Bernini

beautiful looking book, but make sure you order it in the languages you can read. I ordered German, which sadly I cannot read.

英語だと思って買ったら、ドイツ語でした。ドイツ語でも図が豊富に有り、十分楽しめる内容です。ドイツ語がもっと楽に分かればさらに楽しめると思います。

Amazing detail in the photography and text. A really good book to remember a European vacation.

This is a fine book about Bernini's sculpture. It has multiple photos of the important works. It groups sculptures into chapters by subject matter (busts, mystic religious, mythological, fountains, etc.) which makes sense. The text is interesting, and includes quotes from Bernini's contemporary Baldinucci and others. Avery places heavy emphasis on antecedents that may have influenced Bernini's designs. There is a fascinating chapter about Bernini's methods of sculpting. His fountains are described and illustrated in detail. His architecture is also covered.The book badly needs a biographical summary and chronology to assist the reader. Avery's chapter grouping by subject matter means that the sequence of events jump back and forth confusingly. Dates of composition are not always provided.Finn's photos are very good and taken from well-chosen angles. But some are not as sharp as one would like for such a work. Additionally, some sculpture photos have so little depth-of-field that key details are not even in focus--David's head, on page 67, for example.Nevertheless, I recommend this book highly.Avery is rather too coy and protective of his hero. There is the briefest and most obscure discussion of Bernini's failed campanile on Saint Peter's. It is simply dismissed, without details or illustrations, with "allegations of incompetence...ill-founded". There is a delicate discussion, in the final chapter, of the "truly regrettable episode" in which he attempted to murder his brother and dispatched his servant to slash-attack his mistress. Regrettable indeed. I highly recommend, in addition to this book, Simon Schama's outstanding DVD series "The Power of Art"-- his program on Bernini is magnificent.

This is a terrific study of Bernini, with lots of excellent photos, including photos of the models and preliminary sketches he made in preparation for his sculptures, and drawings for his architectural projects. I learned a great deal about how he worked, and the context of his projects.I came to this after reading Loyd Grossman's new book about Bernini's elephant sculpture carrying an obelisk, which was rather disappointing and had very few decent photos of his earlier work.