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:
“Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fail that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing “fixes” a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child’s long life ahead.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men about us are dupes. But life is a sincerity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)