Bernini at the Getty

Portrait of Cardinal Scipione Borghese (detail), Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1632/Museo e Galleria Borghese - Photo: Arrigo Coppitz

If you're in the L.A. area, there are still three days left to see the phenomenal show of Bernini's portrait busts at the Getty Center, which I caught up with a few weeks ago. (Next stop Ottawa, its only other venue.) In the U.S. we don't get to see much in the way of Baroque marble. For starters, we didn't make any. And our great Robber Baron collectors didn't pry away as much of it from the Europeans as they might have. (There's a very choice Faun Teased by Children at the Met in New York, made by Bernini when he was a teenager no less, but that didn't enter the Met's collection until 1976.) Temporary loans from European museums are also rare, partly because marble is fragile and problematic to ship.

So it was quite an experience to walk through the Getty show, which has room after room of Bernini's finely detailed and even voluptuous marbles. A painter as well a sculptor, Bernini wanted to bring to stone paint's powers of persuasion. He also wanted to transcend the serenity of classical sculpture. (Or at least of classical sculpture as it was understood until the excavation of the Laocöon in 1506, the writhing ensemble of figures from the 1st century B.C that completely stunned the artists of the High Renaissance.) He had an extravagant gift, the kind that was enough not just to give shape to stone but to give it life, breath and a beating pulse.

Thomas Baker, Bernini, 1636-1638/ Victoria and Albert Museum © V&A Images

Bernini's portrait busts can't have the corkscrewing intricacy of his standing figures, the works like The Rape of Proserpine and his Apollo and Daphne that you can see at the Villa Borghese in Rome. (And which, trust me, will never come to you.) All the same they have an incredibly supple animation. His figures bend or torque slightly, as though they were turning to you. Or he catches them with lips parted as though they were speaking, like in the bust from 1632 pictured at the top of this post of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, one of his great early patrons, the man who built the Villa Borghese. Scipione may have been a churchman but he doesn't strike you as an ascetic. He's fat and jowly, literally bursting his buttons — one of them doesn't quite make it through the button hole. He looks like he knows all the Vatican gossip, and is probably the subject of some of it. Part concupiscent bull, part eminent meatball, he delivers his magnificence somewhat coyly in your direction. I found myself thinking of Peter Ustinov.

What all this means is that an official portrait bust by Bernini is not just an emblem but a likeness, not simply an image of authority but the image of a warm blooded individual inhabiting the forms of authority, looking out at us through them. It's a considerable trick.

Costanza Bonarelli, Bernini, ca. 1632 /Museale Fiorentina

And then there's the case of Costanza Bonarelli, Bernini's mistress. Six years after he completed Scipione's he made a portrait bust of her. Marble was expensive and this may be the first bust in history made for the artist's private pleasure. Her blouse is falling open, her lips parted and a hint of double chin just intensifies her fleshiness. When he suspected that she was fooling around with his own brother he sent a servant to slash her face with a razor. The servant was sent to prison. So was Costanza — for adultery and fornication. Bernini was fined. Then the fine was waived if he would agree to marry. (It was rich man's law.)

He did marry by the way, and by all reports became an increasingly pious husband. Costanza disappeared into obscurity. But also, you might say, by way of that great portrait, into immortality.

UPDATE: As it turns out, you didn't have, as I said up top, "three more days" to catch Bernini. That's because the Getty Center was closed today on an emergency basis in response to brush fires that broke out this morning in the hills nearby, about two miles from the Center. An announcement from the Getty press office says there was no damage to the buildings or its collections and that the place will be open for business again on Friday.