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Desiderio and Diletto: Vision, Touch, and the Poetics of Bernini's Apollo and Daphne 

Author(s): Andrea Bolland 

Reviewed work(s): 

Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 82, No. 2 (Jun., 2000), pp. 309-330 

Published by: College Art Association 

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Bulletin.

Desiderio and Diletto: Vision, Touch, and the Poetics of 

Bernini's Apollo and Daphne 

Andrea Bolland 

The gods, that mortal beauty chase, 

Still in a tree did end their race. 

Apollo hunted Daphne so, 

Only that she might laurel grow. 

And Pan did after Syrinx speed, 

Not as a nymph, but for a reed. 

-Andrew Marvell, from "The Garden" 

In Filippo Baldinucci's Life of Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1682), the 

marble group of Apollo and Daphne (Fig. 1) is cast as the 

youthful sculptor's first great public triumph. After invoking 

the topos that mere words cannot describe the "meraviglie" 

(marvels) that the sculpture "displayed in every part to the 

eyes of all," Baldinucci goes on to describe the statue's 

reception: 

[I]mmediately when it was seen to have been finished, 

there arose such a cry [se ne sparse un tal grido] that all 

Rome concurred in seeing it as a miracle [tutta Roma 

concorse a vederla per un miracolo], and the young artist 

himself (not yet eighteen years old), when he walked 

through the city, drew after him the eyes of all the people, 

who gazed upon him and pointed him out to others as a 

prodigy... .2 

The grido described by Baldinucci has barely abated in the 

375 years since the statue's completion-if anything, the 

clamor has recently increased with the reopening of the Villa 

Borghese (for which the Apollo and Daphne was made and 

where it is still displayed), the cleaning and scientific examination 

of the statue group, and the quadricentennial of Bernini's 

birth. All three of these events generated catalogues 

containing beautiful photographs, probing essays, and bibliographies 

listing such a quantity of secondary literature that one 

might reasonably ask if anything remains to be said about the 

Apollo and Daphne.3 (Indeed, one might dispute Baldinucci: 

the work's visual meraviglie seem to compel words rather than 

inhibit them.) Yet in spite of the ample documentary evidence 

relating to the statue group's creation, the picture that 

emerges of its meaning and context is anything but clear. In a 

series of equally plausible arguments, the Apollo and Daphne is 

said to celebrate the sense-based pleasures of art (by way of its 

reference to the paragone debates),4 or to be about the evils of 

sensual poetry (by way of the inscription on its base, warning 

against the bitterness of worldly beauty);5 it is an erotic 

artwork, made for a hedonistic patron,6 or it is a Neoplatonic 

allegory of the sublimation of sensual lust into art, made for a 

discerning cardinal;7 it is Marinist and Petrarchan in its 

imagery,s or it is anti-Marinist and anti-Petrarchan in its 

message.9 

That these readings can happily coexist in the modern 

literature (and sometimes even appear as parts of the same 

argument) testifies to the richness of the story of Apollo and 

Daphne and to the subtleties of Bernini's statue. Indeed, one 

might even say that the subject and Bernini's treatment of it 

not only elicit paradoxical readings but that paradox is at the 

heart of the group's meaning. Rather than undertaking a 

radically new reading, this essay will focus on these paradoxical 

relationships-specifically, the intertwined themes of sensuality 

and antisensuality and of desire and artifice-that by 

common consensus seem to lie at the heart of the statue 

group. 

These themes will be placed in a larger Renaissance critical 

tradition in which a crucial role is played by vision and 

touch--senses that Bernini uses to great effect in his statue 

group, and which are central to the literary tradition of the 

story. In this critical discourse, poetry, painting, and sculpture-sister 

arts, united by the common end of mimesiswere 

unequal in ways that hinged on their address to the 

senses, and on the comparative value assigned to the senses 

themselves, in their abilities to provoke desire, provide 

delight, and grant access to knowledge.10 The Renaissance 

hierarchy of sense (like that of the arts) was not an absolute 

one: if vision was often exalted for its immaterial (hence 

spiritual) nature, it was also the sense most easily fooled, and 

if touch was the surest of the senses, it could also be maligned 

for its base association with the sexual act. These criteria were 

particularly significant, since not only did the three arts hold 

in common the deceptions of fiction, but also (as we shall see) 

Renaissance commentators had located the origins of poetry, 

sculpture, and painting in mythic stories revolving around 

erotic desire. The merging of artist and artwork hinted at in 

Baldinucci's text (the crowd's desire to see the statue gives way 

to the need to lay eyes on its maker) also takes us back to the 

intersection of art and myth: if Bernini's own transformation 

during these watershed years in his career is broadly analo- 

gous to that of Daphne (who, after all, emerges from her 

metamorphosis immortalized), it was the poet-god Apollo 

who would provide the young sculptor with a template from 

which to fashion his mythic-artistic identity and recast the 

poetics of his own art. 

Bernini, Scipione Borghese, and Maffeo Barberini 

Bernini created the Apollo and Daphne over a three-year 

period, with some interruptions, beginning in the summer of 

1622, when he was twenty-three years old.11 Commissioned by 

Cardinal Scipione Borghese, it was the third in a series of 

life-size marble sculptures he ordered from Bernini to adorn 

his luxurious villa outside the Porta Pinciana, the others being 

the Aeneas and Anchises (1618-19), the Pluto and Proserpina of 

1621-22 (Fig. 2), and the David (1623-24).12 The group's 

delivery to the Villa Borghese in the fall of 1625 not only 

completed that series of impressive statues, it also effectively 

marked the end of Bernini's large-scale work for the cardinal

310 ART BULLETIN JUNE 2000 VOLUME LXXXII NUMBER 2 

1 Gian Lorenzo 

Bernini, Apollo and 

Daphne. Rome, 

Galleria Borghese 

(photo: Scala/Art 

Resource, New York)

2 Bernini, Pluto and Proserpina. Rome, 

Galleria Borghese (photo: Alinari/Art 

Resource, New York) 

and signaled a turning point in the lives of both patron and 

sculptor. 13 

As has often been noted, Scipione Borghese's status plummeted 

in early 1621, shortly after the death of his uncle Pope 

Paul V and the subsequent accession of the Bolognese pope 

Gregory XV (who had not been the cardinal's first choice in 

the conclave).14 While Borghese eventually recovered from 

his fall from grace, his role had changed; he was never again 

the powerful Cardinal Nephew, responsible for setting the 

taste of the papal court, as he had been when Bernini began 

to work for him in the 1610s.15 We may even view Bernini's 

Apollo and Daphne as an emblem of that change in fortune: 

both concretely, in the apparent circumstances of its commission 

(it replaced Bernini's tour de force Pluto and Proserpina, 

DESIDERIO AND DILETTO: BERNINI'S APOLLO AND DAPHNE 311 

which Borghese cannily presented to the new papal nephew, 

Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi), and also poetically, in its subject 

of loss (the immense power held by the cardinal's nephewlike 

Daphne's human beauty-is ultimately short-lived, and 

the eager pursuer of each is in the end but a witness to its 

transformation).16 Bernini's sculpted metamorphosis also 

coincides with a period of transition in his own career; in the 

mid-1620s his principal source of patronage shifted from the 

Borghese family-which, between Paul V and Scipione, had 

employed two generations of Berninis-to the newly ascen- 

dant Barberini family, which, after the short summer conclave 

following Gregory XV's death in 1623 could claim its own 

pope.'7 It could even be said that the change marked for the 

artist a sort of passage into artistic maturity, a symbolic


severing of paternal bonds (it was, after all, Maffeo Barberinithe 

future Urban VIII-who had first prophesied that the 

young Bernini would surpass his father, and it was he who 

took almost immediate advantage when this came to pass).18 

Gian Lorenzo had apparently known Maffeo Barberini for 

some time. According to the artist's seventeenth-century 

biographers, Paul V had placed the young sculptor under the 

care of then-Cardinal Barberini-a propitious choice to 

mold the young prodigy's mind, since besides being deeply 

learned, the cardinal was himself a practitioner of the creative 

arts-in this case, the art of poetry.19 In the biographers' 

accounts, the cardinal is cast as something of a second father 

figure, teaching the young Bernini the rudiments of literature 

even as his actual father taught him how to hold a drill.20 

Bernini had begun to execute several works for the Barberini 

family over the course of the 1610s (often in conjunction with 

his father, who provided statuary for the Barberini family 

chapel in S. Andrea della Valle).21 But if one is to believe the 

anecdotes of the biographers, Maffeo's interest in the sculptor 

became especially intense during the period that Bernini 

was working on the Borghese commissions.22 If he studied the 

young sculptor's abilities during the final years of his cardinalate 

and his first year as pope, it was only in the summer of 

1624-while Bernini was absorbed in working on the Apollo 

and Daphne2--that Barberini rewarded him with a number of 

large-scale commissions: remodeling the church of S. Bibiana, 

creating a life-size marble statue of that saint for the 

church's main altar, and-grandest of all-designing the 

baldacchino for the crossing of St. Peter's.24 I reiterate this 

rather familiar history to underline the fact that the Apollo and 

Daphne may be placed at crucial turning points in the lives of 

three men: the artist who carved the work (and for whom it 

would be the last of the mythological groups that had 

characterized his youthful artistic production), the worldly 

cardinal who commissioned it, and finally Maffeo Barberini, 

who was cardinal when the work was begun and leader of the 

Roman Catholic world when it was finished.25 

It is within this nexus that the poetic meaning of the story, 

and the implications of that meaning, must be placed. Let us 

begin to locate that meaning by examining the text on which 

the statue group is most likely based. 

The Ovidian Story and the Metamorphosis of Sense 

The canonical poetic treatment of the story of Apollo and 

Daphne-certainly available to Bernini in either Latin or 

Italian-is found in book 1 of Ovid's Metamorphoses (lines 

452-567).26 The tale follows the stories of the origin of the 

cosmos, the re-creation of the human race from stones by 

Deucalion and Pyrrha, and the slaying of the Python by 

Apollo; it is introduced, almost parenthetically, to explain the 

origin of Apollo's laurel crown. Daphne is said to be Apollo's 

primus amor, and the tale of Apollo and Daphne is also Ovid's 

first full-scale love story in the Metamorphoses; perhaps fittingly, 

he begins his epic-scale poem with a tale told on the god of 

poetry. 

The story begins with a fateful insult: Phoebus Apollo 

chides Cupid for playing with adult weapons (his weapon- 

the bow, with which he had just killed the Python), and in 

return Cupid wounds Apollo with a golden arrow, inducing 

love, and wounds Daphne-a young nymph who had already 

declared a desire for perpetual virginity-with a leaden arrow, 

causing flight from love. "Phoebus," writes Ovid, "loves 

Daphne at sight, and longs to wed her."27 The love that begins 

with sight continues to be fueled by vision: "He looks at 

[spectat] her hair hanging down her neck in disarray, and says: 

'What if it were arrayed?' He gazes at [ videt] her eyes gleaming 

like stars, he gazes upon her lips, which but to gaze on does 

not satisfy [videt oscula, quae non est vidisse satis]" (lines 

497-500). Apollo tirelessly pursues the nymph, but just as he 

is at the point of overtaking her (having "breathed on the 

hair that streamed over her neck [crinem sparsum cervicibus 

adflat]"), Daphne begs her father, the river god Peneus, to 

rescue her by destroying the beauty that inspires her pursuer. 

Thus begins the frightful transformation of her soft flesh to 

thin bark, her unbound hair to fluttering leaves, her outstretched 

arms to upturned branches. Yet despite the plea to 

her father, her beauty remained (lines 553-65): 

But even now in this new form Apollo loved her; and 

placing his hand upon the trunk, he felt [sentit] the heart 

still fluttering beneath the bark. He embraced [complexusque] 

the branches as if human limbs, and pressed his 

lips upon the wood [oscula dat ligno]. But even the wood 

shrank from his kisses [refugit tamen oscula lignem]. And the 

god cried out to this: "Since thou canst not be my bride, 

thou shalt at least be my tree. My hair, my lyre, my quiver 

shall always be entwined with thee, O laurel.... And as my 

head is ever young and my locks unshorn, so do thou keep 

the beauty of thy leaves perpetual." 

Ovid's narrative of desire and pursuit is punctuated by 

references to the senses of touch and vision. While the story is 

implicitly set into motion with two touches-the arrows that 

wound both beloved and would-be lover-its affective content 

begins with frustrated vision and ends with frustrated touch. 

Sight kindles in Apollo a desire that it alone ultimately cannot 

satisfy ("videt oscula, quae non est vidisse satis"), and when 

the desire is finally rewarded through touch, the object 

obtained is no longer the same as that which was desired 

("oscula dat lignum"). Even the one point at which desire 

and its initial object interact is one of frustration: Apollo can 

only touch the locks of Daphne's hair with his insubstantial 

breath. 

Bernini's statue group spectacularly captures this culminat- 

ing transformative moment precisely in terms of the ex- 

changes between touch and sight. In a sort of doubled trope, 

Daphne turns her head to gaze back toward her would-be 

captor even as she begins to turn into a new substance, the 

laurel. This detail is not found in Ovid, yet it is a suggestive 

addition with regard to the play between the senses: the 

mutual gaze that has begun to be realized is the one instance 

in which sight actually matches the reciprocity inherent to the 

sense of touch.28 The expression that passes over Daphne's 

face at that instant likewise seems to betray a transformation: 

the fear of being caught gives over to horror at the means by 

which she will avoid capture (Fig. 3). Apollo's mouth also falls

3 Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, detail (photo: Alinari/Art 


open as Daphne begins her transformation (Fig. 4). Yet it 

would seem that his sense that something is desperately 

wrong is informed not primarily by his gaze (which is fixed, at 

close range, on the still-human face that turns toward him), 

but rather from the sensations on his flesh: the roots beneath 

his toes, the branch that goads his loins, and finally--most 

strikingly--what his left hand reveals to him. The hand that 

reaches toward the soft flesh of Daphne (which Apollo still 

sees), touches a surface of rough bark (Fig. 5).29 Thus, the 

transformation that Bernini portrays is not only that of the 

object but also of the means of knowing that object: sight and 

distance, with their sweet promises, give way to touch and 

proximity, with their harsh realities. 

Art historians have pointed out a variety of possible visual 

sources for Bernini's statue group. The turn of Daphne's 

head and the flourish of drapery off Apollo's shoulder both 

recall Cherubino Alberti's engraving after Polidoro da Cara- 

vaggio (Fig. 6), and the position of Apollo's left arm may 

derive from the woodcut by Master IB with the Bird (Fig. 7).30 

Yet identifying the quotations is in some ways less interesting 

than measuring the distance from those models. Bernini 

reduces the distance between the pair-doubtless in part to 

render the sculptural group more stable, but this change also 

allows him to wrap Apollo's arm fully around Daphne and to 

fix his gaze on her face, making more obvious the discrepancy 

between vision and touch. 

These nuances of sight and touch, of inaccessibility and 

possession that Bernini explores are vital to the accretion of 

MW 


4 Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, detail (photo: Alinari/Art 


meanings the story had acquired over the centuries between 7 

C.E. and 1622; indeed, they are important factors in the story's 

role as an emblem of the origin and functions of the art of 

poetry. Already for Ovid, the story seems emblematic: just as 

he begins his collection of love stories with Apollo's decree 

that his beloved laurel shall live in eternal verdure and 

provide a crown for poets, so he concludes the Metamorphoses 

with a claim for the eternity of his own poetic work and his 

own consequent immortality (Fig. 8).31 For Bernini (and for 

his audience), the Ovidian story came wrapped in even more 

complex veils of meaning. 

Distance and Desire: Marino, Petrarch, Barberini 

A number of art historians have suggested that a figure more 

immediate than Ovid may have provided Bernini with a 

model for his representation of the Daphne story: the 

Neapolitan poet Giambattista Marino, who treated the myth 

on at least six occasions throughout his career.32 The claims 

for Marino's influence rest largely on the similarities of 

virtuosic and ornate treatment of transformation--on the 

meraviglie pursued by both poet and sculptor.33 Beyond 

providing a repertoire of effects that are at least mirrored by 

Bernini's sculpture, one particular example of Marino's 

retelling of the myth can also give us a clue as to the meaning 

this story held for an early seventeenth-century audience. 

This significance emerges in the final lines of Marino's 

longest and final treatment of the theme, the eclogue 

"Dafni" in his collection La sampogna (Paris, 1620). After a


5 Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, detail (photo: Istituto Centrale 

per il Catalogo e la Documentazione, Rome) 

long account of the chase and transformation, the poet ends 

the story of Apollo's pursuit with these lines: 

Cola fermossi, e con sospiri e pianti 

tra le braccia la strinse, e mille e mille 

vani le porse, e 'ntempestivi baci. 

Indi de' sacri et onorati fregi 

del novello arboscel cinto la fronte, 

coronatane ancor l'aurata cetra, 

del'avorio facondo in atto mesto 

sospeso il peso al'omero chiomato 

e col dolce arco dala destra mosso 

tutte scorrendo le loquaci fila, 

cant6 l'istoria dolorosa e trista 

de' suoi lugubri e sventurati amori. 

(There he stopped, and with sighs and tears, he embraced 

her in his arms, and offered her thousands and thousands 

of vain and ill-timed kisses. Then, having girt his temples 

with the sacred and honored ornaments of the new tree, 

he also crowned with them his golden cithera; and with the 

eloquent ivory weighing on his tressed shoulder and the 

sweet bow in his right hand, gliding over the loquacious 

strings, he sang the dolorous and sad story of his mournful 

and unfortunate loves).34 

Marino enlivens the Ovidian tale with some characteristic 

touches (the "thousands and thousands" of kisses are a fitting 

addition from the author of the Canzone dei baci), but it is in 

his conclusion that Marino most interestingly builds on his 

model. In essence, he ties the end of the poem to its 

beginning: the "istoria dolorosa" in the penultimate line is 

implicitly the poem that we have just read, and Daphne's hair, 

which in Ovid's version Apollo had so wished to arrange 

artfully ("quid, si comantur?"), is now woven, as leaves, into 

the instrument that provides the accompaniment to her 

artfully combed and curled story.35 Marino treats the conflation 

of the metamorphosed Daphne with the poet's instrument 

and song at length, perhaps in order to strengthen the 

connection with the eclogue that directly follows it in his 

collection, entitled "Siringa." There, in her desperate attempt 

to flee the satyr-god Pan, the nymph Syrinx is transformed 

into reeds, which ultimately become the instrument 

by which Pan will himself effect a transformation: his rueful 

sighs (he is literally dispirited) pass through the hollow shafts 

of Syrinx's new body and emerge as sweet music.36 The two 

stories are linked by a common poetic theme: the sweetness of 

art issues from (and in some sense compensates for) the 

bitterness of loss. As another seventeenth-century poet, An- 

WWI!) 

6 Cherubino Alberti, after Polidoro da Caravaggio, Apollo and 

Daphne. London, British Museum (photo: o British Museum)

drew Marvell, has it in the lines quoted at the beginning of 

this essay, the metamorphosed beloved may be more desirable 

than the original.37 

Marino's delicacy in treating Apollo's sad tale is-at least in 

light of his reputation as a poet of the lascivious-somewhat 

unexpected, yet it demonstrates the special status of the 

subject among love stories and also, I would argue, betrays the 

still-potent force of a poetic model from whom Marino 

otherwise attempts to distance himself: Petrarch.3 Petrarch's 

vernacular poetry turns on the ultimate inaccessibility of the 

beloved and on writing's function as consolation for that 

distance; the myth of Apollo and Daphne provided him a 

means of endlessly refiguring that equation." While the 

centrality of the myth to Petrarch's Rime sparse is signaled by 

the name of his beloved (Laura-the laurel-is of course 

Daphne), specific narrative elements of the Ovidian tale are 

scattered more sparingly throughout his canzoniere. One of 

the more overt examples-in which the myth is tersely 

retold-is poem 6, "Si traviato e '1 folle mi' desio." In this 

poem, mad desire pulls the weary poet after she "che 'n fuga 

e volta" (who is turned in flight), finally bringing him to the 

point of spiritual death: 

sol per venir al lauro onde si coglie 

acerbo frutto, che le piaghe altrui 

gustando affligge piui che non conforta. 

7 Master IB with the Bird, Apollo and Daphne. Berlin, 

Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin-Preussischer 

Kulturbesitz 


44'' 

offi 

. )O- -- lIv - 

AGAPITVSI ERJVLI CIOAi NO DONO DEIT. 

8 Petrus van der Borcht, Portrait of Ovid, from R Ovidii Nasoni 

Metamorphoses, argumentis brevioribus ex Luctatio Grammatico 

collectis expositae, Antwerp, 1591 (photo: Getty Research Institute, 

Research Library) 

(only to come to the laurel, from whence is gathered bitter 

fruit that, being tasted, afflicts the wounds of others more 

than it comforts them.)40 

Petrarch refigures the moment when the lover comes 

together with his newly transformed beloved: Apollo's unan- 

swered kisses in Ovid's tale are here cast as bitter fruit, the 

sense of taste substituting for the related sense of touch. It is 

striking that the poet himself does not seem to sample this 

fruit (it "is gathered"-in the passive voice-and it afflicts the 

wounds "of others"); in effect, he denies himself even the 

frustrated embrace granted Apollo. In fact, consummation 

with the beloved-bitter or otherwise-is not to be found 

within the Rime sparse. The absent or unreachable beloved is a 

leitmotif for Petrarch, and he overtly thematizes its relation to 

writing in several of his poems-providing the model for 

Marino's elegant turn on the Apollo story in "Dafni."41 This 

idea is nowhere more evident than in the group of canzoni 

numbered 125, 126, 127, and 129. In the last of these, "Di 

pensier in pensier," the poet shadows forth the absent Laura's 

face onto various objects he sees, and then, when even that 

dolce error (sweet error) is dispelled, sits down, "cold, a dead 

stone on living rock [pietra morta in pietra viva-a petrous pun 

on his own name], like a man who thinks and weeps and 

writes [pensi et pianga et scriva]."42 The poet is metamorphosed, 

as are his figurations of desire (seeing becomes 

thinking) and his means of expression (weeping turns into 

writing). 

Adelia Noferi has written suggestively on this relationship 

of poetic discourse and absence in Petrarch's verse, both 

generally and with regard to his use of the Daphne myth. She 

notes the latter's similarity to, as well as difference from, 

another myth central to the art of poetry, that of Orpheus, in 

which: 

Eurydice, under the gaze of Orpheus (of the poet- 

Orpheus) descends again into night and death, removing


herself forever from his sight and from his possession to 

disappear into shadow. In the myth of Apollo and Daphne, 

Daphne (Laura-Daphne) also perpetually flees the "desire" 

of Apollo ... escapes his pursuit, but does not 

disappear from sight, swallowed up by shadow. Instead, she 

is transformed (in the same moment in which she has been 

caught up with, touched) into something other than 

herself: into the laurel, the evergreen plant, sacred to 

poets, poetry itself, both visible and tangible in its objective, 

material, literal presence, but which in this presence 

peculiarly confirms the irreparable absence of the lost 

object of desire. The "letter" of the name of Laura 

becomes an emblem, an image-a literal image in and of 

poetic discourse.43 

As Noferi suggests, this distance between lover and beloved 

is articulated in Petrarch's poetry through a play between 

sight and touch-very much like that found in Ovid's treatment 

of the Daphne story. Laura remains untouched, yet is, 

almost in consolation, the constant object of sight-of first 

the external vision of the poet's eye, and then the potent and 

inexhaustible internal gaze of his memory and imagination. 

The vocabulary of vision in the Rime sparse is of course 

inherited from the late thirteenth-century poets of the dolce 

stil nuovo, yet Petrarch stretches it to its limits: vision becomes 

more acute, and also more complex, in the absence of its 

companion erotic sense, touch.44 If occhi (or eyes, both 

Petrarch's and Laura's) is one of the most common nouns in 

the canzoniere, one of the uses to which those eyes are 

put-the mirar fiso (intent gaze), with its combination of 

wonder (admiratio or meraviglia) and immobility-crystallizes 

the collection's intertwined themes of desire and its inhibition.45 

Yet vision is not merely a means for fixing on the object 

of desire; sight implies space (forjust as touch does not admit 

distance, vision fails with contact), and it functions as a means 

for recognizing, even measuring (as in canzone 129) the aria 

(air) that separates the poet from the beloved.46 Ultimately, 

another sense is brought into play in the Rime sparse, for if 

Petrarch's desire for base touch is first sublimated into the 

higher sense of sight, it is finally refigured within the equally 

elevated sense of hearing: the sonorous words of his sonnets 

and canzoni, evoking the absent beloved, finally offer a 

substitute for the tactile pleasures of consummation. The 

corporeal, mortal beloved (Laura) is lost, yet she is reconsti- 

tuted in the sounds, the sighs, of the lover's poetry (literally, 

in l'aura, the air), and in return she bestows immortality on 

the lover, as the laurel crown (lauro) of his eternal fame. 

Petrarch's recasting of the story of Apollo and Daphne 

provided a lens through which not only Marino but all 

Renaissance readers, writers, and even artists viewed the 

classical myth; it may be argued that any subsequent represen- 

tation of the myth carries with it an implicit reference to the 

great trecento poet.47 Yet the Petrarchan treatment of the 

myth (and Petrarchan poetics generally) may have also held a 

special significance at the moment that Bernini made his 

Apollo group-a meaning we may begin to understand by 

looking more closely at the poetic inscription composed by 

Maffeo Barberini that adorns the statue's base. The sculptor 

recalled the occasion for its invention many years later: 

Barberini, viewing the sculptural group in the company of 

Scipione Borghese and Cardinal Escoubleau de Sourdis, 

defended the sensuously nude Daphne to the scandalized 

French prelate by composing the following verses: 

QVISQVIS AMANS SEQVITVR FVGITIVAE GAVDIA FORMAE 

FRONDE MANVS IMPLET BACCAS SEV CARPIT AMARAS 

(Whoever, loving, pursues the joys of fleeting beauty fills 

his hands with leaves or seizes bitter berries)48 

The distich transforms the seminude marble couple into an 

adornment proper to a cardinal's villa, although Barberini's 

conceit differs strikingly from the interpretation more typi- 

cally found in moralizing literature, where Daphne is allegori- 

cally read as a figure for Chastity.49 Here, the poet Barberini 

puns on the bitterness of love (the traditional paronomasia of 

amarus and amare), as well as the double meaning of fugitivus 

(Daphne's literally fleeing form also stands for the fleeting, 

time-bound beauty of all pleasures experienced through the 

senses). The rejection of worldly sensuality is in keeping with 

the tone of much of Barberini's poetry, whose principles are 

laid out in the "Poesis probis et piis ornata documenti, 

primaevo decori restituenda," published in 1631-a poem 

that Marc Fumaroli has called his "encyclical" on Christian 

poetics.50 Barberini's language may derive from an epigram 

on Apollo and Daphne by his Tuscan predecessor Politian, 

which concludes with the lines: 

Utque novas gustu baccas tentavit: eandem 

heu mihi servat (ait) nunc quoque amaritiem 

(And just as he tested the fresh berries by tasting, alas (he 

says) now still she delivers the same bitterness to me.)51 

The ultimate source for the conceit of bitter berries in 

Politian's poem (as Lodovico Castelvetro had pointed out in 

his commentary on the Rime sparse) was Petrarch's sonnet "Si 

traviato," cited above.52 Here, then, Barberini actually has it 

both ways: the warning against the pleasures of earthly beauty 

in the distich adorning Bernini's statue is expressed through 

imagery (the bitter fruits) that ultimately derives from the 

sensual realm of secular poetry. 

Urban's use of a Petrarchan conceit is not altogether 

surprising; in his youth he had composed amorous poetry, 

and he continued to use language with a Petrarchan flavor 

even in his later, moralizing vernacular poems.53 Inasmuch as 

Urban "emphatically rejects the vain ambition of acquiring 

fame by means of the poetic craft" (as Ludwig von Pastor has 

it), by the 1630s Apollo's laurels were almost as much a part of 

his personal iconography as they had been of Petrarch's.54 

Why Barberini would choose to emulate a Petrarchan 

conceit at this particular moment may be explained by a 

closer look at the immediate literary context.55 It has been 

noted that in 1620, even as the first edition of Maffeo 

Barberini's Poemata was being printed in Paris, another poetic 

work, of much different character, was being prepared for the 

French royal printer: Marino's L'Adone, which finally came out 

in April 1623.56 The work's popularity (not to mention 

notoriety) was quickly established, and the editio princeps was 

followed by a succession of Italian editions.57 Vehement 

attacks on the Adone and its author also began to appear, the

first published salvo being the poet Tommaso Stigliani's 

Occhiale of 1627. Though the anti-Marinist tracts attacked the 

Adone primarily for faults of style and language, it was 

Marino's candid celebration of sensual pleasures-especially 

those of touch and its concomitant, sexual consummationthat 

made the work a target for the censors.58 This frankness, 

however, also had the effect of rescuing at least one aspect of 

Petrarch's legacy, for not only did the latter provide a stylistic 

alternative to Marino (and Petrarch's style was praised by 

Stigliani himself in the 1623 edition of his own Rime, dedicated 

to Cardinal Borghese), but also his chaste sublimation 

of sight's desires into poetic utterance served as one alternative 

to the excess of baci and abbracci in the Adone.59 The 

anti-Petrarchists of the late cinquecento and early seicento 

may have cast aspersions on the courtly ideals that dominate 

the Rime sparse, yet Marino's humid evocation of physical love 

brought the alternative rather too clearly into focus.60 

If the insurmountable distance between lover and beloved 

in Petrarch, figured in the Apollo and Daphne myth, marks 

the birthplace of the poetic art (and even Marino's evocation 

of the Ovidian/Petrarchan myth, as we have seen, follows this 

reading), much of Marino's love poetry resolves itself in a 

proximity that threatens to meld the participants into a single 

identity.61 This can be seen in his rendering of Venus's and 

Adonis's courtship, and it is seen in its most concentrated 

fashion in the notorious "Canzone dei baci" (which Marino 

in fact quarried for his description of the lovers' pleasures in 

canto 8 of the Adone).62 In the penultimate stanza of the 

canzone, Marino writes: 

Miro, rimiro ed ardo, 

bacio, ribacio e godo, 

e mirando e baciando mi disfaccio. 

Amor tra '1 bacio e '1 guardo 

scherza e vaneggia in modo 

ch'ebro di tanta gloria i' tremo e taccio; 

ond'ella che m'ha in braccio, 

lascivamente onesta, 

gli occhi mi bacia, e fra le perle elette 

frange due parolette: 

-Cor mio!-dicendo, e poi, 

baciando i baci suoi, 

di bacio in bacio a quel piacer mi desta, 

che l'alme insieme allaccia e i corpi innesta.63 

(I gaze, gaze again, and burn, I kiss, kiss again and take 

pleasure, and in gazing and kissing, I am undone. Love, 

between the kiss and the gaze, plays and mocks in such 

fashion that, drunk with such glory, I tremble and fall 

silent; whence she who has me in her arms, lasciviously 

modest, kisses my eyes, and amidst exquisite pearls crushes 

two little words: My Heart! Saying, and then kissing her 

kisses, from kiss to kiss she stirs me to that pleasure that 

binds together souls and grafts body on body.) 

Gazing and kissing alternate distance and proximity, desire 

and pleasure; in this duel, the latter finally triumphs as the 

beloved kisses the poet's eyes and renders him, at least 

momentarily, sightless. Utterance here, such as it is ("Cor 

mio!") is born of blindness, as a cry in the heat of passion. At 


this climactic moment, distance and difference are con- 

quered simultaneously, and the two lovers become one body, 

a hermaphrodite of sorts.64 A more forcefully modern rejection 

of the courtly Petrarchan tradition could scarcely be 

made.65 

If Barberini's inscription for Bernini's statue group has its 

place in the opposition between Petrarchan poetics and 

Marinismo, it is equally likely that Bernini made his statue, 

with its carefully worked-out exchanges between vision and 

touch, in full awareness of the literary debates going on 

around him.66 For all the gloriously polished marble flesh that 

the statue group displays, it is at base an illustration of erotic 

frustration-and implicitly of the translation of sight's desires 

into art. If the art that emerges from Apollo's frustration is 

poetry, we might ask what the implications of this formula 

were for the young sculptor who was on the verge of his own 

transformation at the hands of the new pope (the poet-pope, 

at that). Surely the topic of the two arts' relationship would 

have been of interest to a young man who from childhood was 

held to be the reincarnation of that superb artist and poet 

Michelangelo, the "nuovo Apollo, e nuovo Apelle" (new 

Apollo and new Apelles) of his age.67 It is worth recalling that 

the first edition of Michelangelo's strongly Petrarchan poems-bearing 

a dedication to Urban VIII-was published in 

1623, during the course of Bernini's work on the Apollo and 

Daphne.68 And if he wished to find a connection between the 

Daphne myth and the origins of his own art, Bernini needed 

look no further than the explanation provided by Leon 

Battista Alberti, at the beginning of De statua (composed in 

the fifteenth century but first published, in Cosimo Bartoli's 

vernacular translation, in 1568): 

I think that the arts of those who wished to apply themselves 

to expressing and portraying the effigies and resemblances 

of bodies created by nature had their origin in this 

way: that they by chance sometimes discerned either in 

tree trunks or in clods of earth, or in other similar bodies, 

certain lineaments by means of which certain similarities 

could be transmuted into them, thus rendering them 

similar to those faces made by nature. They then began, 

applying all their diligence, to consider mentally and 

examine, and to try and strive to see what they might add 

or take away, or whatever might be needed so that it might 

not appear that anything was lacking, in making that effigy 

appear almost to be truly the thing itself [da far apparir 

quasi uera & propria quella tale effigie], and to finish it 

perfectly. Thus, by... emending ... now the lines, and 

now the planes, and cleaning and repolishing, they obtained 

their desire, and this truly not without delight for 

them [ottennero il desiderio loro, & questo ueramente non senza 

loro diletto].69 

Here is a reversed version of the Daphne myth: a tree (or a 

clod of earth) is metamorphosed into human form by the 

sculptor's act of looking and then of pleasantly touching- 

forming and polishing with his tools.70 This reversal is 

important, for it suggests a gap between poetry-which, 

according to the Petrarchan model, begins with the absence 

or loss of a physical, tangible, object-and sculpture, whose 

mental and manual labors produce just such an object.


9 Van der Borcht, Pygmalion, from R Ovidii Nasoni 

Metamorphoses.... (photo: Getty Research Institute, Research 

Library) 

Indeed, while sculpture might be included in general comparisons 

of poetry and the visual arts, it nonetheless usually fell by 

the wayside, ceding place to painting when these comparisons 

were pursued in any depth: ut sculptura poesis was far from a 

commonplace formula.71 In the second part of this essay, I will 

suggest that these two facts are related: that the irreducible 

physicality of sculpture-verified in part by its ability to give 

pleasure and to grant certain knowledge through the sense of 

touch-played a part in its exclusion from the sorority shared 

by poetry (which had been, at least since Petrarch, an art of 

vision, if not a visual art) and painting. Thus, Bernini's 

sculptural rendering of the foundational myth of Petrarchan 

poetry-figured as an exchange of touch and vision-may be 

read in light of (and as a response to) these issues. I will end 

by returning to the relationship between artist and artwork 

addressed in the passage by Baldinucci with which the 

paper began, suggesting that the statue sealed the young 

Bernini's credentials as a poetic sculptor, nuovo Apollo e nuovo 

Michelangelo. 

Bernini and Cinquecento Tradition: The Origin and 

Comparison of the Arts 

The alternation of looking and touching in Alberti's explanation 

of sculpture's origins is of course a feature of any factive 

art, and it need not be read with any connotations of Eros. Yet 

there is evidence that, in his early years especially, Bernini 

characterized his own art in just such erotically charged 

terms. We see this in a pair of anecdotes in Domenico 

Bernini's Vita of his father. According to Domenico, in his 

youth Gian Lorenzo would often spend whole days in the 

Vatican collections, drawing those ancient statues that he 

referred to as his "Innammorate" (girlfriends).72 If it was love 

of sculptural models that lay behind his desire to make art, 

this love apparently also extended to the process and products 

of his own art. When asked how he achieved the marvels 

in his Villa Borghese statues, Bernini reportedly replied that 

"in working he felt so inflamed, and so enamored by that 

which he was doing that he devoured, rather than worked 

[divorava, non lavorava] the marble."73 

There were in fact time-honored classical examples of such 

passion for works of art by both spectators and artists. The 

story of the stain left by a young man on Praxiteles' Cnidian 

Venus was a well-known (if scandalous) example. A more 

poetic and suggestive account of the erotic appeal of statues 

could be found in the mythical tale of the sculptor Pygmalion, 

who swore off real women but became enamored by the 

beauty of one of his own creations.74 Moreover, the canonical 

account of Pygmalion's story-in Ovid's Metamorphoses-is 

rich in its exchanges between vision and touch. The sculptor 

is first enamored by sight: he "looks in admiration and is 

inflamed with love for the semblance of a form" (10.252-53). 

He then proceeds to exercise various forms of touch upon it 

(10.254-58): 

Often he lifts his hands to the work to try whether it be 

flesh or ivory. He kisses it and thinks his kisses are 

returned. He speaks to it, grasps it and seems to feel his 

fingers sink into the limbs when he touches them and thus 

he fears lest he leave marks of bruises on them [credit tactis 

digitos insidere membris et metuit, pressos veniat ne livor in 

artus]. 

Seized by his love of her, the sculptor even makes a bed for 

his statue and "rests its reclining head upon soft, downy 

pillows, as if it could enjoy them" (10.268-69). Pygmalion's 

concern for the statue's comfort is rewarded when Venus 

answers his prayers and brings her to life, a miracle that is 

certified, but also apparently accomplished, through touch 

(10.282-86): 

Again he kissed her, and with his hands also he touched 

her breast. The ivory grew soft to his touch and, its 

hardness vanishing, gave and yielded beneath his fingers, 

as Hymettian wax grows soft under the sun and, moulded 

by the thumb is easily shaped to many forms and becomes 

usable through use itself. 

Ovid's tale ends happily with marriage and finally (through a 

more traditional means of procreation and animation) the 

birth of a daughter. 

The vocabulary of tactility used here ranges from the 

artificer's manipulations (which begin as the carving and 

polishing of ivory and end, metaphorically, as the modeling of 

wax) to the lover's erotic touch.75 The implicit similarities 

between the two types of touch are played on in the myth's 

illustration in an edition of Luctatius's Ovidian Argumenta of 

1591 (Fig. 9).76 With this rich array of touch, it is not 

surprising that the story found its way into the background of 

a mid-sixteenth-century allegorical print of that sense (Fig. 

10).77 

Pygmalion's virtuosic artifice, which even seduces him into 

believing his own fiction, would doubtless make him a fitting 

mythic role model for any ambitious young sculptor, and 

elements in Bernini's early works suggest that he was a rather 

closer student of the story than most. In addition to Scipione 

Borghese's commissions for new sculptures, Bernini was 

asked in the late 1610s to carry out restorations on the 

cardinal's ancient statue of a Sleeping Hermaphrodite (Fig. 11).

10 Jacob de Backer, Sense of Touch. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum 

(photo: ? Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) 

Beyond repairing the creature's body, he also created a 

stunning base for its eternal rest: a plush marble mattress 

carved and polished with extreme delicacy.78 Whether or not 

the idea of resting the statue on a bed was inspired by the tale 

of the mythic sculptor, the Ovidian example would have 

suited the young Bernini in an even broader sense. Certainly 

one of the hallmarks of the artist's style-his ability to 

transform materials from actual hardness to the appearance 

of softness-recalls Pygmalion's miraculous feat of making 

the hard ivory yield "beneath his fingers, as Hymettian wax 

grows soft under the sun ... " Here it is not soft flesh into 

which his superhuman skills seemingly transform marble, but 

cloth-and it is noteworthy that an eighteenth-century visitor 

tells of passing his hand over it and believing it to be "a real 

mattress of white leather or satin which has lost its sheen."''7 

Bernini borrows Ovid's words in his criticism, recorded by 

Baldinucci, of those sculptors who did not "have it in their 

heart to render stone as obedient to the hand as if it were 

dough or wax," an expression echoed by the seventeenthcentury 

critic Luigi Scaramuccia, who describes the sculptor's 

finished marbles as appearing to be modeled in wax.80 The 

demonstration piece for the artist's abilities to achieve just 

this transformation is from the period immediately after the 

Hermaphrodite restorations and before the Apollo group: the 

Pluto and Proserpina (Fig. 2). In that piece, Pluto's grasping 

hands in fact appear to create indentations on Proserpina's 

marble flesh-imprints that, as Paul Barolsky has noted, seem 

the very echo of those which Pygmalion feared to leave on his 

beloved ivory maiden.81 

Even if Bernini had not been reading his Ovid and Pliny, he 

could have become familiar with the tale of Pygmalion (as 

well as the anecdote of the Cnidian Venus) in a different 

context, since both were cited throughout the art literatureand 

especially the paragone arguments-of the previous century.82 

Rudolf Preimesberger has demonstrated that these 

debates were current in Bernini's youth, and while it is true 

that they may have lost some of their freshness by the end of 

the sixteenth century (some fifty years after Benedetto Varchi's 

Due lezzioni, published in 1549, formally kicked off the 


11 Sleeping Hermaphrodite, Roman copy of 2nd-century Greek 

original, with base carved by Bernini. Paris, Musee du Louvre 

(photo: Giraudon/Art Resource, New York) 

discussion), the fact that they were constantly and canonically 

invoked points to the centrality of the issues they address.83 

These issues included the validation of artifice through 

difficulta, art's address to the senses through imitation of the 

substance and external particulars of things, and perhaps 

most important, its ability to suggest what lies beneath the 

surface of living things-the invisible anima or spiritus that 

distinguishes a living, breathing being from mere inert 

matter. 

The two stories of statue love were used in the paragone 

arguments to support the sculptors' claims that threedimensional 

imitation was more convincingly lifelike (since it 

fooled erotic sense) than the two-dimensional kind, and that 

their art surpassed its pictorial counterpart by providing a 

more complete sensory experience, pleasing not only sight 

(as did painting) but also touch. Here, erotic gratification-the 

caress, the kiss, the sexual embrace-was allowed to 

stand emblematically for the powers of touch, and inasmuch 

as sculpture was an art associated with that sense, it was also 

implicitly linked to a particularly physical evocation of love. 

Paintings can also yield erotic delight, yet since the object of 

delectation itself does not repay touch, these pleasures must 

ultimately remain more chaste. In one of his sonnets on 

Simone Martini's portrait of Laura (cited by Varchi as an 

illustration of painting's capacity to produce vaghezza and 

diletto, or charm and delight), Petrarch even seems to acknowl- 

edge that limitation, expressing his envy toward Pygmalion, 

who "received a thousand times what I yearn to have just 

once.'"84 There were those who objected to the use of such 

stories (Raffaele Borghini remarked that "di cose tanto 

stemperate e disoneste non si pu6 far derivare nobiltAi ne 

perfezzione" [one can draw neither nobility nor perfection 

from such intemperate and shameful things]), yet they 

provided a model for writers who wished to convey the 

affective powers of modern sculpture.85 For instance, in I 

marmi (published 1552, reprinted 1609), Anton Francesco 

Doni writes of a visitor's suggestive pronouncement before 

Michelangelo's Aurora in the New Sacristy: "Oh what stupen- 

dous things are these! I touch her in stone, and she moves my


flesh [mi muove la came] and delights me more than if I were 

to touch living flesh; indeed, I am marble and she is flesh."'86 

If the mythological tale of Pygmalion, as used by cinque- 

cento theorists, grounds the mimetic powers of sculpture in 

the erotic appeal of touch, it stands in stark contrast to the 

amorous myth that had been earlier used, in Alberti's De 

pictura, to explain the origins of painting.87 This is, of course, 

the tale of Narcissus. The story is cited near the beginning of 

book 2; after praising painting's ability to overcome both 

distance and mortality, by making the absent present and the 

dead seem to live on for centuries, Alberti argues that 

painting stands above all of the other manual arts. He writes: 

But principally painting was honored by the ancients with 

this honor, that while most of the other artificers were 

called Fabri, according to the Romans, the painter alone 

was not numbered among the Fabri. Such being the case, I 

am accustomed to say among my friends that the inventor 

of painting was, according to the meaning of the poets, 

that Narcissus who was transformed into a flower. Because 

painting is the flower of the arts, indeed it seems that the 

whole story of Narcissus is most well-suited to this. For what 

other thing is painting, than embracing and capturing 

[abbracciare & pigliare] with art that surface of the pool?88 

Alberti's use of this originary myth has been the subject of 

much art historical speculation; here, it will suffice to make 

several brief points.89 First of all, though the tale of Narcissus 

was never considered particularly exemplary (the moral 

might be that excessive self-absorption leads to death), it is at 

least the story of a chaste love that-unlike Pygmalion's for 

his statue-is never consummated, and in which even the 

simplest act of touch is never satisfied (when the reflection 

was visible, it was untouchable; when touched, it became 

invisible). Since Alberti links the story to the fact that painting 

is distinct from all the other arts ("such being the case ... "), 

we might even say that he is distinguishing the pure visuality 

of painting, its untouchability, as its hallmark--that quality 

that separates it from the other, more tactile arts, such as 

sculpture.90 Second, there is an element of displacement, or 

transference, at the heart of both the Ovidian story and 

Alberti's use of it: just as Narcissus, beloved and lover, dies and 

is transformed into a flower, so painting (likewise, as Alberti 

has it, a flower-that is, the product of a metamorphosis) 

involves a double transformation. By means of metamorphos- 

ing the formless substance of individual pigments, the painter 

is able to transform the shimmering, evanescent world into 

something that can be captured, even held, albeit with the 

metaphorical embrace of the eye, the only sense that grasps its 

two-dimensional illusions as if they were substance.9' As 

Alberti states in the passages preceding the Narcissus story, 

there is a presumption of absence and substitution at the 

heart of painting: it comes into being because its object is not 

present. 

Even as Narcissus's story is distant from that of Pygmalion, 

it nonetheless has something in common with the tale of 

Apollo and Daphne. At a superficial level, both involve vegetal 

metamorphoses, and more centrally, the fugitive reflection in 

Narcissus's pool (Ovid-certainly the source of Alberti's 

knowledge of the story-called it a simulacra fugacia) has its 

counterpart in Daphne's fleeing form: both are unattainable 

objects of desire, stirring the mind through vision while 

remaining unavailable to erotic touch. That the two myths 

share certain features was not lost on Renaissance and 

Baroque artists and viewers; the two tales were sometimes 

paired in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings.92 

So in essence we have three mythological love stories, each 

of which came to be emblematically linked in the Renaissance 

to a different art. In two of these tales-those associated with 

poetry and painting--the love remains unfulfilled, grounded 

in vision but unredeemed by touch, while in the thirdassociated 

with sculpture-desire is not only satisfied but 

produces living progeny. While the stories offer little insight 

into the working procedures of artists or poets, they are 

nonetheless telling with regard to the generalized perception 

of each art by its practitioners and audience. In this trio, 

sculpture remains odd man out, by its physicality and its 

association with touch, and if the sculptors, citing the tale of 

Pygmalion, might claim this as a positive feature (demonstrating 

the convincing lifelikeness of their art), the painters 

might note that the virtuality of their medium (its association 

with the spiritual, elevated sense of sight) was one of the bases 

on which it could be related to the equally immaterial, aural 

art of poetry.93 There is a structural similarity in the transformations 

that occur in poetic and pictorial acts of mimesis: 

painting, like poetry, operates figurally, metaphorically, trans- 

forming a flat surface into a fully three-dimensional world in a 

feat of illusion that is ultimately completed in the internal 

vision of the viewer's imagination. Poetry also depends on 

figuration to transform the world through a mimetic act; it 

does this by employing metaphorical (rather than literal) 

language-words that are traslati (transferred) or trasportati 

(transported; "taken," as one sixteenth-century poetics explains 

it, "from their proper signification and placed in 

another").94 It is in traversing the distance between the 

proper and the figured (in the case of painting, the proper is 

the flat canvas covered with pigments; the figured, the 

world the viewer makes of it) that one discovers that quality 

most sought after in late Renaissance and Baroque poetics: 

meraviglia.95 

It is noteworthy that these same terms, distance and marvel, 

were used to make the case for painting in the letter that 

Galileo wrote to Lodovico Cigoli in June 1612, apparently 

offering his friend a "script" to use in paragone discussions (a 

letter sent, as Preimesberger has noted, just at the time when 

Cigoli was working alongside Bernini's father, Pietro, in the 

Pauline Chapel at S. Maria Maggiore).96 As part of his general 

argument for the superiority of painting, the great scientist 

wrote, "The more the means by which one imitates are distant 

[lontani] from the thing to be imitated, the more admirable 

[meravigliosa] the imitation."''7 Hence painting, which imitates 

the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional 

surface, produces greater meraviglia than sculpture. Galileo 

illustrates this observation with the example of a musician 

who can move the audience by singing the quarrels and 

sorrows of a lover, expressing pain in the sweet medium of 

song (and hence imitating more admirably than someone 

who might simply stand on the stage and cry). A singer of love 

songs is not unlike a poet, as Galileo, who wrote at length on 

literature, wrote poetry himself, and was an avid reader of

Petrarch, well knew.98 Similar terms were used in the sixteenth 

century to discuss poetry, as we may see in Sperone 

Speroni's undated Discorso in lode della pittura. In that text the 

Paduan philosopher and letterato dismisses sculpture as "a 

much cruder thing [than painting], rough and without 

marvel," because it represents a body with another body-an 

imitative act that depends not on similarity (the achievement 

of which requires skill) but on essential identity. He adds, 

"And I give the example of poetry: to imitate prose with verse 

is beautiful and delightful poetic imitation, but to imitate 

prose with prose is neither a poetic nor a marvelous thing; 

rather, it delights little."99 Hence, by implication, ut pictura 

poesis; ut sculptura prosa. 

These arguments (both Galileo's and Speroni's) were 

specifically aimed at one of the most frequently cited justifica- 

tions for sculpture's superiority: that sculpture was more 

proper or truthful (propria) than painting in its representation 

of the world, and this truthfulness could be proven by the test 

of that most certain of senses, touch.100 This was illustrated by 

an anecdote which the sculptor Nicolo Tribolo gave in an 

especially elaborate version, responding to Benedetto Varchi's 

1546 survey about the comparative nobility of painting 

and sculpture. Tribolo contrasted sculpture's status as true or 

proper imitation ("la cosa propio") with painting's status as 

lie ("la bugia"), demonstrating his claim by means of the 

following example: if a blind man came upon a statue, he 

would understand through touch that the sculpted man 

represented a man; but if he encountered a picture of a man 

that same sense would find nothing but a flat surface and 

judge it to be a faulty representation.'1' This conceit was 

dutifully repeated over the course of the century by writers 

such as Raffaele Borghini and was even cited by Bernini 

himself, during his French sojourn of 1665.102 

The anecdote itself seems calculated to be read against a 

pair of Plinian stories (duly cited by painters) in which the 

fictive marvels of painting are revealed through acts of touch: 

Zeuxis's painted grapes, at which hungry birds attempt to 

peck, and Parrhasius's painted curtain, which Zeuxis attempts 

to lift in order to reveal the painting he believes is underneath.103 

In these instances, the spectator's touch certifies the 

painter's skills and also serves to heighten his own visual 

delight (for the pleasure of illusion paradoxically depends on 

realizing that one is deceived). Indeed, touch here deflects 

pleasure back to the eye, and ultimately to the imagination. If 

painting's delights hinge on its status as immaterial (hence 

untouchable) fiction, then this makes an instructive comparison 

with the manner in which pleasure and touch functioned 

in the sculptors' stories of the Cnidian Venus and Pygmalion: 

there, the statues give delight not only to the degree that they 

may be verified through touch, but also to the degree that 

they may function properly, as actual surrogates for the bodies 

they represent. 

Tribolo's anecdote of the blind man seems to have appealed 

to seventeenth-century artists and patrons, testifying 

to the fact that the comparative role of the senses was one of 

the issues that continued to provoke interest in the paragone. 

The first datable representation of the blind man and a statue 

comes from the period of Bernini's youth: Jusepe de Ribera's 

Sense of Touch, part of a series of the Five Senses painted in 

Rome about 1615 (Fig. 12).104 Though it represents the 

DESIDERIO AND I)ILETTO: BERNINI'S APOLLO ANDI) I)DAPIlNE 321 

12 Jusepe de Ribera, Sense of Touch. Pasadena, Calif., Norton 

Simon Foundation 

sculptor's argument for superiority, this is the work of a 

painter, and the artist's skillfully foreshortened painting on 

the foreground ledge may be read as a riposte, challenging 

sculpture on the criterion of difficulta. The sculptors' case is 

further dissected in an image, attributed to a follower of 

Guercino, that cleverly brings us back to the question of 

eroticism (Fig. 13).l05 In the undated drawing containing the 

motto "Della scoltura si della pittura no" (sculpture's, yes; 

painting's, no) the sculpted bust that the blind beggar 

indiscriminately touches is contrasted with a framed painting 

depicting a turbaned male-his hands significantly out of 

sight, behind his back-who appears to be inspecting ex- 

amples of nude female beauty. Sculpture's claims for certainty 

(here, of substance; elsewhere, of sexual gratification) are 

answered by a painting that figures the more subtle delights of 

the discerning erotic gaze. It is notable that this same general 

period produced a number of paintings about eroticized 

vision with an implicit pictorial referent, in the form of 

Alberti's mythical inventor of painting, Narcissus.106 It was in 

the earliest years of the new century that Caravaggio painted 

his version of the story (Fig. 14), in which Narcissus is 

seemingly frozen in rapture-held forever at arm's length 

from his beloved reflection, his embrace denied (as if to 

reaffirm that the reflection/painting incites yet cannot satisfy 

desire).107 Not long after, Pietro Bernini's colleague Lodovico 

Cigoli produced a sketch of Narcissus (Fig. 15), perhaps 

inspired by the contemporary paragone discussions hinted at


? 

. 

i 

,?. 

J?.. 

.....i 

13 School of Guercino, Della scoltura si, della pittura no. Paris, 

Musee du Louvre (photo: ? RMN-Michele Bellot) 

in Galileo's letter, or perhaps even related to his own treatise 

on perspective, in which he echoes Alberti by placing the 

origin of painting in the reflections of the world on a watery 

surface.108 

Bernini's Apollo and Daphne 

These, then, were the issues, addressed in both literature and 

art, that formed the backdrop for Bernini's sculptural group 

of 1622-25. In the statue, Bernini thematizes the two senses 

that were not only at the base of erotic love and at the heart of 

two contrasting modes of amorous poetry, but which were 

also a vital part of the literature on his own art. At a very basic 

level, Bernini's Apollo and Daphne is art about art: first, by way 

of its subject matter, the art of poetry, and second, by 

thematizing vision and touch, the art of sculpture itself. 

Bernini plays on and conflates both functions of touch found 

in the paragone debates, the touch motivated by erotic desire 

as well as the touch that certifies knowledge. Yet both types of 

touch, as represented here, are transformed from their 

normal associations with sculpture: erotic satisfaction is con- 

founded, rather than satisfied, by touch, and the touching 

hand discerns something that belies, rather than confirms, 

what is seen, functioning as touch did in the painters' 

anecdote of Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Here it is not sculpture's 

essential, proper truth that is suggested, but the opposite: 

Apollo sees soft flesh and is shocked to feel hard bark,just as a 

", 

. 

14 Caravaggio, Narcissus. Rome, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte 

Antica, Palazzo Barberini-Corsini (photo: Alinari/Art Resource, 

New York) 

15 Lodovico Cigoli, Narcissus. Paris, Musee du Louvre (photo: ? 

RMN-Michdle Bellot) 

viewer who might attempt to caress the transformed marble of 

Bernini's statue, which looks as soft as modeled wax, would be 

surprised to touch cold, hard stone.109 In a sense, the statue 

group thematizes the conditions of illusion itself: what you see 

is not what you get (and if Apollo's face records his wonder at 

the distance between what he sees and what he feels, that 

meraviglia is an equally appropriate response to Bernini's 

artifice). Bernini here makes a demonstration piece of the 

fact that sculpture can make the same claims to being 

convincing fiction as painting: the distance between the hard

marble and the reality of flesh is as great as (if not greater 

than) that between the flat panel and the three-dimensional 

world. 

Finally, if the Apollo group is about poetry and about 

sculpture, it is also in some sense about the relationship 

between the two. Bernini uses his gifts of metamorphosing 

marble to create a work that is less remarkable for its propria 

dire than for its metaphorical, poetic speech. His ensemble 

also plays on the most charged element of the story at the 

level of its poetic meaning: the space between lover and 

beloved, pursuer and pursued (in Petrarch, that space in 

which poetry arises). Here the gap between the marble 

statues is not merely empty but is depicted as filled with 

breath-the gasp of astonishment that seems to issue from 

the opened mouths of both Apollo and the turning Daphne. 

Instead of the kiss that Apollo ardently wishes might bond 

them together, there is immaterial spiritus, or in Petrarchan 

terms, aria. 

The Apollo and Daphne followed immediately on Bernini's 

sculpture of a rape scene (Fig. 2), an image of desire 

rewarded, cleverly sculpted to echo the artifice of the sculptorlover 

Pygmalion. But Apollo and Daphne presented different 

challenges, and perhaps through the agency of Maffeo 

Barberini-the "Apollo Vaticanus"-Bernini was able to 

ponder other models. The famous story that Cardinal Barberini, 

while visiting Bernini's studio, held up a mirror in 

which the young artist studied his face while sculpting the 

David is doubtless a topos of the biographers, but it was a 

cleverly chosen one, for Barberini (who, after all, wrote love 

poems in his youth) was the instrument with whose help 

Bernini refashioned his artistic identity."?0 The mirror image 

(reflecting what Baldinucci refers to as a "terribile fissazione 

d'occhi," a fearsomely intent gaze) recalls Alberti's use of the 

Narcissus story, though here the Albertian formula is complicated 

with a second participant: the love and self-knowledge 

from which art is born is facilitated by a mentor. As in the tale 

of Narcissus, the reflecting medium (the mirror, but also, 

metonymically, the man who holds it) is transformed by the 

reflected object. Urban's oft-quoted statement to Bernini- 

"it is your great fortune, Cavaliere, to see Maffeo Barberini 

pope, and even greater is our fortune that Cavaliere Bernini 

lives in our pontificate"-suggests the reciprocity of the 

relationship between the two and underlines the fact that 

Bernini provided a means for Urban to fashion his own 

identity."' Indeed, if Bernini's emulation of Michelangelo 

guaranteed him a place in the Roman court, it also provided 

the Tuscan Maffeo Barberini the opportunity to cast himself 

as Julius II as well as to emulate a fellow countryman (and 

fellow poet): Michelangelo's first mentor, Lorenzo de' Medici. 

Thus, the quotation of Petrarch via Politian in Barberini's 

distich on Apollo and Daphne not only stakes a claim for a 

particular poetic ideal but also creates a linkage to an 

illustrious Tuscan tradition that intertwined spirituality, po- 

etry, and the laurel. 

When he began the sculptural group that filled all Rome 

with the need to regard both artwork and artist, Bernini was 

something of a modern Pygmalion (sculptor as lover); at its 

completion, and with Urban VIII's full support, he could 

DESIDERIO AND DI)ILETTO: BERNINI'S APOLLO AND DAPHNE 323 

16 Bernini, Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Rome, S. Maria della Vittoria, 

Cornaro Chapel (Alinari/Art Resource, New York) 

additionally be fashioned, like Michelangelo before him, a 

new Apollo (an unrequited lover; sculptor as poet). Pygma- 

lion may get the girl but he loses the statue, his art conquered 

by love; Apollo's art, on the other hand, is born of love's loss. 

Pygmalion generates human children; Apollo, works of art."12 

Coda: Sense and Spirit 

The particular circumstances by which the Apollo and Daphne 

has recently received so much scholarly attention have also to 

a degree determined the nature of that attention. The group 

has been placed within the context of the artist's early 

sculptural production-so spectacularly showcased at the 

Galleria Borghese exhibition-and it has also been read in 

light of the ambitions and tastes of the patron who commissioned 

it. This scholarship has the great virtue of intricately 

tying the work to its historical moment, a goal in large part 

shared by this article. Yet by treating the sculpture as "metacritical"-a 

comment on the poetics of sculpture itself-and 

by suggesting that it marks a moment of passage for the 

sculptor, this essay should also have relevance for the discussion 

of Bernini's later works and shed light on the mixture of 

sensuality and spirituality that is at the core of so much 

seventeenth-century art. While this is not the place to elaborate 

on these themes, I would like to conclude by touching 

briefly on one last, very familiar, work. 

Although at first glance Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa for 

the Cornaro Chapel (1647-51, Fig. 16) has little in common


with the Apollo and Daphne, the two works are compellingly 

linked, forming a kind of parenthesis around the most 

intense period of Bernini's friendship with Urban VIII (which 

ended with the pope's death in 1644).113 The two stories, in 

fact, have structural affinities: if the Apollo and Daphne is about 

frustrated erotic love that is spiritualized through its transformation 

into the art of poetry, the Teresa could be said to be 

about spiritual love that is translated (by Teresa, in her 

autobiography, and by Bernini, in his statue group) into the 

physical language of Eros. In the later group this love is 

between a chaste mortal woman and an incorporeal, invisible 

God (similar to, but also distant from, the radiant sun-god 

Apollo). Unlike the Apollo and Daphne, amorous reciprocity 

and even consummation are suggested in the Ecstasy; yet, as in 

the earlier group, the one point of physical contact between 

the lover (here, a surrogate lover, God's messenger) and his 

beloved is played out not across flesh but across an integument 

that is its metaphorical substitute. In the Daphne group, 

Apollo's left hand caresses the bark that has begun to encase 

and protect the chaste nymph, while in the Ecstasy, the angel's 

left hand delicately grasps a fold of the voluminous drapery 

that both shields and replaces Teresa's enraptured body.114 It 

is worth noting that one of the central late medieval defenses 

of poetry-articulated, among others, by Petrarch-defines 

that art as a play between sensible, seductive surface (often 

referred to as a garment or rind) and substantive, philosophical 

truths to be penetrated (not by sense but by intellect) 

beneath.115 The displaced caresses of both Apollo and Teresa's 

angelic visitor allude to (and redeem) sculpture's 

tactility, but they also thematize sculpture's poetic nature in a 

broader sense. If sculpture is in the end a medium of 

inviolable surfaces, those carefully worked surfaces are at the 

same time the viewer's cognitive opening to its deeper 

truths-whether poetic or theological. 

Bernini himself underwent a spiritual transformation with 

age, although, judging from his biographers, the youthful 

themes of his mythic self-fashioning were subtly shifted rather 

than abandoned.116 Both Baldinucci and Domenico Bernini 

inform us that in the artist's old age, he still worked longer 

hours than many of his younger assistants, and when the latter 

tried to get him to rest, he would respond, "Leave me alone 

here, [Can't you see] I'm in love?" He would then remain at 

work, Baldinucci tells us, "fixated [fisso], so that he seemed 

ecstatic, and it seemed as though from his eyes he wished to 

send forth a spirit which would ensoul the stone.""117 Even in 

his advanced years, Bernini still recalls the Pygmalion myth, 

but here it becomes spiritualized, transformed by the language 

of poetic desire and sublimation (the Petrarchan mirar 

fiso), and by the loving gaze of Narcissus.118 

Andrea Bolland received her Ph.D. from the University of North 

Carolina at Chapel Hill and is currently assistant professor of art 

history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She has published on 

Italian art and art literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries 

[Department of Art and Art History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 

207 Nelle Cochrane Woods Hall, Lincoln, Neb. 68588-0114]. 

Frequently Cited Sources 

Baldinucci, Filippo, Vita di Gian Lorenzo Bernini, ed. Sergio Samek Ludovici 

(Milan: Edizioni del Milione, 1948). 

Barocchi, Paola, ed., 1960-62, Trattati d'arte del cinquecento fra manierismo e 

contrariforma, 3 vols. (Bari: Laterza). 

, 1971, Scritti d'arte del cinquecento, vol. 1 (Milan: Ricciardi). 

Bernini, Domenico, Vita del cavalier Gio. Lorenzo Bernino (Rome: R. Bernabb, 

1713). 

Chantelou, Paul Fr6art de, Diary of the Cavaliere Bernini's Visit to France, ed. 

Anthony Blunt, annot. George C. Bauer, trans. Margery Corbett (Princeton: 

Princeton University Press, 1985). 

Coliva, Anna, and Sebastian Schfitze, eds., Bernini scultore: La nascita del barocco 

in Casa Borghese, exh. cat., Galleria Borghese, Rome, 1998. 

D'Onofrio, Cesare, Roma vista da Roma (Rome: Liber, 1967). 

Giraud, Yves F.-A., Lafable de Daphni, Histoire des Id6es et Critique Littiraire, 

vol. 92 (Geneva: Droz, 1968). 

Herrmann Fiore, Kristina, "Apollo e Dafne del Bernini al tempo del 

Cardinale Scipione Borghese," in Apollo e Dafne del Bernini nella Galleria 

Borghese, ed. Kristina Herrmann Fiore (Milan: Silvana, 1997), 71-109. 

Lavin, Irving, "Five New Youthful Sculptures by Gian Lorenzo Bernini and a 

Revised Chronology of His Early Works," Art Bulletin 50 (1968): 223-48. 

Mirollo, James V., The Poet of the Marvelous: Giambattista Marino (New York: 

Columbia University Press, 1963). 

Pastor, Ludwig von, The History of the Popes, 40 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, 

Trench, Trubner, 1894-1953). 

Petrarch, Francis, Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The 'Rime sparse' and Other Lyrics, ed. 

and trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 

1976). 

Preimesberger, Rudolf, "Themes from Art Theory in the Early Works of 

Bernini," in Gian Lorenzo Bernini: New Aspects of His Life and Thought, ed. 

Irving Lavin (University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 1985), 1-18. 

Notes 

This article develops arguments first presented at the Midwest Art History 

Society Conference in Dallas, 1997. I thank Heather Dubrow and Frances 

Huemer for the suggestions and encouragement they offered on reading the 

text of that paper. I am deeply grateful to Carolyn Allmendinger, Elizabeth 

Teviotdale, Christin Mamiya, Wendy Katz, and especially Mary Pardo for 

reading and commenting on this manuscript at various stages of its composition 

and revision. I also thankJohn Paoletti, Irving Lavin, and an anonymous 

Art Bulletin reviewer for helpful suggestions and for probing and difficult 

questions, which will continue to bear on my work. I had the good fortune 

some years ago to take a seminar on artists' biographies from Catherine 

Soussloff, in which I was introduced to some of the broader issues addressed 

here; if I do not do them justice, it is nonetheless thanks to that experience 

that I have had the courage to take them on. Finally, my gratitude goes to 

Susan Arthur, who encouraged me to pursue the topic of visuality and tactility 

in art, and whose paintings demonstrate its continuing relevance. Translations, 

unless otherwise noted, are my own. 

1. Andrew Marvell, The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (New 

York: Penguin, 1996), 100. 

2. Baldinucci, 78-79. 

3. See Anna Coliva, ed., Galleria Borghese, trans. Donald Garstang and 

Edward Steinberg (Rome: Progetti Museali, 1994); Coliva and Schiitze; 

Kristina Herrmann Fiore, ed., Apollo e Dafne del Bernini nella Galleria Borghese 

(Milan: Silvana, 1997); as well as the volume-published immediately before 

the artist's anniversary, though not overtly occasioned by it-by Charles Avery, 

Bernini: Genius of the Baroque (Boston: Bullfinch Press, 1997). 

4. Preimesberger, 9; idem, "Zu Berninis Borghese-Skulpturen," in Antikenrezeption 

im Hochbarock, ed. Herbert Beck and Sabine Schulze (Berlin: Mann, 

1989), 122-24; and Hans Kauffmann, Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini: Diefigiirlichen 

Kompositionen (Berlin: Mann, 1970), 76. 

5. Preimesberger, 12-13; idem, 1989 (as in n. 4), 124; idem, "David," in 

Coliva and Schiitze, 218; Anna Coliva, "Apollo e Dafne," in Coliva and 

Schfitze, 262; Herrmann Fiore, 79. 

6. See Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters: Art and Society in Baroque Italy, 2d 

ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 27-28, on Cardinal Scipione 

Borghese as a "man of few intellectual attainments" with a collection that "to 

the modern eye, appears to have been formed on no guiding principle other 

than an enthusiastic and undiscriminating appetite," and whose villa was the 

"centre of the most hedonistic society that Rome had known since the 

Renaissance." 

7. Coliva (as in n. 5), 262-63. For a rather different reading of the sculpture 

that nonetheless emphasizes Cardinal Borghese's seriousness as patron (by 

arguing that the work was part of a decorative program exalting the Borghese 

family's role in the renewal of Rome), see Herrmann Fiore, 72-73, 78. For an

interpretation of the villa and its works of art generally in this vein, see idem, 

"Villa Borghese and the Public Image of the Borghese Pontificate," in Coliva 

(as in n. 3), 360-81. 

8. While Stanislao Fraschetti had already made a general comparison 

between Bernini and the early 17th-century poet Giambattista Marino in 1900 

(II Bernini: La sua vita, la sua opera, il suo tempo [Milan: Hoepli], 417), the 

suggestion that Bernini's Apollo and Daphne reflects the spirit of Marino's 

verses was first put forward by Howard Hibbard (Bernini [New York: Penguin, 

1965], 235-36); who was followed by Kauffmann (as in n. 4), 73; and by Joy 

Kenseth, "Bernini's Borghese Sculptures: Another View," Art Bulletin 63 

(1981): 195, 200-201. On Petrarch's significance for the story of Apollo and 

Daphne, see Coliva (as in n. 5), 264. 

9. Preimesberger, 12-13; Herrmann Fiore, 78-79. 

10. From practically the moment they were separated into discrete entities 

and associated with specific bodily organs, the senses were configured into 

various hierarchies, with their ordering determined by the concerns of the 

particular writer. With regard to the period being discussed here, a number of 

scholars-largely, though not entirely Francophone and ranging chronologically 

and methodologically from Lucien Febvre to Roland Barthes to Walter 

Ong-have maintained that sight's position at the top of the hierarchy 

(replacing hearing, smell, and/or touch) is a relatively recent acquisition, 

occurring in tandem with the development of a scientific method relying 

more heavily on visual observation, the invention of the printing press, and 

the formulation of Counter-Reformation devotional practices. Hence, the 

changes in sense hierarchy in the early modern period would seem to be 

bound up with changes in the systematization and hierarchy of knowledge 

itself. Some of this literature is discussed in Ezio Raimondi, "La nuova scienza 

e la visione degli oggetti," in his I sentieri del lettore II: Dal seicento all' ottocento 

(Bologna: SocietA Editrice il Mulino, 1994), 9-60; for arguments against the 

idea that vision was not highly valued or trusted in the Middle Ages and 

Renaissance, see David C. Lindberg and Nicholas H. Steneck, "The Sense of 

Vision and the Origins of Modern Science," in Science, Medicine and Society in 

the Renaissance: Essays to Honor Walter Pagel, ed. Allen G. Debus (New York: 

Science History Publications, 1972), 29-45; and Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The 

Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of 

California Press, 1993), 34-36. The simple dichotomies that have been said to 

structure the hierarchy of the senses have been problematized by recent works 

addressing the complex history of the senses in the early modern period; see, 

for instance, David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and 

the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Charles 

Burnett, Michael Fend, and Penelope Gouk, eds., The Second Sense: Studies in 

Hearing and Musical Judgement from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (London: 

Warburg Institute, 1991); Claire J. Farago, Leonardo da Vinci's 

"Paragone": A 

Critical Interpretation with a New Edition of the Text in the Codex Urbinas (Leiden: 

E. J. Brill, 1992); and W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, eds., Medicine and the Five 

Senses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 

11. The payment records for the group begin in Aug. 1622 and end in Oct. 

1625. The relevant documents for the Apollo and Daphne were published by 

Italo Faldi, "Note sulle sculture borghesiane del Bernini," Bollettino d'Arte 38 

(1953): 140-46; idem, "Nuove note sul Bernini," Bollettino d'Arte 38 (1953): 

310-16; and by Howard Hibbard, "Nuove note sul Bernini," Bollettino d'Arte 43 

(1958): 181-83; this material is republished in Marina Minozzi, "Appendice 

documentaria: Le opere di Bernini nella collezione di Scipione Borghese," in 

Coliva and Schfitze, 437-40. 

12. The David was apparently originally commissioned by Alessandro 

Peretti, Cardinal Montalto (for whom Bernini also made his Neptune and 

Triton, Victoria and Albert Museum, London), rather than Borghese, but the 

latter obtained the unfinished block after Montalto's death in June 1623; see 

Coliva (as in n. 5), 261. 

13. See Minozzi (as in n. 11), 439. Bernini did undertake one last project 

involving the cardinal in 1632: the marble portrait busts of Scipione Borghese 

now in the Galleria Borghese. See Anna Coliva, "Scipione Borghese," in 

Coliva and Schfitze, 276-89. 

14. See Haskell (as in n. 6), 28; and most recently, Anna Coliva, "Casa 

Borghese: La committenza artistica del Cardinal Scipione," in Coliva and 

Schfitze, 412-14; on the conclave of 1621, see Pastor, vol. 27 (1938), 29-41. On 

Scipione's political and financial position in the years after his uncle's death, 

see V. Castronovo, "Borghese Caffarelli, Scipione," in Dizionario biografico degli 

Italiani, vol. 12 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970), 622; and 

Volker Reinhardt, Kardinal Scipione Borghese (1605-1633): Vermigen, Finanzen 

und sozialerAufstiegeines Papstnepoten (Tiibingen: M. Niemeyer, 1984), 169-81. 

15. On Borghese's role as collector and patron during his time as "Cardinal 

Nephew," see most recently Coliva (as in n. 14), 391-420; and idem, "The 

Borghese Collection: Its History and Works of Art," in Coliva (as in n. 3), 

28-35. 

16. For the suggestion that the Apollo andDaphnewas made as a replacement 

for the Proserpina group (or that the promise shown in the early stages of the 

Daphne group reassured Borghese about giving the earlier work away), see 

Hibbard (as in n. 8), 48. The Proserpina was transported from Bernini's studio 

to the Villa Borghese on Sept. 23, 1622, and moved to the Villa Ludovisi 

possibly as early as a month later; see Coliva (as in n. 14), 414; but see also 

Matthias Winner, "Ratto di Proserpina," in Coliva and Schiitze, 187. 

17. Camillo Borghese-Pope Paul V-commissioned a number of works for 

the Pauline Chapel in S. Maria Maggiore from Gian Lorenzo's father, Pietro, 


shortly after the family's arrival in Rome in 1605-6: a relief of the Assumption of 

the Virgin (executed between 1607 and 1610) as well as caryatids and a relief of 

the Coronation of Clement VIII for that pope's tomb monument (1611-13). 

Between 1616 and 1617, Pietro also made sculpture for the entrance to the 

Pauline Chapel in the Quirinal Palace, and from 1616 to 1620, he created 

decorative sculptures for Scipione Borghese's villa. See Valentino Martinelli, 

"Contributo alla scultura del seicento IV: Pietro Bernini e figli," Commentari 4 

(1953): 133-54; and more recently, Pietro Bernini: Un preludio al Barocco, exh. 

cat., Teatro la Limonaia and Villa Corsi-Salviati, Sesto Fiorentino, 1989. In 

addition to the help Gian Lorenzo provided his father on the decorative 

sculptures (see Alberta Campitelli, "Erme," in Coliva and Schfitze, 18-37), 

and to the life-size sculptures he then made for the Villa Borghese between 

1618 and 1625, the young artist made a series of portrait busts for the 

Borghese, probably beginning in the late 1610s (see Rudolf Wittkower, 

Bernini, 3d ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 175-77, 180-81). 

Gian Lorenzo's early Goat Amalthea Nursing Zeus (Villa Borghese, Rome) was in 

the cardinal's collection by Aug. 1615, though it is unknown whether it was 

actually commissioned by Scipione; Minozzi (as in n. 11), 429. 

18. Barberini's prediction to Pietro Bernini (made, according to Bernini, 

when he was eight years old) is one of Gian Lorenzo's reminiscences recorded 

by Chantelou, 15-16. 

19. See Baldinucci, 74-75; and Bernini, 11-12. Our knowledge of the early 

relationship between Gian Lorenzo and Cardinal Barberini is largely depen- 

dent on Bernini's biographers, whose chronologies are admittedly not always 

easy to reconcile with documented facts. For a caveat against using Renaissance- 

Baroque artistic biography as a historical source, see Catherine M. Soussloff, 

"Lives of Poets and Painters in the Renaissance," Word and Image 6 (1990): 

154-62; and idem, The AbsoluteArtist: The Historiography ofa Concept (Minneapo- 

lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). While I would not claim that the 

sources necessarily give access to the factual truth of Bernini's day-to-day life, 

they do encode an artistic "myth" that (at leastjudging from the testimony of 

Chantelou) Bernini himself played no small role in fashioning. We know that 

Barberini returned from his mission as papal nuncio to France in late Sept. 

1607 and remained in Rome until he was awarded the see of Spoleto, in late 

Oct. 1608. He resided outside Rome-first in Spoleto, then in Bologna, to 

which he was named legate (1611-14), and again in Spoleto-untilJuly 1617, 

when he returned there for good; see Pastor, vol. 28 (1938), 29-32; and Pio 

Pecchiai, I Barberini (Rome: Biblioteca d'Arte, 1959), 137-38, 143-48. It is 

possible, then, that Barberini made the reported prediction to Pietro Bernini 

(see n. 18 above) in 1607, when the artist was indeed eight years old, and that 

he may have served as his protector in the years between 1607 and 1608 

(though see D'Onofrio, 154-55, for the view that the two did not meet until 

late 1617). On Maffeo Barberini as poet, see Lucia Franciosi, "Immagini e 

poesia alla corte di Urbano VIII," in Gian Lorenzo Bernini e le arti visive, ed. 

Marcello Fagiolo (Florence: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1987), 85-90; 

D'Onofrio, 33-48; and Pastor, vol. 29 (1938), 408-21. On his earliest Latin 

poetry, see Marina Castagnetti, "Variazioni su una statua di Amor dormiente: 

A proposito di alcuni epigrammi latini di Maffeo Barberini," in Studi difilologia 

classica in onore di Giusto Monaco (Palermo: UniversitA di Palermo, FacoltA di 

Lettere e Filosofia, 1991), vol. 4, 1693-1703; and idem, "La 'Caprarola' ed 

altre 'Galerie': Cinque lettere di Maffeo Barberini ad Aurelio Orsi," Studi 

Secenteschi 34 (1993): 411-50; for his earliest volgare poetry, see Mario 

Costanzo, Critica e poetica del primo seicento, vol. 2, Maffeo e Francesco Barberini, 

Cesarini, Pallavicino (Rome: Bulzoni, 1969), 15-31. 

20. Bernini, 21, reports that his father always referred to Barberini as his 

"primo Benefattore." The pope long remained an important figure for 

Bernini; in his account of Bernini's visit to France twenty-one years after 

Barberini's death, Chantelou, 15, reports that the artist "is always eager to 

quote Pope Urban VIII." 

21. Pietro Bernini was commissioned to make a Saint John the Baptist 

(1613-15) and four marble cherubs (1618) for the family chapel in S. Andrea 

della Valle (see Lavin, 232, 234). Gian Lorenzo made two busts for the chapel, 

representing Maffeo's parents, in 1619-20, and Lavin suggests that he 

executed the cherubs as well, working from his father's model (235-37). Lavin 

(233-34) also concurs with the hypothesis of Wittkower (as in n. 17), 174, that 

Gian Lorenzo's Saint Sebastian (Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid), in 

the possession of the Barberini family by 1628, was made for a niche in the 

family chapel but never installed. Another early work by Bernini, Boy with a 

Dragon (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) is recorded in the Barberini 

inventories in 1628 (Lavin, 230), though it is not known when, or under what 

circumstances, it entered the family collections. 

22. See Baldinucci, 76, 78-79; and Bernini, 16, 19-20, for anecdotes 

recording Barberini's responses to Bernini's Bust of Pedro de Foix Montoya 

(completed ca. 1622), David, and Apollo and Daphne. 

23. After an interruption in his work on the Apollo and Daphne, presumably 

to carve the David in 1623-24, Bernini received payments again in Apr.,June, 

and Sept. 1624; Minozzi (as in n. 11), 438. The statue was completed with the 

help of the sculptor Giuliano Finelli, who was apparently responsible for the 

fine details of the leaves, roots, and hair. Finelli's work on the group is 

mentioned by his biographer G. B. Passeri. On Finelli's share in the statue, see 

Jennifer Montagu, Roman Baroque Sculpture: The Industry of Art (New Haven: 

Yale University Press, 1989), 104-6; Herrmann Fiore, 103-4; and Coliva (as in 

n. 5), 268-69. If Urban did not immediately give Bernini commissions, he 

nonetheless quickly began to bestow favors on the artist, appointing him


overseer of the foundries of Castel Sant Angelo and commissioner of the 

conduits and fountains of Piazza Navona; see Fraschetti (as in n. 8), 41. 

24. Payments for the baldacchino began on July 12, 1624, and Bernini 

received payment for the marble block out of which Santa Bibiana would be 

carved on Aug. 10, 1624. See Wittkower (as in n. 17), 189. The reconstruction 

of the church of S. Bibiana began on Aug. 8, 1624; Sandra Vasco Rocca, Santa 

Bibiana, Le Chiese di Roma Illustrate (Rome: Istituto Nazionale di Studi 

Romani, 1983), 41. 

25. In addition to the Goat Amalthea (see n. 17 above), Boy with a Dragon (n. 

21), Neptune and Triton (n. 12), and Pluto and Proserpina, Bernini's other early 

mythological figures and groups include a Faun Teased by Putti (Metropolitan 

Museum of Art, New York) and Putto Bitten by a Dolphin (Staatliche Museen 

Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin). That Bernini viewed the Daphne as pivotal is 

suggested by the fact that during his 1665 visit to France, he told Chantelou 

that he completed the work at age eighteen-placing it, effectively, at the very 

beginning of his adult career; see Chantelou, 102. 

26. The classic study of the various literary and visual versions of the theme 

is Wolfgang Stechow, Apollo und Daphne, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, 23 

(Leipzig: Teubner, 1932); see also the wide-ranging survey of the various 

retellings of the myth from antiquity to the end of the 17th century (with some 

attention to the visual tradition) in Giraud. While the Ovid translation most 

familiar to art historians is Lodovico Dolce's Trasformationi (first published 

1553), the most widely known translation of the later cinquecento and early 

seicento was Giovanni Andrea dell'Anguillara's Metamorfosi d'Ovidio, which was 

reissued in over twenty editions between 1561 and 1624. On Anguillara, see C. 

Mutini, "Anguillara, Giovanni Andrea dell'," in Dizionario biografico (as in n. 

14), vol. 3 (1961), 306-9; and Giraud, 174-76. Anguillara's edition is discussed 

in relation to Bernini's statue by Herrmann Fiore, 77. 

27. Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.490. All the English translations (and the Latin 

text) of Ovid used in this article are taken from the Loeb Classical Library 

edition, trans. FrankJustus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: 

Harvard University Press, 1994). 

28. While the 16th-century translators of the Metamorphoses follow Ovid in 

not indicating any eye contact during or after the chase, both Anguillara and 

Dolce include a moment at which the god pleads with the fleeing nymph to 

turn around and look at him: "Deh volgi un poco A me la fronte, e '1 core: / 

Tien nel mio volto i tuoi begli occhi intenti: Non sai, stolta, non sai chi fuggi; e 

credi / Forse molto veder, ma nulla vedi" (Oh, turn your brow, and your heart, 

a little toward me, hold your beautiful eyes intently on my face; you do not 

know, foolish one, you do not know whom you flee; and you perhaps believe 

you see much, but you see nothing; Metamorfosi di Ovidio, trans. Gio. Andrea 

dell'Anguillara, annot. Giuseppe Horologgi [Venice: Giunti, 1584], 15); and 

"Rivolgi Ninfa la sdegnosa fronte, / E vedi chi per te piagato ha il core" (Turn 

your haughty brow, nymph, and see whose heart you have wounded; Dolce, Le 

trasformationi [1568; reprint, with an introduction by Stephen Orgel and 

illustrations from the 1558 ed., NewYork: Garland, 1979], fol. 10v). Compare 

this with Ovid's much simpler version of Apollo's plea at 1.512: "cui placeas, 

inquire tamen" (nay, stop and ask who thy lover is). 

29. See Matthias Winner, "Paragone mit dem Belvederischen Apoll: Kleine 

Wirkunggeschichte der Statue von Antico bis Canova," in Il cortile delle statue: 

Der Statuenhof des Belvedere im Vatikan, ed. Matthias Winner, Bernard Andreae, 

and Carlo Pietrangeli (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1998), 244. 

30. The Alberti engraving is presented as one model among many by 

Herrmann Fiore, 89, and the woodcut by Master IB with the Bird is discussed 

in Avery (as in n. 3), 57; and Kauffmann (as in n. 4), 69; both are reproduced 

and discussed by Coliva (as in n. 5), 264, 265. It should be said that the most 

obvious quotation in Bernini's group comes not from a rendering of the story 

itself, but (as art historians have long recognized) from the Apollo Belvedere in 

the Vatican. 

31. Metamorphoses, 15.871-79: "And now my work is done, which neither the 

wrath ofJove, nor fire, nor sword, nor the gnawing tooth of time shall ever be 

able to undo. When it will, let that day come which has no power save over this 

mortal frame, and end the span of my uncertain years. Still in my better part I 

shall be borne immortal far beyond the lofty stars and I shall have an undying 

name. Wherever Rome's power extends over the conquered world, I shall have 

mention on men's lips, and, if the prophecies of bards have any truth, through 

all the ages shall I live in fame." The author portrait reproduced here as Fig. 8 

is from the R Ovidii Nasoni Metamorphoses, argumentis brevioribus ex Luctatio 

Grammatico collectis expositae (Antwerp, 1591); this edition is illustrated by 

Petrus van der Borcht (who signs the image found on 357). 

32. See n. 8 above. Marino treated the story in the paired sonnets "Parole 

d'Apollo, mentre seguiva Dafne" and "Trasformazione di Dafne in lauro," as 

well as the madrigal "Dafne in Lauro," all first published in his Rime (Venice, 

1602); in his 176-line poem "Dafne," published as part of his Ecloghe boscherecce 

(Naples, 1620), though probably composed much earlier; and in the 339-line 

eclogue "Dafni," published in La sampogna (Paris, 1620). Additionally, Marino 

dedicated one of the epigrams in his Galeria (Venice, 1619) to an Apollo and 

Daphne by Guido Reni. Marino's treatment of the theme is discussed by 

Giraud, 281-89. 

33. Kenseth's argument (as in n. 8) for Marino's import rests on a more 

involved comparison of text and sculpture, relating to her central thesis that 

Bernini conceived the Apollo and Daphne to be seen in a series of views, 

beginning from the back of the sculptural group, where the running Apollo 

provides the main focus, and moving toward a view incorporating both the 

god and his metamorphosing prey. Kenseth argues that the sequence of views 

experienced by the viewer-from motion to stasis-parallels Marino's narration 

of the chase in his "Dafne." For a different proposal on the original 

position of the sculpture in the the room (and thus a different sequence of 

views experienced by the spectator), see Herrmann Fiore, 98-103. 

34. Giambattista Marino, La sampogna, ed. Vania de Mald6 (Parma: Fondazione 

Pietro Bembo and Ugo Guanda, 1993), 363. 

35. Apollo's almost comical fascination with Daphne's hair in Ovid's verses 

could certainly have been read as a metaphorical evocation of the process of 

literary or poetic composition, which was described in similar terms in certain 

classical and medieval sources. The term Ovid uses for the arranging of 

Daphne's hair-comere--designates the ornamenting of speech in Cicero, De 

partitione oratoria 19, and Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 8.3.42. Other instances 

in which the adornment or combing of hair is used to describe the adornment 

of literary compositions are found in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Literary 

Composition 25: "combing" (ktenizon), "curling" (bostruchizon), "replaiting" 

(anapl6kon); see Dionysius of Halicarnassus, The Critical Essays, vol. 2, 

trans. Stephen Usher, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard 

University Press, 1985), 224, 225; and Geoffroy of Vinsauf's late medieval 

Poetria Nova, in Edmond Faral, Les arts poitiques du XIIe et du XIle simcle (Paris: 

Librairie Ancienne Honor6 Champion, 1924), 257. 

36. The story of Syrinx is found in Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.689-712. Marino 

had paired the Daphne and Syrinx stories earlier in his career, in the Ecloghe 

boscherecce; see Mirollo, 67. 

37. On the theme of poetry's dependence on absence and frustration in the 

17th century, see Gordon Braden, "Beyond Frustration: Petrarchan Laurels in 

the Seventeenth Century," Studies in English Literature 26 (1986): 5-23. I thank 

Heather Dubrow for pointing out the aptness of Marvell's construction to the 

broader reading attempted here. 

38. For Marino's complex relation to Petrarch, see Alessandro Martini, 

"Marino postpetrarchista," Versants 7 (1985): 15-36. 

39. The literature on Petrarch's use of the Apollo and Daphne myth is large; 

see, for instance, Marga Cottino-Jones, "The Myth of Apollo and Daphne in 

Petrarch's 'Canzoniere': The Dynamics and Literary Function of Transformation," 

in Francis Petrarch: Six Centuries Later, ed. Aldo Scaglione (Chapel Hill, 

N.C.: Dept. of Romance Languages, University of North Carolina, 1975), 

152-76; P.R.J. Hainsworth, "The Myth of Daphne in the 'Rerum vulgarium 

fragmenta,' " Italian Studies 34 (1979): 28-44; and Sara Sturm-Maddox, 

"Apollo and Daphne: The Ovidian Subtext," chap. 2 of her Petrarch's 

Metamorphoses: Text and Subtext in the Rime Sparse (Columbia, Mo.: University of 

Missouri Press, 1985). 

40. Petrarch, 40, 41. I amend somewhat Durling's reading of the final lines, 

which does not account for the term altrui (of others). Admittedly, the term 

may refer to those other than Laura/the laurel (rather than to those other 

than the poet), yet the word choice still renders the construction strangely 

impersonal (in contrast with the first-person voice used for the preceding 

lines). 

41. This central idea of poetry's origin in unfulfilled desire is even 

underlined by the poems that frame his canzoniere: at the beginning of poem 1, 

"Voi ch'ascoltate," Petrarch describes the rime sparse that follow (perhaps in 

glancing allusion to Pan and Syrinx) as "the sound of those sighs with which I 

nourished my heart during my first youthful error" (lines 1-3), and in the 

final, redemptive Canzone to the Virgin, he acknowledges that if he had 

achieved the consummation so ardently wished for in many of the 365 

preceding poems, it would only have resulted in death to him and dishonor to 

Laura (poem 366, lines 92-97); see Petrarch, 36, 37, 580, 581. 

42. The lines cited are 48-52, from Petrarch, 266, 267. See Ugo Dotti's 

introduction to his edition of Petrarch's Canzoniere, vol. 1 (Rome: Donzelli, 

1996), xli-xlvii ("La poesia dell'assenza e la funzione della parola"), as well as 

his commentary on the individual poems. 

43. Adelia Noferi, "11 canzoniere del Petrarca: Scrittura del desiderio e 

desiderio della scrittura," Paragone (Letteratura) 296 (Oct. 1974): 8-9. 

44. Vision on occasion even appropriates some of the powers (albeit 

negative ones) of touch. If Petrarch and Laura never make physical contact, 

her gaze nonetheless has the power to burn (Petrarch, poems 171, lines 5-6, 

320, line 10), to inflict blows (poems 95, lines 5-6, 133, line 5), and to wound 

(poems 87, line 5, 174, lines 5-6, 297, lines 10-11). 

45. On Petrarch's use of the term occhi, see Peter Hainsworth, Petrarch the 

Poet: An Introduction to the "Rerum vulgarium fragmenta" (London: Routledge, 

1988), 120-21. Miraris used withfisoin poems 17, 77, 127, 261, 323, 356, 360. 

46. Poem 129, lines 56-61: "Indi i miei danni a misurar con gli occhi / 

comincio, e 'ntanto lagrimando sfogo / di dolorosa nebbia il cor condenso, / 

alor ch' i' miro et penso / quanta aria dal bel viso mi diparte / che sempre m' 6 

si presso e si lontano" (Thence I begin to measure my losses with my eyes, and 

then I weeping unburden my heart of the sorrowful cloud gathered in it, when 

I see and think how much air separates me from the lovely face that is always so 

near to me and so distant; Petrarch, 266, 267). Also emblematic of the 

mutually exclusive relationship between the two senses is poem 190, "Una 

candida cerva sopra l'erba," in which the poet gazes until his eyes are tired 

("but not sated") at a white doe (that is, Laura) sporting a jeweled collar 

warning "Nessun mi tocchi" (Let no one touch me; Petrarch, 336, 337). 

47. See Giraud, 155-81, on the treatment of the myth among the Petrarchists; 

not surprisingly, Petrarchan language also colors the Italian translations 

of Ovid's Metamorphoses, especially Anguillara's.

48. Bernini told the story to Chantelou in 1665 (30-31); it also appears in 

less detailed form in Baldinucci, 79; and Bernini, 19-20. The story is not easily 

reconciled with the documents: Bernini acquired the marble block for the 

sculpture at the beginning of Aug. 1622, yet Cardinal de Sourdis apparently 

ended his residency in Rome before July 17, 1622 (Lavin, 238 n. 102). It is 

probable, then, that Bernini either embellished or misremembered the 

participants in this incident, which had taken place some forty years earlier. 

The statue's pedestal, containing the inscription, was completed by Mar. 15, 

1625; Minozzi (as in n. 11), 438. 

49. See, for instance, Giuseppe Horologgi's gloss in Anguillara's Ovid 

translation (as in n. 28), 15, 16; or Georgius Sabinus, Metamorphosis seufabulae 

poeticae (Frankfurt:J. Wechel, 1589), 36. 

50. See Marc Fumaroli, L'inspiration du poite de Poussin: Essai sur l'allIgorie du 

Parnasse (Paris: Editions de la Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1989), 59-60. 

The poem appeared in the 1631 edition of the Poemata, but not the 1623 

edition, suggesting it was written after Barberini's accession to the papal 

throne. 

51. The preceding lines are: "Complexus virides [sic] frondosae virginis 

artus: / sic quoque mutata (dixit Apollo) fruar" (The brief embrace of the 

green leafy virgin: Thus also let me take pleasure (Apollo said) in the changed 

one; Giraud, 177). According to Giraud, the epigram was published in Fausto 

Sabeo, Picta poesis Ovidiana, Thesaurus propemodum omnium fabularum poeticarum 

... epigrammatis expositarum (1580), and in Janus Gruter, Delitiae CC 

italorum poetarum, Pars altera (1608). 

52. See Lodovico Castelvetro, Le rime delPetrarca brevemente sposte (Basel: P. de 

Sedabonis, 1582), 23. The connection of Barberini's distich to Petrarch's 

sonnet is noted by Preimesberger, 1989 (as in n. 4), 124, though his 

conclusions about the meaning of the inscription are somewhat different from 

those presented here. Giraud, 196, and Kauffmann (as in n. 4), 63, also note 

similarities between Barberini's distich and the poem inscribed on Jacopo 

Caraglio's engraving of Apollo and Daphne. 

53. A manuscript of Barberini's earliest volgare poetry was edited and 

published by Costanzo (as in n. 19), 24-31. One of Urban's poems using 

Petrarchan imagery was published under the title "Quanto sia vano il pensiero 

d'acquistar fama col mezzo della poesia," in his Poesie toscane (first published 

1635), and is reprinted in Pastor, vol. 29, 416 n. 1. The poem begins with the 

verses "Che fai Maffeo, che pensi? a che con arte / Emula all'eta prisca, si ti 

cale / Formar inni canori? a che ti vale / Vegliar la notte per vergar le carte?" 

(What are you doing Maffeo, what are you thinking? To what purpose do you 

care to fashion melodious hymns with an art that rivals that of the golden age? 

What does it avail you to keep vigil all night in order to fill the pages with 

writing?), emulating the internal dialogue form ("Che fai? Che pensi?") used 

by Petrarch in poems 150 and 273. Urban goes on to scold himself in 

Petrarchan terms for loving too much the "deception [inganno]" and "sweet 

error [dolce errore]" of believing he can render things eternal and flee death 

with his "harmonious lyre [cetra armoniosa]." One might argue that in much of 

his poetry (especially in vernacular verse) Urban follows Petrarch's example in 

an even deeper sense, for just as Barberini writes numerous verses decrying 

the vanity of composing poetry, so the trecento poet uses his volgare poetry to 

disparage that selfsame poetry (the fruit, as he writes in poem 1, of his "primo 

giovanile errore," his first youthful error). See Hainsworth (as in n. 45), 103ff. 

54. Pastor, vol. 29, 416. On the linking of Apollo and the laurel with Urban 

VIII in contemporary panegyrics, see Fumaroli (as in n. 50), 56-57. A pictorial 

example may be found in the central field of Pietro da Cortona's Divine 

Providence fresco (Palazzo Barberini, Rome, 1632-39), where a putto adds a 

laurel crown to Urban's coat of arms, signifying, in the words of a contemporary, 

"valor poetico" (poetic virtue). SeeJohn Beldon Scott, Images ofNepotism: 

The Painted Ceilings of Palazzo Barberini (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 

1991), 139, 216. 

55. According to D'Onofrio (307, 276) the epigram--one of twelve in 

Biblioteca Apostolica, Vatican ms Cod. Barb. lat. 2077-was actually composed 

between 1618 and 1620. Whether, as D'Onofrio suggests, it served in any way 

as a program for the sculptural decoration of the Villa Borghese (another 

epigram from the same manuscript treats Pluto and Proserpina) or whether 

Barberini simply called on his earlier composition under circumstances like 

those described by Bernini is impossible to know. 

56. Preimesberger, 12-13, calls attention to the publication of L'Adone but 

suggests that the bitter fruits of Barberini's inscription imply a critique not 

only of Marinismo but also of Petrarchismo. Preimesberger's reading would 

seem to collapse the distinction between amorous poetry and lascivious 

poetry; for evidence that the Church did in fact maintain such distinctions, see 

the letter of Apr. 2, 1625, from Girolamo Preti to Claudio Achillini, in 

Giambattista Marino, Epistolario seguito da lettere di altri scrittori del seicento, ed. 

Angelo Borzelli and Fausto Nicolini, vol. 2 (Bari: Laterza, 1911-12), 176. On 

the prepublication history of the Adone (which Marino had begun to write in 

the last years of the 16th century), see Marzio Pieri's "Nota al testo" in his 

edition of the Adone (Bari: Laterza, 1975-77), vol. 2, 755-68; and Giovanni 

Pozzi's "Guida alla lettura" in his edition of the poem (Milan: Mondadori, 

1976), vol. 2, 103-21. 

57. The first Paris edition was followed by editions published in Venice, 

Ancona, Turin, and Paris, all appearing between 1623 and 1627. See Mirollo, 

72, 86-87, and Marino-Pieri (as in n. 56), vol. 2, 768-69. 

58. In cantos 6-8 of the poem, Adonis is guided through the Garden of 

Pleasure, which can be entered through five gates, each representing a 


different sense; it is in the section of the garden devoted to touch (in canto 8) 

that Venus and Adonis consummate their passion. While the Adone was finally 

placed on the Index librorum prohibitorum (Index of Prohibited Books) in 

1627, two years after the author's death, censors were already requiring 

changes by Sept. 1623 (Giorgio Fulco, "Giovan Battista Marino," chap. 5 of 

Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 5, La fine del cinquecento e il seicento [Rome: 

Salerno, 1997], 637), and its reprinting was prohibited in papal dominions in 

June 1624 (Marino-Pieri [as in n. 56], vol. 2, 768). Marino anticipated these 

problems from the very beginning; in several letters written in 1623 and 1624 

Marino makes reference to his (now lost) "discourse on lascivious writing," 

which he intended to publish as part of the Adone; Marino, 1911-12 (as in n. 

56), vol. 2, 13, 27, 28, 67. On the anti-Marinist backlash after the publication of 

the Adone, see Mirollo, 98-100, and Franco Croce, "I critici moderatobarocchi, 

I-La discussione sull'Adone," Rassegna della Letteratura Italiana 59 

(1955): 414-39. 

59. On the 1623 edition of Stigliani's Rime, and on Stigliani's Petrarchism, 

see Antonio Belloni, Il seicento, Storia Letteraria d'Italia, vol. 7 (Milan: Vallardi, 

1899), 93; and Ottavio Besomi, "Tommaso Stigliani: Tra parodia e critica," 

Studi Secenteschi 13 (1972): 3-4. One of Stigliani's sonnets using Petrarchan 

themes of distance, desire, sight, and touch ("Io veggio a' miei desir tant'alto 

il segno, / ed e fra quello e me spazio si lungo, / che, non che con la mano, 

appena il giungo / cogli occhi e della fronte e dell'ingegno ." [I see the 

target of my desires so lofty, and between it and me so great a ... distance, that I 

barely attain it (to say nothing of the hand) with the eyes of my forehead and 

my mind]) is published in Alberto Asor Rosa, Il seicento: La nuova scienza e la 

crisi del Barocco, vol. 5, pt. 1, of La letteratura italiana: Storia e testi (Bari: Laterza, 

1974), 531. The revival of interest in Petrarch as an antidote to Marinism is 

discussed by Marc Fumaroli, "Rh6torique et po6tique," Lettere Italiane 44 

(1992): 36-37. In his Ragionamento sopra la poesia giocosa (1634), Nicola Villani 

defended certain stylistic features of Marino's poem but attacked its lasciviousness 

as only the latest example of a long tradition of such subject matter in 

Tuscan poetry. Interestingly, he set Petrarch somewhat apart from this 

tradition and linked his chaste treatment of love with that of Francesco da 

Barberino, the dugento poet whom Urban VIII claimed as his ancestor; on 

Villani's treatment of Petrarch and Francesco da Barberino, see Croce (as in n. 

58), 433-34; on Urban VIII and his illustrious forebear, see Pastor, vol. 29, 408. 

A distinction between Petrarch and the corruption of Petrarchan verse by the 

Marinists was also drawn by Iacopo Filippo Tomasini in his Petrarchus redivivus 

of 1635; see Fumaroli, 36-37. Later in the century, Sforza Pallavicino also 

contrasted the poetry of Petrarch ("non disonesta, ma vana" [not shameful, 

but empty]) with that of his followers, who joined obscenity of form to the 

vanity of the subject matter; see Belloni, 52. 

60. Rejections of the Petrarchan model may be found in a number of 16thand 

early 17th-century writers; see Donald L. Guss, "Petrarchism and the End 

of the Renaissance," in Scaglione (as in n. 39), 384-401, on the variety of 

responses to the Rime sparse. Indeed, the first great literary debate of the 17th 

century was spurred by the publication of Alessandro Tassoni's anti-Petrarchist 

Considerazioni sopra le rime del Petrarca (Modena, 1609). Tassoni's work is in 

many ways less an attack on Petrarch than a denunciation of his servile 

followers (and of the notion that the great trecento poet's authority should 

carry into the modern era). On Tassoni's tract and the responses it elicited, 

see Franco Croce, "Critica e trattatistica del barocco," in Il seicento, ed. Emilio 

Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, Storia della Letteratura Italiana, vol. 5 (Milan: 

Garzanti, 1967), 425-36; on Marino's supportive response to Tassoni's 

position, see Marziano Guglielminetti, "Tassoni e Marino," in Studi Tassoniani 

(Modena: Aedes Muratoriana, 1966), 147-75. 

61. Martini (as in n. 38), 27-28, interestingly contrasts the semantics of 

Marino's love poetry with those of Petrarch's. Not only does Marino distance 

himself from Petrarch by expanding the language of love to include the 

physical (for example, the many baci, which are all but absent in the trecento 

poet) and the lascivious, but he also largely rejects Petrarch's lexicon of 

amorous melancholy, and the terms by which distance-both temporal and 

spatial-is figured (for example, the variety of words describing the operations 

of memory). 

62. The poem, which was originally published in part 2 of Marino's Rime 

(1602), is reworked into canto 8 of the Adone, beginning at ottava 124. 

63. Italian text from Giuseppe Guido Ferrero, ed., Marino e i Marinisti 

(Milan: Ricciardi, 1954), 354. The poemjoined the Adoneon the Index later in 

the century; see Mirollo, 100. 

64. The image is reminiscent of the Ovidian story of Hermaphrodite, who 

was unwillingly embraced by the nymph Salmacis until their bodies became 

one ("nam mixta duorum / corpora iunguntur, faciesque induciter illis / 

una" [for their two bodies, joined together as they were, were merged into 

one, with one face and form for both; trans. in Ovid, 1994 (as in n. 27), 205]); 

see Metamorphoses 4.373-75, or Marino, who describes a sculptural rendition of 

the two adorning a fountain ("seno a seno congiunto e bocca a bocca" [breast 

to breast conjoined, and mouth to mouth]; Adone, canto 3, ottava 169). The 

notion of two souls joining together through a kiss originates in the Platonic 

epigram on kissing Agathon in the Palatine Anthology 5.78; see NicolasJames 

Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 

1969) on the numerous medieval and Renaissance interpretations and uses of 

this conceit. 

65. Marino was of course not the first writer to describe the pleasures of 

basciare (see Perella [as in n. 64], 196-208, on the treatment of the kiss by


Italian writers such as Ariosto, Tasso, and Guarini), but his writings represent 

the culmination of the treatment of the theme. Marino's overt celebration of 

touch vanquishing sight is also used by one of his followers and defenders, 

Scipione Errico. Errico concludes his sonnet "Contra l'amore platonico" with 

the following lines: "Ceda al tatto la vista, al labro il lume; / il guatar, I'affissar 

vada in disparte, / perch6 tocca e non mira il cieco nume" (Let sight yield to 

touch, the light to the lip; let the stare, the gaze, be set aside, because the blind 

god touches and does not look). See Ferrero (as in n. 63), 788. 

66. Although Preimesberger, 4, claims, "At no moment in his life did 

Bernini have any theoretical or literary ambitions," there are in fact indications 

of the artist's interest in (and knowledge of) literature. Not only did he 

go on to write plays (of which the one surviving example-the so-called 

Impressario-self-reflexively takes as one of its themes the art of theatrical 

illusion), but also, as Fulvio Testi writes in a letter ofJan. 29, 1633, Bernini "sa 

molto anche di belle lettere e ha motti e arguzie che passano l'anima" (also 

knows much about belles lettres and has sayings and witticisms that prick the 

soul; Fulvio Testi, Lettere, ed. Maria Luisa Doglio, vol. 1 [Bari: Laterza, 1967], 

432-33, no. 403). On Bernini's play as art about art, see D. A. Beecher, 

"Gianlorenzo Bernini's 'The Impressario': The Artist as the Supreme Trickster," 

University of Toronto Quarterly 53 (1984): 236-47. 

67. According to both of the artist's biographers, Paul V had claimed that 

Bernini would be the Michelangelo of his age (Bernini, 9, 11-12; Baldinucci, 

75). The witticism about Michelangelo as Apelles and Apollo was originally 

made in a burlesque poem by Francesco Berni and was repeated by Benedetto 

Varchi in his Due lezzioni (first published Florence, 1549, and reprinted in his 

collected Lezzioni, Florence, 1590); see David Summers, Michelangelo and the 

Language of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 205-6, 514-15 

n. 10. 

68. On Bernini's imitation of Michelangelo around this time, see D'Onofrio, 

172-87. For an insightful analysis of the revival of Michelangelo's reputation in 

the Barberini circle in the mid-1620s, as well as a discussion of the uses to 

which Bernini's association with Michelangelo were put much later by 

Bernini's biographers, see Catherine M. Soussloff, "Imitatio Buonarroti," 

Sixteenth Century Journal 20 (1989): 581-602. Michelangelo Buonarroti il 

Giovane-the artist's grandnephew, who edited (and notoriously expurgated) 

the 1623 edition of Michelangelo's Rime-had known Maffeo Barberini since 

his youth and had sent him a partial copy of the manuscript already in Aug. 

1622; see Marziano Guglielminetti and Mariarosa Masoero, "Lettere e prose 

inedite [o parzialmente edite] di Giovanni Ciampoli," Studi Secenteschi 19 

(1978): 178 n. 2. On the edition of 1623, see Enzo Noe Girardi's comments, in 

Michelangelo Buonarroti, Rime (Bari: Laterza, 1960), 508-9. It is of interest 

that Maffeo Barberini pursued early on the implications of Paul V's comparison 

of the sculptor's gifts to those of Michelangelo; in a letter of Oct. 1618, he 

alludes to his attempt to buy from Michelangelo il Giovane an unfinished 

sculpture by the High Renaissance master so that Bernini might complete it. 

See D'Onofrio, 172-74, 187-95; and Lavin, 236-37. 

69. Leon Battista Alberti, Opvscoli morali, trans. Cosimo Bartoli (Venice: 

Francesco Franceschi, 1568), 290: "Io penso che le arti di coloro, che si 

messono a uolere esprimere & ritrarre con le opere loro le effigie & le 

somiglianze de corpi procreati dalla natura hauessino origine da questo. Che 

essi per auentura scorgessino alcuna volta, o ne tronconi, o nella terra, o in 

mold altri corpi cosi fatti, alcuni lineamenti, mediante i quali transmutando in 

loro qualche similitudine, essi gli possino rendere simili a uolti fatti dalla 

natura. Cominciarono adunque a considerare con la mente, & ad esaminare 

ponendoui ogni diligentia, & a tentare & a sforzarsi di uedere quel che eglino 

ui potessino o aggiugnere, o levare, o quel che ui si aspettasse, per far si, & in 

tal modo che ei non paressi che ui mancassi cosa alcuna, da far apparir quasi 

uera & propria quella tale effigie, & finirla perfettamente. Adunque per 

quanto la stessa cosa gli auuertiua, Emendando in simili apparenze hora le 

linee, & hora le superficie, & nettandole & ripulendole, ottennero il desiderio 

loro, & questo ueramente non senza loro diletto." While manuscripts of 

Alberti's Latin text continued to be copied into the 17th century (Leon 

Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, trans. Cecil Grayson [London: 

Phaidon, 1972], 5-7), Bartoli's translation was the form in which the tract was 

most widely known in the later 16th and 17th centuries (it was in fact 

republished in 1651 as part of the Paris edition of Leonardo da Vinci's Trattato 

della pittura). See Marco Collareta, "Considerazioni in margine al 'De statua' 

ed alla sua fortuna," Annali della Scuola Normale di Pisa; Classe di Lettere e 

Filosofia, 3d ser., 12 (1982): 185-87. 

70. The relation of this story to the tale of Daphne was noted by H. W. 

Janson, in "The 'Image Made by Chance' in Renaissance Thought," in his 

Sixteen Studies (New York: Abrams, [1974]), 60-61. 

71. For an overview (albeit a not entirely sympathetic one) of the 16th- and 

17th-century literature on the relationship between poetry and painting, see 

Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New 

York: Norton, 1967). 

72. Bernini, 13: "Siccht era cosa cosi solita il non comparire in Casa Gio: 

Lorenzo, che il Padre non vedendolo per giorni intieri, ni pure domandava di 

che ne fosse, certo gid della dimora di lui nello Studio di S. Pietro, dove, al dir 

del figliuolo, stavan di Casa le sue Innammorate, intendendo delle Statue che 

vi erano" (So it was so usual for Gian Lorenzo not to show up at home that his 

father, not seeing him for entire days, didn't even ask where he was, so sure was 

he that he was staying at the Studio of St. Peter's, where, in the words of his 

young son, his girlfriends resided, meaning the statues that were there). 

73. Bernini, 18: "soleva rispondere, Che nel operare si sentiva tanto 

infiammato, e tanto innamorato di ci6, che faceva, che divorava, non lavorava 

il Marmo" (he used to answer that in working he felt himself so inflamed and 

so in love with what he was doing, that he devoured, rather than worked, the 

marble). Similar terminology can be found in Baldinucci's Vita: "Viveasene il 

fanciullo in questo tempo [his childhood] cosi innamorato dell'arte che non 

solo tenea con essa sempre legati i suoi pilh intimi pensieri, ma il trattar con gli 

artefici di maggior grido riputava egli le sue maggiori delizie" (The boy lived 

at this time so in love with the art that not only was it always bound up with his 

most intimate thoughts, but he considered hobnobbing with the most famous 

artists to be his greatest joy), 75; "egli non facesse mai opera senza 

straordinario amore" (he never made a work without extraordinary love), 

141; "Quanto fusse nel Bernino l'amore, ch'ei port6 all'arte non 6 facile il 

raccontare; diceva, che il portarsi a operare era a lui uno andare a deliziarsi al 

giardino" (It is not easy to tell how great a love Bernini brought to his art; he 

would say that taking himself to work was for him like going off to enjoy 

himself in the garden), 142. Amorous terminology had of course long been 

applied to artistic practice, in a sense not necessarily erotic. Already in 1400, 

for instance, Cennino Cennini specified that the young artist should adorn 

himself with a quasimonastic mixture of amor, timor, ubidienza, and perseveranza 

(love, awe, obedience, and persistence; II libro dell'arte, comm. and annot. 

Franco Brunello [Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1982], 6). More recently, Giorgio Vasari 

used similar vocabulary to describe artists' character and working habits- 

Michelangelo, for instance, conjoined such great "labor [fatica]" and "love 

[amor]" in his Vatican Pietd that he was moved to inscribe the finished work 

with his name, and he is also said to have worked with "care [sollecitudine]" and 

"love [amore] " on the Medici Chapel statues (Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 7, 151, 197). 

While Bernini's (or his biographers') use of this amorous language is certainly 

grounded in this tradition, I would nonetheless suggest that at least in some of 

the passages cited, the terminology becomes pointedly erotic: going to visit his 

"innammorate" carries the resonance of courtship, and the delights of the 

garden already had amorous connotations long before Marino set the most 

scandalous passages of the Adone in the Garden of Pleasure. 

74. Pliny the Elder, Natural History 36.21 (on the Cnidian Venus); Ovid, 

Metamorphoses 10.243-97 (on Pygmalion). For other examples, see Berthold 

Hinz, "Statuenliebe: Antiker Skandal und mittelalterliches Trauma," Marburger 

Jahrbuch fir Kunstwissenschaft 22 (1989): 135-42; and the wide-ranging 

and complex treatment of the topic in David Freedberg, "Arousal by Image," 

in The Power of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), chap. 12. 

75. This is explored by Mary Pardo in "Artifice as Seduction in Titian," in 

Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James 

G. Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 64. 

76. P Ovidii Nasoni Metamorphoses ... expositae (as in n. 31), 253. The 

Argumenta were short prose summaries of the myths in Ovid's Metamorphoses, 

found in a number of early manuscripts of the poem, and attributed in the 

Renaissance to a certain Luctatius (or Lactantius); see Brooks Otis, "The 

Argumenta of the so-called Lactantius," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 47 

(1936): 131-63. 

77. On this image (of which there is also a painted version) and the series of 

which it was a part, see Agnes Czobor, " 'The Five Senses' by the Antwerp Artist 

Jacob de Backer," Nederlands KunsthistorischJaarboek 23 (1972): 317-27. 

78. Payments to Bernini for the carved mattress run from Oct. 1619 to Feb. 

1620; see Minozzi (as in n. 11), 431-32. On the restoration, see Montagu (as in 

n. 23), 161; and Matthias Winner's catalogue entry in Coliva and Schfitze, 

124-33. 

79. The visitor was the French president Charles de Brosses, who recorded 

his response in his Lettres d'Italie (1739-40); it was noted in a French guidebook 

to Rome of 1700 that most visitors to the villa tested the substance of the 

mattress by touching it. See Montagu (as in n. 23), 161. 

80. Bernini, quoted in Baldinucci, 141: "non essere dato loro il cuore di 

rendere i sassi cosi ubbidienti alla mano quanto se fussero stati di pasta o 

cera." (See also Bernini, 149, where this criticism is specifically aimed at 

ancient sculptors.) In 1674, Scaramuccia wrote that in the Apollo and Daphne, 

Bernini wielded the chisel in such a way that "piiu tosto in cera che, in Marmo 

poteva credersi impiegato"; Luigi Scaramuccia, Le finezze de' pennelli italiani 

(1674; reprint, Milan: Labor, 1965), 18. 

81. Paul Barolsky, "As in Ovid, So in Renaissance Art," Renaissance Quarterly 

51 (1998): 472. Another ancient prototype for the depiction of flesh so real 

that fingers appear to cause indentations in it is the Plinian account of 

Cephisodotus (36.24), the son of Praxiteles (and heir of his skills-heres artis), 

who made a statue of persons grappling that was "notable for the fingers, 

which seem genuinely to sink into flesh rather than into dead marble"; Pliny, 

Natural History, vol. 10, trans. D. E. Eichholz, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, 

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 18, 19. Presumably, the ability 

to render flesh so suggestively was one of the skills he inherited from his father, 

author of the Cnidian Venus. On the significance of Pliny's description of 

Cephisodotus's statue for Bernini's rendering of the Pluto group, see Preimesberger, 

1989 (as in n. 4), 121; see also Irving Lavin's discussion of the Plinian 

passage in relation to the larger topic of the Renaissance sculptor's competitive 

response to the example of antiquity, in "Ex uno lapide: The Renaissance 

Sculptor's Tour de Force," in II cortile delle statue: Der Statuenhof des Belvedere im 

Vatikan, ed. Matthias Winner, Bernard Andreae, and Carlo Pietrangeli (Mainz: 

Philipp von Zabern, 1998), 203. One final example that forms a link between 

Praxiteles (and, by implication, his Venus) and Pygmalion in point of flesh is

found in Callistratus's Descriptions 8. One reads there of a bronze Dionysus by 

Praxiteles that "sought to show the appearance of life and would yield to the 

very finger-tip if you touched it, for though it was really compact bronze, it was 

so softened into flesh by art that it shrank from the contact of the hand"; 

Philostratus the Elder and the Younger and Callistratus, Imagines; Callistratus, 

Descriptions, trans. Arthur Fairbanks, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, 

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 405. 

82. See, for instance, Paolo Pino, Dialogo di pittura (1548), in Barocchi, 

1960-62, vol. 1 (1960), 129; Benedetto Varchi, Lezzione. .. nella quale si disputa 

della maggioranza delle arti (1549), in ibid., vol. 1, 47; Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 1, 

.... 

77, 94; Francesco Bocchi, Ragionamento sopra l'eccellenza del San Giorgio di 

Donatello (1584), in Barocchi, 1960-62, vol. 3 (1962), 162, 165; Raffaele 

Borghini, II riposo (1584), in Barocchi, 1971, 676; and Giovanbattista Marino, 

Dicerie sacre, pt. I: La Pittura (1614), in Dicerie sacre e la strage de gl'innocenti, ed. 

Giovanni Pozzi (Turin: Einaudi, 1960), 85. 

83. Preimesberger, 3-4. While Varchi was not the first to write about the 

paragone (the topic was already treated in Filarete's 15th-century architectural 

treatise, in Leonardo's writings, and in Baldassare Castiglione's Cortegiano), his 

second Lezzione is the first systematic presentation of the arguments in 

published form. On the paragone in the Renaissance generally, see Farago (as 

in n. 10), 17-31. 

84. Varchi, in Barocchi, 1960-62, vol. 1, 40; Petrarch, 178, 179: "Pigmali6n, 

quanto lodar ti dei / de l'imagine tua, se mille volte / n'avesti quel ch'i' sol 

una vorrei!" Although Petrarch begins the sonnet ("Quando giunse a Simon 

I'alto concetto") by wishing that Simone could have given the portrait voice 

and intellect, in these final two lines he seems to allude to a desire for less 

elevated pleasures. This shift in tone was apparently evident to Petrarch's 

readers, judging from the 16th-century commentators' insistence that the 

poet's words not be taken in a "shameful sense [disonesto senso]"; see, for 

example, Castelvetro (as in n. 52), 160. In 1609, however, Alessandro Tassoni 

did not hesitate to interpret the lines as referring to the "ultimate pleasure 

[ultimo godimento] "; see Le rime di Francesco Petrarca riscontrate, comm. Alessandro 

Tassoni, annot. Girolamo Muzio, and observations by Lodovico Antonio 

Muratori (Venice: Sebastian Coleti, 1727), 154. Rather less often does one find 

tales of paintings that are subjected to more than just desirous glances. 

Leonardo da Vinci provides one example in his paragone writings, when he 

mentions a painting of a beautiful holy subject, the owner of which could not 

stop covering it with kisses (he asked Leonardo to assuage his guilt by 

removing its attributes); see Farago (as in n. 10), 230, 231. It is telling that the 

one painting Benedetto Varchi cites as having the same powers of erotic 

seduction as the Cnidian Venus was the Venus painted byJacopo da Pontormo 

but designed by the sculptor Michelangelo; see Barocchi, 1960-62, vol. 1, 47. 

85. Raffaele Borghini, in Barocchi, 1971, 683. See also Raffaele's uncle 

Vincenzio Borghini, in the same volume, 638-39, and Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 1, 

97-98. The elder Borghini's remarks are made in the context of a diatribe on 

the irrelevance of touch to a discussion of painting or sculpture (since both 

arts--he writes--are intended for the eye and no other sense). 

86. Anton Francesco Doni, I marmi, ed. E. Chi6rboli, vol. 2 (Bari: Laterza, 

1928), 21: "Oh che stupende cose son queste! Io la tocco sasso, e mi muove la 

carne e mi diletta pifi che se viva carne io toccasse; anzi io son marmo ed ella 

camrne." Aurora's ability to excite the visitor follows on another miracle of 

art-the statue speaks in his presence. The theme of the erotic powers of 

Michelangelo's statue was developed by Doni on a number of occasions; it is 

used in a letter to Michelangelo ofJan. 12, 1543, and appears in his dialogue 

Disegno (Venice, 1549), with explicit reference to the Plinian anecdote of the 

Cnidian Venus (one of the speakers responds to his interlocutor's derision of 

that story by claiming, "If you had seen the Aurora of Michelangelo ... 

perhaps you would have experienced a greater stimulus to carnality than that 

youth"). See Barocchi, 1971, 564. See also Pietro Aretino, Lettere sull'arte, ed. 

Ettore Camesasca, vol. 1 (Milan: Edizioni del Milione, 1957), 17, for reference 

to a Venus by Jacopo Sansovino that is so true and so alive that it fills the 

thoughts of anyone who sees it with "libidine." 

87. Alberti's Latin text dates from 1435 (he produced a volgare translation 

the following year), and was first published in 1540 (Basel). Lodovico 

Domenichi's vernacular translation saw print in 1547 (Venice) and was 

followed by Cosimo Bartoli's translation in his edition of Alberti's Opvscoli 

morali (as in n. 69). As with the De statua, Bartoli's translation would also be 

published again as part of the Paris edition of Leonardo da Vinci's Trattato 

della pittura (1651). The claim that Narcissus was the inventor of painting was 

repeated in Paolo Pino's Dialogo di pittura (in Barocchi, 1960-62, vol. 1, 131). 

88. Alberti, 1568 (as in n. 69), 328: "Ma principalmente fu da gli antichi 

honorata la pittura di questo honore, che essendo stati chiamati quasi la 

maggior parte de gli altri artefici, Fabri appresso de latini, il pittor solo non fu 

annouerato in fra i Fabbri. Le quali cose essendo cosi, io son solito di dire in 

fra gli amici miei che lo inuentore della pittura fu, secondo la sententia de 

Poeti quel Narciso che si conuerti in fibore. Percioche essendo la pittura il fiore 

di tutte le arti, ben parra che tutta la fauola di Narciso sia benissimo 

accommodata ad essa cosa. Imperoche, che altra cosa i il dipignere, che 

abbracciare & pigliare con la arte quella superficie del fonte?" 

89. Recent treatments of Alberti's use of the Narcissus theme include 

Norman E. Land, "Narcissus Pictor," Source 16, no. 2 (1997): 10-15; Karsten 

Harries, "Narcissus and Pygmalion: Lessons of Two Tales," Studies in Philosophy 

and the History of Philosophy 23 (1994): 54-62; Cristelle L. Baskins, "Echoing 

Narcissus in Alberti's 'Della Pittura,' " Oxford ArtJournal 16 (1993): 25-33; and 


Stephen Bann, "The Antique Narcissus," in The True Vine: On Visual 

Representation and the Western Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University 

Press, 1989), chap. 4. 

90. The phrase that links the discussion of painting's place among the arts to 

the story of Narcissus in Bartoli's translation-"Le quali cose essendo 

cosi"--closely follows the phrasing used by Alberti in the original Latin: 

"Quae cum ita sint"; Alberti-Grayson (as in n. 69), 62. In a lecture before the 

Roman Accademia di S. Luca in 1594, the painter Federico Zuccaro differentiated 

painting from the other arts using a similar distinction between the 

senses: "[painting's] works are made by means of composing material with 

material, which is to say the colors not understood [compresi] by the sense of 

touch, differentiating it from all the other professions and practices"; Scritti 

d'arte di Federico Zuccaro, ed. Detlev Heikamp (Florence: Olschki, 1961), 37. 

91. Mary Pardo has suggested that the Italian term Alberti uses to designate 

embrace-abbracciare-connotes the braccio (arm's length), which was his 

primary unit of measurement for composing a perspectival picture. See Pardo 

(as in n. 75), 81. In book 1 of De pictura, vision metaphorically operates 

through touch: the extrinsic rays of the eye are said to reach out to a surface 

and measure it by lightly touching (libando) its edges; Alberti-Grayson (as in n. 

69), 40, 41. 

92. See the painting in the Corsini Palace in Florence, variously attributed to 

Andrea del Sarto or Franciabigio (reproduced in Stechow [as in n. 26], pl. 27), 

or the two paintings, apparently pendants, attributed to Bernardo Castello, in 

the Pallavicini Gallery, Rome. The themes are also linked in literary sources. 

See, for instance, the passage in Ottavio Rinuccini's late 16th-century operatic 

text Dafne, in Teatro del seicento, ed. Luigi Fass6 (Milan: Ricciardi, 1956), 13, 

lines 166-72; or the madrigal by Giovanni Boccaccio ("Come su'l fonte fu 

preso Narciso") cited in a number of 16th-century poetical treatises, including 

Antonio Sebastiano Minturno, L'arte poetica (1564; reprint, Munich: W. Fink, 

1971), 453. 

93. Vision and hearing were traditionally the only two senses granted the 

ability to discern beauty; see Summers (as in n. 10), 54-62. For an overview of 

literature discussing the senses, see Louise Vinge, The Five Senses: Studies in a 

Literary Tradition (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1975). 

94. Gian Giorgio Trissino, La poetica (1529), pt. 1, quoted from Bernard 

Weinberg, ed., Trattati di poetica e retorica del cinquecento (Bari: Laterza, 

1970-74), vol. 1, 28. On the necessity of using figured speech in poetry, 

Camillo Pellegrino writes in Del concetto poetico (ca. 1598): "Prose, in expressing 

conceits, uses pure modes of speech, proper words, and when using metaphors 

and figures does so carefully and rarely; whereas verse, with greater 

freedom and sometimes with excessive daring [troppo ardito] presents its 

conceits with figures and metaphors distant from their proper significance 

[lontane dal proprio]"; quoted from Angelo Borzelli, Il Cavalier Giovan Battista 

Marino 1569-1625 (Naples: Gennaro M. Priore, 1898), 336. Similar ideas are 

expressed in the Aristotelian commentaries of Robortello (1548) and Lombardi 

and Maggi (1550); see Danilo Aguzzi-Barbagli, "Ingegno, Acutezza and 

Meraviglia in the Sixteenth Century Great Commentaries to Aristotle's 

'Poetics,' " in Petrarch to Pirandello, ed.Julius A. Molinaro (Toronto: University 

of Toronto Press, 1973), 76-77, 80. 

95. On the association of metaphorical language with meraviglia (already 

implicit in Aristotle's Poetics), see Aguzzi-Barbagli (as in n. 94), 77; and Mirollo, 

118-19, 166 ff. 

96. Preimesberger, 4. There is no record of why Galileo wrote this letter to 

Cigoli, though as Preimesberger suggests, it is likely that the comparison 

between the arts was a topic of discussion among the large group of painters 

and sculptors employed by Paul V in S. Maria Maggiore. 

97. Galileo to Lodovico Cigoli, June 1612, quoted from Erwin Panofsky, 

Galileo as a Critic of the Arts (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 33. 

98. On Galileo as letterato, see CarmineJannaco, Il seicento (Milan: F. Vallardi, 

1966), 539-44; on the annotations he made to his copy of Petrarch, see Nereo 

Vianello, "Le postille al Petrarcha di Galileo Galilei," Studi di Filologia Italiana 

14 (1956): 211-433. 

99. Sperone Speroni, Discorso in lode della pittura, in Barocchi, 1971, 1002: 

". .. nella pittura con la linea e superficie si imita tutto il corpo, cioi anche la 

terza dimensione, che i la profunditY, il che i meraviglioso nella pittura. Ma 

tal meraviglia non i nella scoltura, la quale imita il corpo col corpo, e non con 

manco dimensioni; la qual cosa i assai grossa e rozza e senza meraviglia. Ni 

vale a dire che pidi simiglie il corpo al corpo, e per conseguente ci sia maggior 

imitazione nella scoltura: perch6 qui i non similitudine, ma identith essen- 

ziale, perchi e l'uno e l'altro i corpo in genere substantiae. E do lo esempio della 

poesia: imitare la prosa col verso i imitazion poetica bella e dilettevole, ma 

imitar la prosa con la prosa non 2 cosa poetica nE meravigliosa, per6 meno 

diletta." 

100. For use of the term proper or properly (with its suggestion of the propria 

dire) with regard to sculptural imitation, see Raffaele Borghini, II riposo, 

excerpted in Barocchi, 1971, 689; Nicolo Tribolo, quoted in Barocchi, 

1960-62, vol. 1, 79 (see n. 101 below); and even Cosimo Bartoli's translation of 

Alberti's De statua (as in n. 69), quoted above. The general argument that 

sculpture's tactility renders it more truthful is repeated by Varchi (in Barocchi, 

1960-62, vol. 1, 41-42); Bronzino (ibid., 64); Tasso (ibid., 70); and Marino (as 

in n. 82), 83, who in his Dicerie sacre neatly sums up the terms of the 

comparison as it is made in previous literature: the difference between 

sculpture and painting is that between essere and parere (being and appearing),


sostanza and accidente (substance and accident), veritai and menzogna (truth and 

lie). 

101. Nicolo Tribolo, "Al molto eccellentissimo M. Benedetto Varchi sua 

osservandissimo," in Barocchi, 1960-62, vol. 1, 79: " [S]e fussi uno cieco e non 

avessi mai visto che toccato s6 con giudizio suo, e li trovassi una figura di 

marmo o di legno o di terra, che confessassi 1'2 una figura d'uomo, di donna 

donna, di bambino di bambino; e a l'incontro, fussi la pittura, e 

cercando non vi truova nulla, essendovi, pure la confess6 bugia, perch6i cosa 

falsa mostrare quello che non fa el vero, perch6 la natura non inganna 

l'uomini: s'e uno zoppo, la lo mostra, se e bello, bello ve lo mostra, tale che a 

me mi pare la scultura sia la cosa propio, e la pittura sia la bugia." 

102. Borghini, in Barocchi, 1971, 675; Bernini, in Chantelou, 259. 

103. While Pliny's account implies rather than describes an act of touch on 

the part of the birds and of Zeuxis (Natural History 35.65), later writers are 

more specific. Paolo Pino, for instance, imagines that "Zeusi, cupido di vedere 

l'opra che parea e non era, accostatosi alla tavola, diede di mano nel velo 

dipinto, ond'egli confess6 essere vinto dall ingeniosita del rivale" (Zeuxis, 

desirous of seeing the work that seemed to be but was not, and having gotten 

close to the painting, struck his hand on the painted veil, whereupon he 

confessed to having been defeated); Pino, in Barocchi, 1960-62, vol. 1, 112. 

Marino (as in n. 82), 166, also writes in the Dicerie sacre that "per vedere qual 

pittura sotto il velo di Parrasio si nascondesse, volse levarlo, ed inteso l'errore 

cedette arrossito la palma" (in order to see what painting hid itself under 

Parrhasius's veil, he tried to lift it, and understanding his mistake, he 

blushingly yielded the palm). 

104. Though the painting is not dated, according to Giulio Mancini's 

biography of Ribera, the series to which it belongs was executed in Rome for a 

Spanish patron, which would place it in the artist's Roman period, 1611/13 to 

1616. See Alfonso E. Perez Sdnchez and Nicola Spinosa, Jusepe de Ribera 

1591-1652, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1992, 60-64. 

Other paintings that illustrate this (or related conceits) may be found in Peter 

Hecht, "The 'Paragone' Debate: Ten Illustrations and a Comment," Simiolus 

14 (1984): 125-36; as well as in Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, ed., Immagini del sentire: I 

cinque sensi nell'arte, exh. cat., Centro Culturale "Citta di Cremona," Cremona, 

1996, 43 (fig. 19), 149 (cat. no. VI.3), 157 (cat. no. VI.7), and 165 (cat. no. 

VI.11). 

105. The drawing is discussed in Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The 

Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas 

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 43, 133. Though clearly not by 

Guercino himself, the work resembles a pair of genre drawings by the artist, 

similarly bearing inscriptions, dated to about 1619; for these, see David M. 

Stone, Guercino, Master Draftsman: Works from North American Collections, exh. 

cat., Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Cambridge, Mass., 1991, 188. 

106. Besides the two works mentioned in the text, other seicento depictions 

of Narcissus include Nicolas Poussin's Narcissus and Echo from about 1630 

(Mus6e du Louvre, Paris), the Caravaggist painting attributed to Gerard van 

Kuijl (John and Mabel Ringling Museum, Sarasota, Fla.), and Pier Francesco 

Mola's painting (Palazzo Chigi, Ariccia), reproduced in Ferino-Pagden (as in 

n. 104), 167. 

107. On Caravaggio's painting (whose attribution has been questioned), see 

Rossella Vodret, "I1 restauro del 'Narciso,' " in Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: 

La vita e le opere attraverso i documenti, ed. Stefania Macioce (Rome: Logart 

Press, 1996), 167-83; andJos6 Milicua's catalogue entry in Ferino-Pagden (as 

in n. 104), 140. Milicua, in keeping with the theme of the exhibition, reads the 

painting as an allegory of vision; Vodret (175-76 n. 36) suggests that it may be 

related to Alberti's conceit, as does Mary Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The 

Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton: Princeton University 

Press, 1989), 365. For a reading of this painting that places the relation 

between desire and specularity in an interpretative framework rather different 

from that used here, see Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, 

Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 239-61. 

108. In the proem to the first part of the treatise, Cigoli writes: ". . non si 

puo negare, che la pittura non sia mezzo efficacissimo et ancora antichissimo, 

poi che creato il Mondo e la luce, ella apparisce nelle chiare e quieti acque 

come si vede per le reflessioni de gl'Alberi, et altro, che se la rappresenti 

d'avanti, poi che tutto e contenuto sotto la medesima ragion' di pittura" (And 

it cannot be denied that painting is a most effective and most ancient tool, 

since as soon as the world and light had been created, it appeared in the clear 

and quiet waters, as we can see in the reflections of Trees and other things 

which are represented there, for all this is included within the scope of 

painting); Martin Kemp, "Lodovico Cigoli on the Origins and Ragione of 

Painting," Mitteilungen des kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 35 (1991): 140, 

145 (trans.). The drawing is not related to any known commission; see 

Francoise Viatte, Inventaire gbndrale des dessins italiens III: Dessins toscans 

XVle-XVIIIe sidcles, vol. 1, 1560-1640 (Paris: Editions de la Reunion des Musies 

Nationaux, 1988), 91. 

109. Recall the reactions to the mattress below the Sleeping Hermaphrodite 

(see above at n. 79). Bernini later noted that the spherical base he intended 

for his bust of Louis XIV would have the advantage of discouraging French 

viewers from attempting to touch the work; see Chantelou, 185, 186, 195. It is 

also true that the success of one of his early portraits-that of Pedro de Foix 

Montoya-was certified in a biographical anecdote that plays on touch and 

vision. According to both of Bernini's biographers, when a group of cardinals 

went to see the bust, one wittily proclaimed that the bust was "Montoya 

petrified." When Montoya himself arrived, Cardinal Barberini went to greet 

him, "and, touching him, said, 'This is the portrait of Monsignor Montoya,' 

and turning toward the statue, 'and this is Monsignor Montoya' " (Baldinucci, 

76; Bernini, 16). 

110. Baldinucci, 78. The anecdote has much in common with the stories 

Francisco de Hollanda tells of Clement VII and Michelangelo, or Carlo 

Ridolfi's account of Emperor Charles V retrieving Titian's paintbrush. On the 

topos of the virtuosic artist treated as an equal by pope or prince, see Ernst Kris 

and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist, trans. Alistair 

Laing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 41. 

111. Bernini, 24; Baldinucci, 80. 

112. An interesting anecdote along these lines is provided by Bernini, 51: 

Urban VIII, in the interest of freeing Bernini from the time-consuming detail 

of running a household, suggested that the sculptor get married, to which he 

replied that his works alone should be his children ("l'Opere sue esser solo 

dovevano i suoi figli"). The anecdote was in fact modeled on a similar conceit 

in Vasari's Life of Michelangelo: when a priest suggested the sculptor marry, so 

that he might leave to his children his "so highly honored labors [tantefatiche 

onorate]," he replied, "Io ho moglie troppa, che e questa arte, che m'ha fatto 

sempre tribolare, ed i miei figliuoli saranno l'opere che io lasser6; che se 

saranno da niente, si vivera un pezzo" (I have too much of a wife, which is this 

art that has always tormented me, and my sons will be the works that I leave; 

even if they are trifles, one will live on a bit); Vasari-Milanesi, vol. 7, 281. 

113. The two works are also similar in linking Urban's poetry and Bernini's 

sculpture; just as Urban composed the Latin distich that transforms Apollo and 

Daphne into a kind of emblem, he also wrote hymns for the office of Saint 

Teresa, which could serve as an aural accompaniment to the miraculous 

transverberation visualized in the Ecstasy. On these hymns, which center on 

the day of Teresa's death, see Irving Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts 

(New York: Pierpont Morgan Library and Oxford University Press, 1980), 

116-17; Lavin's book remains the standard text for understanding the chapel 

as a whole. The point at which Bernini began his work on the chapel 

corresponds to the darkest period of his career, a temporary fall from favor 

brought about in part by his friendship with the late pope (70-71, 198). Rudolf 

Preimesberger also notes a connection between the Teresa and an earlier 

sculpture with Barberini associations: the Saint Sebastian (see n. 21 above), in 

which a figure wounded by arrows falls into a swoon suggesting both life and 

death; see Preimesberger, "Berninis Cappella Cornaro: Eine Bild-Wort- 

Synthese des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts?" Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte 49 

(1986): 204. 

114. See Lavin (as in n. 113), 110-11, on the angel's gesture and Teresa's 

superabundant drapery. The apparent absence of Teresa's body (except for 

the hands and feet projecting from the drapery's edge) is perhaps Bernini's 

interpretation of her statement that when the angel removed the flaming 

arrow, "I thought he was drawing [my entrails] out with it" (107). 

115. See Mary Pardo, "The Subject of Savoldo's Magdalene," Art Bulletin 71 

(1989): 84-91, for a highly suggestive discussion of this poetic model's 

significance for the art of illusionistic painting. 

116. On the religious turn in Bernini's later years (recounted by his 

biographers, but also evident in Chantelou's diary), see Anthony Blunt, 

"Gianlorenzo Bernini: Illusionism and Mysticism," Art History 1 (1978): 

78-79. 

117. Baldinucci, 139: "e se talvolta alcuno di loro nel voleva distogliere, 

resisteva con dire, 'Lasciatemi star qui, ch'io son innamorato.' Stava poi in 

quel lavoro cosi fisso, che sembrava estatico, e pareva che dagli occhi gli 

volesse uscir lo spirito per animare il sasso." See also Bernini, 179. 

118. There is one other mythological reference hinted at within the story: it 

is a reversal of the Medusa myth, by which an intense gaze transforms living 

flesh into stone. On the significance of this myth to Bernini's sculptural 

enterprise, see Irving Lavin, "Bernini's Bust of the Medusa: An Awful Pun," in 

Docere delectare movere: Affetti, devozione e retorica nel linguaggio artistico del primo 

barocco romano (Rome: De Luca, 1998), 155-74.

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