Bernini as the Seicento Michelangelo: Imitation and Identity in Art, Architecture and Biography

Bernini as the Seicento Michelangelo: Imitation and Identity in Art, Architecture and Biography Carolina Mangone Doctor of Philosophy, History of Art Department of Art University of Toronto 2012 Abstract This dissertation examines how Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), acclaimed the “Michelangelo of his age,” constructed his identity by imitating the art, practices and persona of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564). Buonarroti’s “inimitability,” a disputed sixteenth-century notion that became ever more contentious as newly critical seventeenth-century perspectives of his work and practice questioned his worth as a model for imitation, furnishes the point of departure for investigating how Bernini became Bernini through and against his predecessor. By analysing Gianlorenzo’s formal, stylistic, theoretical and conceptual references to Buonarroti in his early narrative sculpture (ch.1), his sculpted self-portraits (ch.2), his work at St. Peter’s (ch.3), his architectural ornament (ch.4) as well as the intertextual strategies attending the literary uses of the association between the two artists (ch.5), I shed light on various imitative modes –ranging from emulation, allusion and paraphrase, to repetition, quotation and bricolage – that Bernini and his biographers employed to shape the artist into Michelangelo’s worthy “son” rather than his burdened epigone. In positing a filial model as a flexible framework for understanding Bernini’s life-long relationship to Michelangelo, I take a cue from early modern art writers who suggested that the way to overcome Buonarroti’s inimitability was to resemble him faintly, the way a son resembles a father. Yet while the latter saw filial likeness as fixed, I show that the son’s (Bernini’s) resemblance to his chosen father (Michelangelo) changed by degree and in demeanor over time, according to discipline and, sometimes, from subject to subject. And by reconstituting the respective prisms through which Bernini and his biographers regarded the work and life of Buonarroti, I show that each perceived Michelangelo differently based on the manifold representations of him, his work and his practice that existed in critical, biographical, theoretical and pictorial sources. In turn, multiple constructions of Bernini’s identity as the seicento Michelangelo emerge. This dissertation ultimately suggests that to imitate Michelangelo successfully was not only to inscribe oneself into history but to rewrite the past by altering the perception of Buonarroti from an inimitable vanguard to a fecund “father” of a new generation.

Department dc:contributor.department

History of Art

Year dc:date.issued

2012

Author dc:creator

• Mangone, Carolina

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Levy, Evonne

• Bernini
• Michelangelo
• Imitation

Language dc:language.iso

en_ca

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/67290

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/67290