Bernini And Costanza Poem by gershon hepner

Bernini And Costanza

Rating: 5.0


With startled lips Costanza gasps,
and gives Bernini looks that, feral,
explain the knife his servant grasps,
commanded to cause her great peril
and slash her face, because the sculptor
suspected her of having fooled
with his young brother, sua culped her,
and cutting with no chisel, tooled
her face. The stone records her glance
that maybe after sex he carves,
with passion far more than romance,
till, moved by jealousy, he starves
compassion, and defaces though
he’d made her husband cuckold, bold
enough to take her from him. Lo,
you say when seeing her, behold!
My story isn’t about morals
or lack of them, it’s all about
true beauty with which no one quarrels
when taking the artistic route.
Artists’ love lives often cause,
like their models’, serious scandals,
but legislating beauty laws
is done by philistines and vandals.

Holland Cotter writes about the Bernini exhibition at the Getty Museum (“Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the Man of Many Heads, ” NYT, August 8,2008) :
In fact he had it all: not just talent, ego and energy, but also brains (unhampered by troubling introspection) , looks (evident in two 20-something self portraits, one painted, one drawn, in the show) and a careerist’s savvy that seldom let him down. Born in 1598 and raised in Rome, he turned out preposterously sophisticated work when barely into his teens and continued to produce at peak form until his death in 1680. He adhered to the Renaissance model of the artist as polymath. In addition to being a sculptor, painter and draftsman, he had a major career as an architect; was a poet, playwright and stage designer; and still found time for a scandalous love life….If any of Bernini’s portraits can be said to convey affection, the one of Scipione does. Or maybe it’s just a sense of relaxation. He presents his old friend as he saw him — corpulent, loquacious, hat tipped back, lips pursed in a quip — but also as he envisioned him: the rock-solid source of stability he had been for a young artist making his way. And this blend of realism and idealism, of fleeting impressions and monumentality, instantly expanded the possibilities of sculptural portraiture. The expansion is taken to an extreme in the bust of Costanza Bonarelli, done four years later, in 1636. The young woman was Bernini’s mistress at the time, and the likeness was a self-commission: Bernini kept it for private contemplation. If Scipione’s portrait is candid, this one is an exercise in psychological exposure, distilled in the look on the woman’s face: startled, feral, lips parted as if with a gasp. Apparently she had cause to be on the alert. When Bernini suspected her of infidelity — the third party involved being his younger brother — he ordered a servant to slash her face.

8/8/08

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