Bernini broke his marble out of the columnar, broke it out of the sense of piling bricks onto bricks. Photographs do not even do the sculptures full justice; to appreciate them properly, you must walk up to and around them -- as in the Borghese Gallery, which has Apollo and Daphne, Pluto and the Rape of Proserpina, Aeneas carrying Anchises -- when he was under eighteen! Michelangelo's figures are massive, muscular, statuesque -- Bernini's nymphs gambol, their hair flings wild in unseen wind, their soft flesh dimples under a satyr's or god's hand. Bernini achieved a sense of movement, an emotional quality in his sculpture not later seen until Rodin -- and Rodin worked in clay, molding and shaping it to suit. Under his chisel, marble was a flowing willing shape that only set into sculpture when he declared it finished. Bernini was always a misplaced chisel, an overstressed bridge, an inadvertent hammer swing, from ruining his creations ... yet his hand never slipped, even as flawed marble failed under it. Commissioned by Cardinal Scipione Borghese to do a portrait bust, Bernini cranked out a masterpiece ... and then, discovering a hairline crack in the block of marble, carved a second bust, virtually identical, in only fifteen days -- performing a little discreet plastic surgery on his host, shrinking the tubby double chin, making the shocked-cow expression more philosophical.
He could paint too, as in this self-portrait.
But he went Hollywood. Though he lived until the age of 82 -- 65 years of actively practicing his art -- one pope after another recruited or dragooned him into the church's service. He designed St. Peter's, and having designed it, decorated it, with massive ecclesiastical statues toned down from the sensual, almost lascivious pagan mythic figures of his youth. St. Peter's is impressive, and amidst the Counter-reformation one could imagine Bernini believing there could be no higher cause than defense of the most Holy Catholic Church ... but examining his Vatican statues, or the enormous ugly baldacchino that is St. Peters' internal focal point, one can only regret that so much genius was directed to so much statist monument.