Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Scipione Borghese, Borghese Gallery

Scipione was 56 years old when Bernini portrayed him in these spontaneous, istant and psychologically penetrating portraits and they had known each other from twenty years.

When Bernini painted a portrait usually closely followed his model making drawings and trying to find peculiar aspects in this case also with a caricature.

Bernini made two sculptures because, when he almost completed the first, noticed an orizzontal crack on the forehead. At the beginning he repaired it adding a metal clamp and later started the second one. According Domenico, his son and biographer, Gian Lorenzo did it in only three days while Filippo Baldinucci says the he worked on it for fifteen night.

He was well paid, five hundred scudi. To have an idea of how much it was we know that with fifty scudi was possible to rent, for one year, a four stories building in the centre of Rome.

Bibliography: A. Bacchi, A. Coliva a cura di, Bernini Catalogo della Mostra, Roma 2017.