Document Type

Dissertation

Keywords

Baroque, Renaissance, Pagan, Art History, Art, Sculpture, Bernini, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Satyr, Rome

Disciplines

History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology | Music

Abstract

Throughout and succeeding the seventeenth century, countless works by the acclaimed Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) have been recognized as pinnacle contributions to the Baroque period that sanctioned him as one of the most prominent sculptors in the history of Western art. Despite the veneration of his later esteemed works, a single sculpture has been virtually disregarded altogether in the trajectory of Bernini’s career — its consequence reflected in the scarcity of contemporary scholarship on the piece. Bernini’s Bacchanal: A Faun Teased by Children, housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, appears as a seemingly trivial and less-than-life size marble statue with a Bacchic motif; its main subjects are a faun, three putti, and a vining tree. While the present scholarship on Bacchanal has contributed to the chronological harmonization of Bernini’s artistic career and has proffered relevant discourse on a pedantically overlooked masterpiece, academics have yet to consider Bacchanal’s intimate sanctioning of escapism. This research seeks to present a unique perspective on Bernini’s Bacchanal: A Faun Teased by Children (ca. 1616-17) to articulate that the intention of the sculpture was to offer a means of metaphorical abscondence from the theological and social restrictions that afflicted the Early Baroque period through a homage to the credences of classical antiquity and an audulation of the humanist ideals of the Renaissance. In situating Bernini’s Bacchanal in the context of the Early Baroque period, this paper will consider Bernini’s Bacchic muses and their individual significances as representational figures of pleasure and inebriation in classical mythology and the Renaissance, thus illuminating their relationship to escapism.

Article Number

1050

Publication Date

Winter 12-23-2022

Language

English

Version

Pre-publication

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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