The many faces of Gian Lorenzo Bernini

CYCLE: Research in Progress
SPEAKER: Lucia Simonato
DATE: Thursday, Semptember 17, 6:00 PM

Portraits and self-portraits not only punctuated the life of Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), the defining figure of European Baroque art, but also fueled his vibrant critical fortune from the 17th to the early 20th century. Drawings, engravings, medals, paintings, and terracotta busts comprise a complex artistic output, rich with internal echoes and unexpected iconographic solutions, admired by exceptional observers and still capable of revealing surprises today. Retracing this gallery of effigies means recounting an artist's ambition and the social context of his rise, offering a privileged vantage point both on his art and on the captivating history of its literary and visual reception up to the threshold of modernity.

Lucia Simonato is currently Professor of Early Modern European Art History at the University of Vienna (February 2025 – January 2028), while on leave from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where she has been Associate Professor of Museology, Art Criticism, and Restoration since September 2020. In addition to the Normale, she trained at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence and has conducted research at the CASVA of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the INHA in Paris, and Villa I Tatti – Harvard University.
She co-curated the exhibition The Touch of Pygmalion: Rubens and Sculpture (2023–2024) at the Galleria Borghese with Francesca Cappelletti and co-directs the Materiality series for Brepols. Between 2023 and 2026, she served as Principal Investigator for the PRIN project The Public of the Galleria Borghese: 1888–1938. She is the author of the monograph Bernini scultore. Il difficile dialogo con la modernità (2018), which is currently being published in English. Among her many editorial projects are The Drill in Sculpture, from Ancient Egypt to Modernism (with Paola D'Agostino, 2024) and the website Piazza dei Cavalieri: A European History (2023–2025).