Whoosh! You can practically hear the sound of satin flung over papal shoulders and the rustle and creak of silk against silk brocade in “Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture,” currently on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. NYT | Slideshow | related

An installation view of "Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture" at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Holland Cotter writes: "Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture" at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has to be one of the outstanding displays of 17th-century European sculpture in the United States in recent decades. With 28 bronze and marble busts, it the largest show yet of Gian Lorenzo Bernini's portraits.


"Self-Portrait" (about 1625)

In addition to being a sculptor, painter and draftsman, he had a major career as an architect, was a poet, playwright, and stage designer, and still found time for a scandalous love life.


...The expansion is taken to an extreme in the bust of his mistress Costanza Bonarelli, done four later, in 1636. If Scipione's portrait is candid, this one is an exercise in psychological exposure: startled, feral, lips parted as if with a gasp.

Apparently, she had cause to be on the alert. When Bernini suspected her of infidelity he ordered a servant to slash her face.