by Jon Lackman | 27 March 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
In his new, intimately detailed Bernini biography, Arne Karsten evokes the artist’s role in the history of Baroque Rome, writes reviewer Dirk Schümer in the Frankfurter Allgemeine. He describes how the Piazza Navona fountain, for instance, symbolized papal world domination (showing the Rio de la Plata, Danube, Nile, and Ganges) just as the Peace of Westphalia was doing away with the Church’s temporal powers. An expert social tactician, Bernini loved springing surprises, such as the irrigation of the Navona fountain upon the Pope’s visit. Karsten, affiliated with the Requiem research program on papal funerary art, makes good use of his knowledge of patronage history, noting for instance that the St. Peter’s baldachin alone consumed ten percent of papal state income. Over at Kunstform, Felix Ackermann praises the author for bringing such material to a general audience, but notes a certain lack of critical distance from the primary sources, questions the casual style and tone, and in the end favors the 2004 Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco book over Karsten’s.
