Beschreibung:

After Bernini: An impressive carved white marble group of Apollo and Daphne
Italian, 2nd half 19th century 216cm.; 85ins high Gian Lorenzo Bernini 1598-1680 was an Italian artist who worked principally in Rome. He was the leading sculptor of his age and also a prominent architect. In addition he painted, wrote plays, and designed metalwork and stage sets. A student of Classical sculpture, Bernini possessed the unique ability to capture, in marble, the essence of a narrative moment with a dramatic naturalistic realism. This ensured that he effectively became the successor of Michelangelo, far outshining other sculptors of his generation, including his rival, Alessandro Algardi During his long career, Bernini received many commissions, many associated with the papacy, of which perhaps the most important was the design in Rome of the Piazza San Pietro in front of the Basilica which is considered one of his most innovative and successful architectural designs.. True to the decorative dynamism of Baroque, among Bernini~s most gifted creations were his Roman fountains that were both public works and papal monuments. His fountains include the Fountain of the Triton or Fontana del Tritone and the Barberini Fountain of the Bees, the Fontana delle Api.[14] The Fountain of the Four Rivers or Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi in the Piazza Navona is a masterpiece of spectacle and political allegory. Apollo and Daphne was commissioned in 1622 by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the pope~s nephew and still stands in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. The subject is taken from Ovid~s Metamorphoses in which Apollo, the god of light, scolded Eros, the god of love, for playing with adult weapons. In retribution, Eros wounded Apollo with a golden arrow that induced him to fall madly in love at the sight of Daphne, a water nymph sworn to perpetual virginity, who, in addition, had been struck by Eros with a lead arrow which caused her to harshly spurn Apollo~s advances. The sculpture depicts the moment when Apollo finally captures Daphne, yet she has implored her father, the river god, to destroy her beauty and repel Apollo~s advances by transforming her into a laurel tree. This statue succeeds at various levels: it depicts the event and also represents an elaborate conceit of sculpture. This sculpture tracks the metamorphoses as a representation in stone of a person changing into lifeless vegetation; in other words, while a sculptor~s art is to change inanimate stone into animated narrative, this sculpture narrates the opposite, the moment a woman becomes a tree. Bernini~s sculpture captures Daphne~s transformation with intense emotion and drama by portraying the different stages of her changes. The interlocking components and chiaroscuro create more narrative, reflecting Bernini~s admiration of Hellenistic Greek art. Many marble antiquities and later sculptures were copied in the 18th and 19th Centuries to be brought back as souvenirs of the Grand Tour. This group, which is unusual in being unsigned, is a tour de force in terms of the scale and quality of carving. Interestingly the sculpture has been made in two parts, with the join on the middle of the base artfully disguised by simulating the texture of the ground around the base of the tree.