A Jubilee for Two: The Rivalry Between Bernini and Borromini in 1650

CYCLE: The arts around the Holy Years
SPEAKER: Andrea Bacchi
DATE: Thursday, 22 January, 6 p.m.

Among the great modern artists, few were direct rivals as openly as Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini. It was precisely during a Jubilee that this already simmering rivalry exploded dramatically, becoming eternal in the legend of Bernini’s Rio de la Plata, one of the Four Rivers of the fountain in Piazza Navona, which defends itself from the imminent collapse of Borromini's façade of Sant'Agnese in Agone. The Thirty Years' War had just ended in 1648, and for that Jubilee, which marked the definitive loss of many Northern European faithful for Rome, the painter of painters, Diego Velázquez, came to Rome and portrayed Pope Innocent X; meanwhile, Alessandro Algardi sculpted the most memorable marble altarpiece, Claude Lorrain established forever the rules of the ideal landscape, and Salvator Rosa those of the romantic landscape… but the main protagonists of this exciting artistic moment were Bernini and Borromini.

Andrea Bacchi teaches Modern Art History at the University of Bologna, where since 2014 he has directed the Federico Zeri Foundation. After studies on Renaissance Ferrarese painting, he focused mainly on sculpture, both from the Renaissance (in 1999, he curated an exhibition in Trento on Alessandro Vittoria) and the Baroque (in 1996, the catalog Scultura del ‘600 a Roma, and in 2000, Scultura a Venezia da Sansovino a Canova). He has written extensively on Bernini, including exhibitions curated at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (2008) and the Borghese Gallery in Rome (2017).

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