Reconciliation in Marble: Bernini’s Portrait of Innocent X

Giovanni Battista Pamphilj (1574–1655) was elected pope in September 1644 at the age of seventy, after a conclave that had lasted over a month and left most of its participants exhausted. He took the name Innocent X and inherited a papacy financially depleted by his predecessor’s military campaigns and building projects in roughly equal measure. His relationship with Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), who had dominated artistic production in Rome for two decades under that predecessor, was shaped from the outset by that inheritance. That predecessor, Maffeo Barberini (1568–1644), who had reigned as Urban VIII for twenty-one years, had been among the most consequential patrons in Bernini’s career, and the relationship between the two men had been as close as any between a seventeenth-century pope and a working artist. Urban VIII had effectively handed Bernini the keys to Rome: from his appointment as papal architect in 1629, Bernini had overseen the baldachin over the high altar at Saint Peter’s, the tomb monuments for Urban himself, the restructuring of the Piazza San Pietro, and a continuous flow of commissions that made any serious rival in Rome almost invisible by comparison. Alessandro Algardi (1598–1654) and Francesco Borromini (1599–1667), both of considerable ability, had found it difficult to compete in a city where Bernini was so thoroughly embedded in the structures of papal favour. When Urban VIII died in July 1644, he left the Church’s treasury exhausted by the costs of the Castro War — a territorial conflict of limited strategic consequence that had consumed enormous resources — and Innocent X, who had opposed many of Urban’s policies, regarded that inheritance with undisguised contempt. The sculptor and the new pope began, in other words, on the worst possible terms, and what makes the bust so historically loaded is precisely that it was made at all.

The consequences of the transition were immediate and professionally devastating for Bernini. Innocent X ordered structural investigations into Bernini’s bell tower at Saint Peter’s, and the conclusion was brutal: the tower was demolished, the works abandoned, and Bernini’s own property seized as a guarantee against further damage to the basilica. Whether the structural concerns were entirely genuine, or served as convenient cover for the political displacement of the Barberini circle and everything associated with it, has been disputed in the literature, with Sarah McPhee arguing persuasively that the financial difficulties of the papal state, attributable largely to Urban VIII’s Castro War, played a far greater role in the decision than any real doubts about Bernini’s architectural competence (McPhee 2002). What is not in dispute is the practical outcome. Alessandro Algardi (1598–1654), whose sober, classicising sensibility was temperamentally better suited to the new pontificate’s tone, absorbed much of the monumental patronage that had previously been directed at Bernini, including the Villa Pamphilj on the Janiculum, the large relief altarpiece at Saint Peter’s depicting the meeting of Pope Leo I (c.400–461) and Attila the Hun (c.406–453), and a substantial bronze portrait of Innocent now in the Musei Capitolini. The rivalry between the two sculptors, which had simmered throughout the Barberini years, became under Innocent not merely a matter of personal competition but of institutional consequence.

Bernini’s recovery of favour was gradual and, by all accounts, engineered through a combination of strategic intelligence and the willingness to exploit whatever channels of access remained open. The opportunity came through the commission for a monumental fountain at the centre of Piazza Navona, which Innocent was transforming into the public face of Pamphilj dynastic power. Francesco Borromini (1599–1667), Bernini’s great rival in architecture, was already embedded in the piazza’s projects and was the more obvious candidate. According to one version of the story, Bernini arranged for his fountain model to be placed where the pope could not avoid encountering it, and Innocent, after seeing it, reportedly exclaimed that if one did not want to carry out his designs, one must not see them. A parallel account holds that Bernini had a silver scale model, approximately a metre and a half in height, delivered to Olimpia Maidalchini (1594–1657), the pope’s sister-in-law and the most politically consequential figure in Innocent’s inner circle, who then used her considerable influence to redirect the commission. Maidalchini was no peripheral presence: she had effectively governed portions of papal policy throughout the pontificate, accumulated substantial personal wealth and institutional power, and her endorsement carried practical weight that artistic reputation alone could not supply. Both versions of the story may be embellished — they have the flavour of anecdotes improved in the retelling — but their persistence in the sources reflects something real about how patronage operated in mid-seventeenth-century Rome, where access and personal interest mattered as much as open competition. The Fountain of the Four Rivers was completed in 1651, the bust of Innocent followed at around 1650, and the relationship between sculptor and pope had by then shifted, however cautiously, into something resembling functional patronage.

There are actually two marble busts of Innocent X by Bernini, both now in the Doria Pamphilj. The first was marred by a flaw that appeared in the stone at the level of the beard during carving, a circumstance that the gallery’s own records note also reflects the speed at which Bernini typically worked. Rather than salvage a compromised block, he set it aside and began again. The situation had a direct precedent in Bernini’s practice with the two busts of Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1577–1633) in the 1630s, where a late-discovered flaw in the marble of the first version prompted a second carving that is now considered the superior work. That Bernini could repeat a portrait from his clay model at sufficient speed to complete a replacement before the flaw in the original had become widely known tells something important about where, within his working process, the actual creative investment resided. The clay bozzetto, prepared through careful prior observation of the sitter, was the true instrument of invention; the marble was its translation. This is not a trivial point, because it reframes what we are looking at: the finished bust is, in a technical sense, at least one step removed from the moment of conception, and the authority it projects is the result of accumulated preparation rather than spontaneous execution.

Bernini’s standard procedure for portrait busts, documented across his career and most fully recorded in connection with the bust of Louis XIV in 1665, was to spend extended time observing the sitter before any formal session in the studio began, making drawn records of characteristic expressions and natural poses, then building clay models from those observations as a basis for the marble carving. Formal sittings, when they came, were concentrated and focused rather than prolonged, used for the face and any detail requiring direct observation, while the dress and drapery were worked from the model. The rough blocking of the marble was carried out in advance by studio assistants, but the finishing, and certainly the face, remained throughout the work of Bernini’s own hand. Andrea Bacchi has noted that by mid-career Bernini reserved portrait busts almost exclusively for popes and kings, people he could not refuse, and that he valued them too highly to cede the carving to assistants — a telling indication of where, within an enormous and heavily studio-dependent output, he located his most personal investment (Bacchi and Hess 2008).

The optical management of the marble reflects a set of strategies that are easier to describe than to appreciate without direct experience of the object. Working in white stone, Bernini introduced the impression of pigmented eyes by incising the irises deeply so that they lay in shadow and appeared dark, a technique that gives the portrait an alertness and directness that photographs cannot convey. The mozzetta — the short cape covering the pope’s shoulders — is carved with sustained attention to the way fabric accumulates its own weight and distributes light differently across compressed and released folds, with the buttons individually described and the surface as a whole animated by the sense of a body occupying the garment from within. This is not decorative elaboration but argument: in papal portraiture, vestments carried precise hierarchical meaning, and the care Bernini gave to the mozzetta was part of what the portrait was saying about its subject, as much as the expression on the face. The bust proposes, implicitly, that authority inheres in the office as well as the man, and that marble, with its capacity for idealisation and permanence, is the appropriate medium for making that proposition visible.

That argument becomes most legible when the bust is read alongside Diego Velázquez’s (1599–1660) painted portrait of Innocent, made at almost exactly the same moment and, since 1927, displayed in the same room. Velázquez was in Rome around 1650 on behalf of the Spanish crown, with no particular political stake in how he rendered the pope, and his portrait is famously unsparing: a heavy, watchful, inwardly suspicious face, painted with a precision that records what it sees without softening or dramatising it. The quality of the observation is such that Innocent was reportedly reluctant to display the work publicly, and it remained largely out of view through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Bernini, working in marble and in a political situation that had only recently recovered from near collapse, made a wholly different set of interpretive choices. The pope in the bust is purposeful and alert, the gaze directed slightly upward, the head turned just enough to imply that the figure has been caught in the middle of something rather than arranged for display. Where Velázquez constructed a record, Bernini constructed an argument, and the juxtaposition the Doria Pamphilj offers — two portraits of the same man, by two of the great artists then working in Europe, made within months of each other — is one of the most instructive comparisons the seventeenth century has to offer, not because the works are similar but because they disagree so fundamentally about what portrait art is for and what obligations it carries towards its subject.

Contemporaries described Innocent X as physically ugly, and there is no reason to suppose Bernini was unaware of that reputation when he undertook the bust. His decision to idealise rather than record was not a failure of looking but a deliberate interpretive act, one that reflects both the demands of the commission and his own understanding of what marble portraiture could legitimately do. A bust destined for a dynastic family collection is a memorial object as much as a likeness, and within those terms Bernini gave Innocent X something considerably more durable than physical truth: a posture of authority that the living man, by all accounts, did not consistently project on his own terms. Whether that represents the highest function of portrait sculpture, or a form of flattery so polished that it no longer resembles its subject, is a question the two portraits in that small room at the Doria Pamphilj continue to hold in productive tension.

References

Avery, C. (1997) Bernini: Genius of the Baroque. London: Thames and Hudson.

Bacchi, A. and Hess, C. (2008) ‘Creating a new likeness: Bernini’s transformation of the portrait bust’, in Bacchi, A., Hess, C. and Montagu, J. (eds.) Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture. Los Angeles: Getty Publications

Dombrowski, D. (2011) ‘Apotheosis and mediality in Bernini’s later portrait busts’, Artibus et Historiae, 32(64), pp. 183–218. Available at” https://www.jstor.org/stable/i40072095 (Accessed: 16 October 2025).

Lavin, I. (2014) ‘Bernini’s portraits of no-body’, Academia.edu. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/7364051/_Bernini_s_Portraits_of_No-Body_ (Accessed: 16 October 2025).

McPhee, S. (2002) Bernini and the Bell Towers: Architecture and Politics at the Vatican. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Montagu, J. (1989) Alessandro Algardi. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Mormando, F. (2011) Bernini: His Life and His Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wittkower, R. (1997) Bernini: The Sculptor of the Roman Baroque. 4th edn. London: Phaidon Press