Early Life
Bernini was born in Naples to a Mannerist sculptor, Pietro Bernini, originally from Florence, and Angelica Galante, a Neapolitan, the sixth of their thirteen children. Bernini himself would not marry until May 1639, at age forty-one, when he wed a twenty-two year old Roman girl, Caterina Tezio, an arranged marriage that bore him eleven children. In 1606, at the age of eight he accompanied his father to Rome, where Pietro was involved in several high profile projects. There, as a boy, Gianlorenzo's skill was soon noticed by the painter Annibale Carracci and by Pope Paul V, and he soon gained the important patronage of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the papal nephew. His first works were inspired by antique Hellenistic sculpture.
Read more about this topic: Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)