Volume 37, Number 6 · April 12, 1990
Marble and Marzipan
By Joseph Connors
Roman Baroque Sculpture: The Industry of Art
by Jennifer Montagu
Yale University Press, 244 pp., $45.00
When the French jurist Charles de Brosses wrote, in 1740, the letters from Rome that were later to be widely read, he remarked that the population of the city was composed of one quarter priests, one quarter statues, one quarter those who do scarcely any work, and one quarter those who do nothing at all. Anyone who walks from the Tiber to Saint Peter's today will get the same impression, at least as far as statues go. Ten angels holding the instruments of Christ's passion grace the Ponte Sant' Angelo; ninety statues crown the skyline of Bernini's colonnade, thirteen colossi are to be seen on the top of the façade of Saint Peter's, and many more in the niches of the interior, not to mention the dozens of dreamy-eyed allegories on the many papal tombs. The decorations executed in the nave of Saint Peter's in 1647–1648 included fifty-six large medallions of the early popes, 192 cherubs each over four feet high, twelve giant allegories in the spandrels of the arches, and 104 very large doves, the heraldic bird of Innocent X, the pope who commissioned it all. Critics called it a pigeon coop.
Review, 2563 words
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