portrait, in gleaming white marble, of the swooning Teresa and the quietly smiling angel, who delicately grips the arrow piercing the saint's heart.

The result is a complex but subtly orchestrated architectural environment providing the spiritual context (a heavenly setting with a hidden source of light) that suggests to viewers the ultimate nature of this miraculous event.

Often likened to two arms reaching out from the church to embrace the waiting crowd, Bernini's creation extended the symbolic greatness of the Vatican area, creating an emotionally thrilling and "exhilarating expanse" that was, architecturally, an "unequivocal success".

[40] Elsewhere within the Vatican, Bernini created systematic rearrangements and majestic embellishment of either empty or aesthetically undistinguished spaces that exist as he designed them to the present day and have become indelible icons of the splendour of the papal precincts.

Within the hitherto unadorned apse of the basilica, the Cathedra Petri, the symbolic throne of St Peter, was rearranged as a monumental gilded bronze extravagance that matched the Baldacchino created earlier in the century.

[50] Though his design for the Louvre went unbuilt, it circulated widely throughout Europe by means of engravings and its direct influence can be seen in subsequent stately residences such as Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England, seat of the Dukes of Devonshire.

Other projects in Paris suffered a similar fate, such as Bernini's plans for the Bourbon funerary chapel in the cathedral of Saint Denis and the main altar of the Church of Val de Grâce (done at the request of its patron the Queen Mother), as well as his idea for a fountain for Saint-Cloud, the estate of King Louis's brother, Philippe.

"[52] The sole work remaining from his time in Paris is the Bust of Louis XIV although he also contributed a great deal to the execution of the Christ Child Playing with a Nail marble relief (now in the Louvre) by his son Paolo as a gift to Queen Maria Theresa.

Back in Rome, Bernini created a monumental equestrian statue of Louis XIV; when it finally reached Paris (in 1685, five years after the artist's death), the French king found it extremely repugnant and wanted it destroyed; it was instead re-carved into a representation of the ancient Roman hero Marcus Curtius.

[54] In his last two years, Bernini also carved (supposedly for Queen Christina) the bust of the Savior (Basilica of San Sebastiano fuori le Mura, Rome) and supervised the restoration of the historic Palazzo della Cancelleria, a direct commission from Pope Innocent XI.

Although his formal professional training was as sculptor and his entrance into the field of architecture not of his own volition but that of Pope Urban VIII, Bernini had by the end of his life reached what has proven to be his enduring status as one of the most influential architects of seventeenth-century Europe.

Best known is the small but richly ornamented oval church of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale, done (beginning in 1658) for the Jesuit novitiate, representing one of the rare works of his hand with which Bernini's son, Domenico, reports that his father was truly and very pleased.

Bernini's projects were essentially rooted in the Italian Baroque urbanist tradition of relating public buildings to their settings, often leading to innovative architectural expression in urban spaces like piazze or squares.

True to the decorative dynamism of Baroque which loved the aesthetic pleasure and emotional delight afforded by the sight and sound of water in motion, among Bernini's most gifted and applauded creations were his Roman fountains, which were both utilitarian public works and personal monuments to their patrons, papal or otherwise.

His earliest activity as a painter was probably no more than a sporadic diversion practised mainly in his youth, until the mid-1620s, that is, the beginning of the pontificate of Pope Urban VIII (reigned 1623–1644) who ordered Bernini to study painting in greater earnest because the pontiff wanted him to decorate the Benediction Loggia of St. Peter's.

[71] The extant, securely attributed works are mostly portraits, seen close up and set against an empty background, employing a confident, indeed brilliant, painterly brushstroke (similar to that of his Spanish contemporary Velasquez), free from any trace of pedantry, and a very limited palette of mostly warm, subdued colours with deep chiaroscuro.

However, although there is much disparate, scattered documentation showing that all of this theatrical work was not simply a limited or passing diversion for Bernini, the only extant remains of these endeavours are the partial script of one play and a drawing of a sunset (or sunrise) relating to the creation of a special effect on stage.

Indeed, much like Caravaggio, Bernini often devised strikingly bold compositions, akin to theatrical tableaux that arrest the scene at its dramatic key moment (such as in his Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in Santa Maria della Vittoria).

For the neo-classicist Winkelmann, the one true, laudable "high style" of art was characterized by noble simplicity joined with a quiet grandeur that eschewed any exuberance of emotion, whether positive or negative, as exemplified by ancient Greek sculpture.

The Baroque Bernini, instead, represented the opposite of this ideal and, moreover, according to Winkelmann, had been “utterly corrupted...by a vulgar flattery of the coarse and uncultivated, in attempting to render everything more intelligible to them.”[84] Another major condemning voice is that of Colen Campbell (1676–1729), who on the very first page of his monumental and influential Vitruvius Britannicus (London, 1715, Introduction, vol.