Carolina Mangone:
Material and Mimesis in Bernini’s Scogliera

This paper considers the paradox of transforming stone into stone by examining Bernini’s travertine outcrop (scogliera) for the Four Rivers Fountain, perhaps the most extreme instance of an early modern sculptor foregrounding the stoniness of his material. How do we understand mimesis that so insistently elides the difference between matter and its representation? In exploring this question, I show how Bernini’s transformation of masonry blocks into the appearance of a naturally occurring and unruly mass intersects with emergent philosophies about earth’s craggy origins, with period constructs about architecture’s geological underpinnings, and with the relationship of material to place. The result is a new vocabulary of stony carving that ultimately reformulates conditions of unfinishedness in art and nature alike.

Carolina Mangone is associate professor of early modern art and architecture in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. She is the author of Bernini’s Michelangelo (Yale, 2020) and is currently writing a study of Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures, from their production to their reception, as they inflect and shape an early modern aesthetics of the imperfect.