A volume on the legacy of work Bernini left to history, operating in 17th-century Rome. A sublime expression, as the critical analysis reveals, of complex, arduous research.
[Bernini architect] The exultant, triumphal image of Bernini is one of the clichés challenged by this book, which reconstructs the legacy the artist, working in Rome in the 1600s, left for European architecture. His work, aimed at tracing the outlines of a new, vast allegory of centrality, exists precisely between the vanishing of one world and the appearance of a horizon, dramatically occupying the historical space of the demise of the artistic vision of the Renaissance and the appearance of the perspectives of the Enlightenment.
The hypothesis of a less monolithic figure whose formal energy expresses the contradictions of a complex, arduous architectural research is the focus of this volume which, through a fine selection of images, completes a long voyage through the work of one of the greatest protagonists of occidental architecture, a genius who overcame the precarious equilibria of history.