Il Marmo Spirante: Sculpture and Experience in Seventeenth-Century Rome

The sculptors of the Roman Baroque, including masters such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Alessandro Algardi, and Giuliano Finelli, managed to achieve unprecedented vivaciousness in their works. Yet, the apparent life of these sculptures is persistently obscured by their materiality. Soft, undulating flesh and fluttering draperies are captured in hard and lifeless marble. Taking the manner in which the beholder’s engagement with sculpture plays out in contemporaneous poetry and other sources as a point of departure, this study explores the various ways contemporary viewers dealt with sculpture’s double character, introducing ideas from modern-day psychology along the way.