The following from Genevieve Warwick:
Bernini’s ‘Paragoni’
Thursday 15 January 2009
Hawthornden Lecture Theatre, National Gallery Complex, The Mound, Edinburgh
Organised in partnership with the Universities of St Andrews, Edinburgh, Glasgow; the National Galleries of Scotland
and Glasgow Museums Service. This event is funded by the Henry Moore Foundation.
This study day is dedicated to the sculpture and architecture of the great Roman Baroque artist, Gian Lorenzo
Bernini. Specifically, it addresses the theme of ‘paragone’, or comparison, in his art, to consider how his sense
of rivalry with other artists and art forms nurtured the development of his work. Collectively the papers will
address Bernini’s fertile competition with other artists and the art of the past; and his engagement with
theoretical debates of his day in both art and the science of optics. The fruit of the papers will be to analyse
how these spheres interacted and came together in his artistic practice.
Above all, the endeavour to imitate the effects of painting in sculpture lay at the core of Bernini’s work. The
historic achievements of High Renaissance painting formed a fertile wellspring on which Bernini drew across his
career, just as it in turn had translated the forms of antique sculpture into the colours of paint. This history of
exchange between media reached an acme in the art of Bernini, who sculpted effects of texture, colour and light
traditionally held to be the province of painters: the translucent leaves of his Apollo and Daphne, or the
shimmering effects of sculpted satin in his court portraits, the lightness of cloud, the movement of the wind. His
study of the effects of sculptural relief in directing the play of light across a work to create highlights and
shadows gave him the means of achieving a chiaroscuro to rival that of painters. This was the heart of his seeming
ability to ‘paint’ across the surface of a marble. In Bernini’s hands the so-called paragone debate on the relative
merits of painting and sculpture nurtured a productive rivalry between the arts that drove the artist’s quest to
forge a new sculptural language of illusion, to rival nature itself.
The National Gallery of Scotland is open to the public from 10 am to 7 pm on Thursdays. It will be possible to view
the collections at intervals throughout the course of the day. The National Gallery has a coffee shop and a
restaurant available for coffee, lunch and tea. There are also many cafes and restaurants in the surrounding area
available for use.
Programme
10:30
Welcome & Opening Remarks: Aidan Weston-Lewis, National Galleries of Scotland
Session I Between Painting and Sculpture
Chair: Dr. David Howarth, University of Edinburgh
Dr. Kristina Herrmann-Fiore, Galleria Borghese, Rome, ‘Poesis, painting, sculpture: About Scipione Francucci’s 1613
poem on the Borghese collection’
11:30
Prof. Jennifer Montagu, Professor Emeritus, Warburg Institute, University of London, ‘Bernini’s Relief Sculpture: an
Irrelevance?’
Prof. Steven Ostrow, Dept. of Art History, University of Minnesota, ‘Appearing to be what they are not: Bernini’s
Reliefs in Theory and Practice’
2:00
Session II To Rival Nature: Bernini’s Portraiture
Chair: Dr. Patricia Allerston, National Galleries of Scotland
Dr. Genevieve Warwick, Dept. of Art History, University of Glasgow, ‘The story of the man who whitened his face:
Bernini’s Art of Sculpture.’
Dr. Maarten Delbeke, Dept. of Architecture, Ghent University, ‘Speaking of Likeness: Bernini in the Face of Greatness’
4:00
Session III Beyond the Paragone
Chair: Robert Wenley, Glasgow Museums Service
Dr. Claudia Lehmann, Institute of Art History, University of Berne, ‘Bernini’s Monument for Matilda of Tuscany as a
Monumental Device’
Dr. Fabio Barry, School of Art History, University of St Andrews, ‘Bernini at St. Andrew’s: a synaesthetic
interpretation of S. Andrea al Quirinale’
Closing Remarks
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