Just as history records that nations have a lifespan not unlike that of their human habitants--infancy, childhood, youth, maturity, middle-age, then a doddering old age--the same can be said of a nation's art. Spain, France, England, Germany, have experienced this fate, and no doubt this country too, is presently at some point in this cycle. No country on earth however, more typifies this evolution than Italy, where Western Art all began. What began in the Middle Ages progressed with almost straight linear progression to an apogee during the High Renaissance, then gradually descended through a murky Mannerist period only to re-emerge in some semblence of its previous prominence during the Baroque era, and then to coast downward on its past glory until modern times, never again to even approach its former brilliance. Because Italian art ALMOST peaked a second time during the Baroque era, it is this period that we find most interesting because it is so uncommon in art history.

Of course when one thinks of Italian art during the Baroque period, Caravaggio comes to mind. But another, slightly younger Italian artist may have better typified the era in a broader sense--Gianlorenzo Bernini. Although most remembered for his dramatic sculpture, or perhaps his architectureal skills in planning the enfolding "arms" of St. Peter's "square" in Rome (a misnomer if there ever was on); the man was also a painter as well. In fact, it is this painterly quality we have come to admire most in his sculptures. It's hard to say which of his works is best or most famous. Certainly his "David" from 1623 is the only one to make any kind of challenge to Michelangelo's immortal figure. And my personal favorite, the melodramatic "Apollo and Daphne" from the same period in which he has depicted the moment of Apollo's touch which begins turning his sister-in-law into a Laurel tree. And perhaps, most beautiful, his "Ecstasy of St. Theresa," in which he pulls out all the stops, depicting in hard, heavy marble a scene set on a floating cloud mounted outward from a wall beneath an unseen window which serves as his light source. It's like a three-dimensional painting.

Daring to mimic and surpass Michelangelo himself, Bernini's architectural/interior decoration of the nearly completed St. Peter's cathedral brings to bear the very best the Baroque period had to offer. His massive Baldechino is a free-standing cast bronze structure replete with twisted columns and hanging "canvas," also cast in bronze, which towers upwards over the high altar several stories beneath the dome where Michelangelo's tomb for Julius II was to have rested. The edifice was so massive it's construction created a bronze shortage in Rome. The pope even went so far as to allow Bernini to strip this precious metal from the roof of the Pantheon in order to complete it. Bernini's work, taken as a whole, would seem to suggest that the ideal of the "Renaisance Man" did not die with the Renaissance.