[1] Bernini's rationale for creating Truth Unveiled by Time was, according to his son Domenico, as a sculptural retort to attacks from opponents criticizing his failed project to build two towers onto the front of St. Peter's Basilica.

What many fail to mention is that most of the blame lies with Carlo Maderno, the previous architect who built weak foundations for the monumental task being requested, and Pope Urban VIII, who kept pressuring Bernini for heavier, more elaborate bell towers.

[4] Seated on a boulder with dramatic, flowing drapes behind her, the maiden Truth holds a representation of the Sun in her right hand at shoulder level as she rests her left leg on the Earth.

It remained in the family (displayed on a tilted stucco block during the 19th century) until 1924, when it was purchased by the Italian government and transferred to its current home on a plinth in room VI of the Galleria Borghese.

[6] The placement of a maiden on a boulder who holds a sun in the right hand while resting the left leg on the Earth is in accordance with the popular canonical iconography detailed by Cesare Ripa in his famous book Iconologia (Italian for Iconology).

Many drawings for the planned sculptural group are known, and in the figure of Truth one can recognize similarities with Correggio's unfinished Allegory of Virtue which is housed in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome where Bernini might have seen it.

[9] In creating this work, Bernini intended to give visual representation to a familiar saying used to console victims of injustice: Fear not, for sooner or later time will reveal the truth.

Despite not completing the companion figure of Father Time, we do know something of what Bernini had in mind for the finished composition thanks to a surviving preparatory drawing found in Leipzig and an artist's account in a diary.