he nearest houses, in derision, and went away laughing. It was at
that time that he modelled four grinning masks for the corners of his
sedan-chair, so that they seemed to be making scornful grimaces at his
detractors as he was carried along. He could afford to laugh. He had
been the favourite of Urban the Eighth who, when Cardinal Barberini, had
actually held the looking-glass by the aid of which the handsome young
sculptor modelled his own portrait in the figure of David with the
sling, now in the Museum of Villa Borghese. After a brief period of
disgrace under the next reign, brought about by the sharpness of his
Neapolitan tongue, Bernini was restored to the favour of Innocent the
Tenth, the Pamfili Pope, to please whose economical tastes he executed
the fountain in Piazza Navona, after a design greatly reduced in extent
as well as in beauty, compared with the first he had sketched. But an
account of Bernini would lead far and profit little; the catalogue of
his works would fill a small volume; and after all, he was successful
only in an age when art had fallen low. In place of Michelangelo's
universal genius, Bernini possessed a born Neapolitan's universal
facility. He could do something of everything, circumstances gave him
enormous opportunities, and there were few things which he did not
attempt, from classic sculpture to the final architecture of Saint
Peter's and the fortifications of Sant' Angelo. He was afflicted by the
hereditary giantism of the Latins, and was often moved by motives of
petty spite against his inferior rival, Borromini. His best work is the
statue of Saint Teresa in Santa Maria della Vittoria, a figure which has
recently excited the ecstatic admiration of a French critic, expressed
in language that betrays at once the fault of the conception, the taste
of the age in which Bernini lived, and the unhealthy nature of the
sculptor's prolific talent. Only the seventeenth century could have
represented such a disquieting fusion of the sensuous and the
spiritual, and it was reserved for the decadence of our own days to find
words that could describe it. Bernini has been praised as the
Michelangelo of his day, but no one has yet been bold enough, or foolish
enough, to call Michelangelo the Bernini of the sixteenth century.
Barely sixty years elapsed between the death of the one and birth of the
other, and the space of a single lifetime separates the zenith of the
Renascence from the nadir of Barocco