IT IS not every day that you get a phone call announcing the discovery of a long-lost Baroque masterpiece, even if you are the director of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. When Alexander Kader, Sotheby’s head of European sculpture, rang Timothy Potts, the boss of the Getty, in March, saying he might have found Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s first marble carving of a pope, Mr Potts booked himself on a plane to London.
“Bernini was the master of the ‘speaking likeness’,” he says. “He found a way of breathing life into marble, of capturing the essence of a person. Not just the physical likeness of the pope, but his personality and stature, his benevolent seriousness and living presence. It makes you go weak at the knees when you see it, even if you know nothing of the artist.”
Pope Paul V’s nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, commissioned the sculpture shortly after the pope’s death in 1621. On its completion it was displayed in Villa Borghese alongside another famous Bernini bust of the cardinal himself. In 1893, when the family fell on hard times, it was sold at auction in Rome, having first been photographed for the catalogue. Along with this snapshot, the bust...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1Nk6xwU
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