The Bust of Pope Gregory XV is a marble portrait sculpture by the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

He was able to achieve this by reusing the pattern and arrangement of the cope, amice, and alb he had created for the Bust of Pope Paul V in 1618.

On 30 June 1621,[4] at the age of twenty-two, Bernini was awarded a papal knighthood by the pope—the Supreme Order of Christ—and an accompanying lifetime salary.

[4][5] Bernini was also honoured at this time by being elected the principal of the Accademia di San Luca, the artists' society in Rome, after being a member for only three years.

[2] Bernini shows the thickness of the fabric and the rigidity of the embroidery by the "abrupt bends with which it conforms to the curve of the pope's shoulders".

[5] His eyes are raised, creating soft wrinkles across his forehead; his gaze is steady and far-reaching, focused beyond the viewer toward eternity.

[5] The smoothness of his skin is offset by the "crisp, dry carving of the myriad tufts of hair" around his tonsured head and along his cheeks and jowls.

Unlike other artists of his time that relied primarily on subject sittings—an approach that often produced stiff and overly-formal results—Bernini preferred to observe his subjects in their daily work and activities over a period of time, making numerous sketches that captured their features, characteristic poses, and natural expressions.

Bernini's technique of offsetting this pallor was to produce "effects of colour" using numerous tricks, exaggerations, and distortions, such as drilling more deeply in certain places to create "accents of shadows" and presenting the figure in such a way as to catch the light.

The next buyer, Norman Leitman, managed to achieve a much higher price when he sold it via the auctioneers Sotheby's to Canadian collectors Joey and Toby Tanenbaum in 1983 for £2.78 million—the price had risen dramatically after art historian Irving Lavin had commented that "In my opinion the bust is not only the original, it is wholly autograph (i.e. by the master's own hand) and one of the most perfect and important of Bernini's early works.