The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · a group in white Carrara marble of three figures, over life size, about 2.25 metres high · Pluto striding with Proserpina lifted against his hip, Cerberus at his feet, after the story Ovid tells in the Metamorphoses · carved for Cardinal Scipione Borghese in 1621 to 1622, when Bernini was about twenty three · given in 1622 to Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, kept in the Villa Ludovisi for nearly three centuries, acquired by the Italian state and returned to the Borghese in 1908 · Galleria Borghese, Rome, free standing in the centre of a room · scored as the one marble group as it now stands, its base and setting weighed as survival only
Mode
A free-standing marble group with a principal view and a sequence of secondary ones; one stone carved as several substances; a story given at its instant of force
Mythos
Ovid’s Proserpina: death seizing the maiden; the earth-born girl lifted off the ground; the hound of the threshold; the rest of the cycle, the mother’s search, the pomegranate, the return and the seasons, left outside the stone
Phase
Carved 1621 to 1622 for Scipione Borghese; given to Ludovico Ludovisi in 1622; in the Villa Ludovisi for nearly three centuries; acquired by the state and returned to the Borghese in 1908
Presentation
White Carrara marble, three figures over life size, about 2.25 metres high; now free standing in the centre of a room of the Galleria Borghese
Register
Terror and wonder at making: a struggle staged at the distance its virtuosity creates, with the victim’s tears at the top
Scale
Three bodies, one action, one instant
Governing Proposition
A god of the dead lifts a girl off the earth and strides with her toward his own country, his hound already at his heel. She pushes his head away with one hand and weeps; his fingers sink into her thigh, and the stone gives under them as flesh does. Everything in the group is force against counterforce, and everything is told in the same white marble worked as skin, hair, cloth, tears and fur. The wager is that carved marble can make pressure a fact about matter, and that the instant, walked round, can be read as a sequence: stride, horror, flight.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Gian Lorenzo Bernini carved the group for Cardinal Scipione Borghese in 1621 and 1622, in about a year, when he was about twenty three. It comes between his Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius and the two groups that followed it for the same patron, the David and Apollo and Daphne. They are its company and its context; only this group is scored. In 1622 Scipione gave it to Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, and it stayed in the Villa Ludovisi for nearly three centuries, until the Italian state acquired it and returned it to the Borghese in 1908.
It is one group of three figures in white Carrara marble, over life size, about 2.25 metres high. The story is the one Ovid tells in the Metamorphoses: Pluto, god of the dead, carries off Proserpina, the daughter of Ceres, into the underworld. Bernini takes the instant of the seizure and nothing else. Pluto, crowned and bearded, strides with Proserpina lifted against his hip; she twists away, her left hand pushing at his head; Cerberus, three-headed, stands at his feet.
The work scored is the marble group as it now stands in the Galleria Borghese, where it is free standing in the centre of a room. The base and the setting are weighed only as survival. The group has a principal view and a sequence of secondary ones, and was carved to be walked round in that order: from the left, the stride; from the front, the hand and the face; from the right, the flight.
Movement II
Pluto’s fingers are sunk into Proserpina’s thigh, and the skin rises between them. It is the single place where the group’s theme becomes visible as matter, and it is the reason the group exists in marble. In paint the same image would be an illustration; in bronze it would read as modelled clay, soft from the start. Only carved stone can show a hard block made to yield, and so make the viewer feel the pressure as a fact about matter rather than a depiction of one. The sculptor’s difficulty and the god’s grip are the same act.
What can be stated from it is plain: force exerted on a body is shown as felt by that body. The flesh yields under the hand, the torso twists against the grip, the face weeps. A mass that walks holds a body that cannot get purchase. And the composition puts the victim’s resistance at its top, her hand at the god’s brow, her head flung back, her mouth open, so that the eye ends where she pushes away. That holds outside the Rome of 1622, and it is the group’s disclosure.
It is not all the group insists on. What it most insists on is its own making, stone as skin, and the meaning of the act is carried by a virtuoso’s appetite for difficulty more than by an articulated condition. A cardinal’s collection wanted a marvel and a mythology, and the group delivers both, with the violence aestheticised. The tears and the pressing hand disclose; much of the rest displays. The surfaces partly stand between the viewer and what is being done, and the form serves the virtuosity as much as the meaning.
Movement III
Walked round, the instant becomes a sequence. From the left, Pluto’s stride and the weight lifted against his hip carry the drive of the abduction. From the front, the hand in the thigh and Proserpina’s face, the tears standing on her cheek, give the moment of horror. From the right, her arm thrown up and her hair loosed give the flight. At the base Cerberus’s three heads snarl in three directions. Each station rises, two kinds of height at once, terror and wonder at the making; and the transport stays one of spectacle, the terror held at the arm’s length the virtuosity creates.
The making is load-bearing. The tears stand on her cheek; her hair lifts free of the block; Pluto’s beard and curls are drilled deep; Cerberus has fur and three distinct heads; the drapery runs as a thin, spinning sheet across both bodies, carrying weight from her body to his and reading as movement. Surfaces are told apart by polish and texture, skin against hair against cloth against fur, so that one white stone yields several substances, and the undercutting is extreme and holds. The costs are Pluto’s: his anatomy is pressed toward display, his face is more formula than person beside hers, and the less favoured views are less resolved than the front.
One law holds the group from her raised hand to the hound’s heads: force and counterforce, the god’s stride down and forward against the girl’s thrust up and away, with the beast pinning the ground. A second law governs every surface, that each substance be told by its own working, and the two agree. Almost nothing is idle. Cerberus is needed twice, as the sign of the threshold and as the third support a striding marble group needs. What yields is the god’s: the crown and bident are attributes rather than argument, and his musculature is more than the action asks.
Movement IV
The group is composed on a boundary. The earth-born girl is lifted off the ground by the god of the dead, and the hound of the threshold is already at his heel, so that the abduction happens at the edge between the living and the underworld. Death seizing the maiden is among the oldest patterns there is, and here it is built by structure, the upward struggle against the downward stride, not carried by allusion. The particulars stay particular: a girl’s tears, a hand, a crown.
What is not built is the rest of the myth, which gives the instant its depth: the mother’s search, the pomegranate, the return and the seasons. The group holds one instant of a cycle and does not hold the cycle. The natural order, the earth’s fertility and its turning year, is present only to a viewer who knows the story. Ceres, whose grief is the other half of the myth, is not there.
The orders the group does hold are the divine, in a god of the dead; desire and sexual violence; power, in the asymmetry of a crowned god and a girl; and the threshold of death, in Cerberus. The single action binds them. Labour, the state and history are absent, and consciousness appears only as the instant of terror and of grip. Three bodies and one action are the whole of its range, narrow in kind and wide in substance, god, girl, beast, cloth, hair and tears.
Movement V
About four centuries on, the three figures are the figures Bernini carved, with nothing that carries the meaning lost or replaced. For nearly three centuries the group was in the Villa Ludovisi, a known private collection; since 1908 it has been on view in the Galleria Borghese, continuously before the public. Surface cleaning is the ordinary history of an exhibited marble. It now stands free in the centre of a room, which alters how it is seen and not what survives.
Bernini’s departure was from the Mannerist group, above all Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women in Florence, completed in the early 1580s, itself an abduction in a spiral of three figures with no privileged view. He turned the formal problem into a narrative instant, stone as form into stone as substance, and the endless spiral into a principal view with secondary ones, closer to a picture; the subject, the type and the spiralling pose he took whole. With this group and the two that followed it, marble became a medium for the instant and for the feel of substance, and the Borghese groups together turned European sculpture toward the Baroque. This group’s own share is above all the pressing hand, the touchstone for marble as flesh in the teaching and writing on sculpture since. The questions it raises stay open, how the stone was cut and polished, whether it was conceived for one face against a wall or for the round, and how a work about sexual violence made as a cardinal’s marvel should be seen; they circle one gesture and one instant.
The desk sets the group half a point below Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne at 8.7, the fuller statement of the instant, whose myth is built in the material; below his Ecstasy of Saint Teresa at 8.9, a whole chapel, and his St Peter’s Square at 8.6; and below the Laocoön at 8.6, its nearest ancestor among bodies under force. Rodin’s The Thinker and the Winged Victory of Samothrace stand a tenth above it at 8.3; Canova’s Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss stands below at 8.1, and Fragonard’s The Swing, another erotic subject made for a private patron, at 7.8. Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, a descent to the god of the dead from the same years, stands at 8.7, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the source that holds the whole cycle, at 9.3. In the centre of the room the god’s fingers are still in her thigh, and the stone still gives.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged figure by figure and mass by mass. Proserpina cannot go: she is the event, and her resistance, the hand pressing the god’s brow away, the head flung back, the open mouth, is the whole content. Pluto cannot go, and neither can his hand: the fingers sunk into her thigh are the one place where the theme becomes visible as matter. Cerberus is required twice, as the sign that the ground is already the threshold of the underworld and as the third support a striding group needs in marble. The drapery carries weight from her body to his and is made to read as movement. What yields: the crown and bident are attributes rather than argument, and the god’s spread of muscle is more than the action asks.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Something can be stated: force exerted on a body is shown as felt by that body. The flesh yields under the hand, the torso twists against the grip, the face weeps. The group makes the asymmetry plain, a mass that walks and a body that cannot get purchase, and puts the victim’s resistance at the top of the composition, where the eye ends. That holds outside 1622. But what the group most insists on is its own making, stone as skin, and the meaning of the act is carried by a virtuoso’s appetite for difficulty more than by an articulated condition. A cardinal’s collection wanted a marvel and a mythology, and got both, with the violence aestheticised. The tears and the pressing hand disclose; much of the rest displays.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The elevation is real and of two kinds, terror and wonder at making, and it recurs as the viewer moves. From the left, Pluto’s stride and the weight lifted against his hip carry the drive of the abduction. From the front, the hand in the thigh and Proserpina’s face, the tears standing on her cheek, give the moment of horror. From the right, her arm thrown up and her hair loosed give the flight. Cerberus’s three heads, snarling three ways, add dread at the base. Each station rises, so the frequency is high for a single object. What holds it below the top is register: the transport is of spectacle more than awe, the terror kept at an arm’s length the virtuosity creates.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Built in one place, evoked in the rest. The built place is the descent: the earth-born girl lifted off the ground by the god of the dead, with the hound of the threshold already at his heel, so that the abduction happens at the boundary between the living and the underworld, and the group is composed on that boundary. Death seizing the maiden is among the oldest patterns there is, and here it is carried by structure, the upward struggle against the downward stride, not by allusion. The particulars stay particular: a girl’s tears, a hand, a crown. What is not built is the rest of the myth that gives it depth, the mother’s search, the pomegranate, the return and the seasons. One instant of a cycle is held, not the cycle.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The inheritance is the Mannerist group, above all Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women in Florence, completed in the early 1580s, an abduction whose spiral of three figures draws the viewer round it and has no privileged view. The departure is real and threefold: from formal problem to narrative instant; from stone as form to stone as substance, flesh, hair, tears and fur each worked differently; and from the endless spiral to a principal view with a sequence of secondary ones, closer to a picture. The stake was a twenty-three-year-old’s, on the leading patron’s most demanding commission, with undercutting that could have failed in the block. Held below the gate because the subject, the type of group and the spiralling contrapposto were inherited whole: the swerve is in treatment, on a proven path.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Substitute another form and the work loses what it knows. The meaning of the hand in the thigh is that stone gives. In paint the same image is an illustration; in bronze it would read as modelled clay, soft from the start. Only carved marble can show the impossible, a hard block made to yield, and so make the viewer feel the pressure as a fact about matter rather than a depiction of one. The scale puts the viewer at the height of the action, and the free figure in space makes the struggle a sequence walked through. Held a step below the top because the form serves virtuosity as much as meaning: the brilliance of the surfaces partly stands between the viewer and what is being done, and some of the round is less necessary than the rest.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence over promise: about four centuries, and a reception that keeps returning in more than one key. The early and long-standing return is to technique, how the stone was cut, polished and left matte to render skin, hair and drapery. The art-historical return is to viewpoint, whether the group was conceived for one face against a wall or for the round. The most recent return is to the subject, how a work about sexual violence made as a cardinal’s marvel should be seen, and the hand in the thigh has become its emblem. These questions are real and remain open. But the yield in meaning is narrower than in technique: the questions circle one gesture and one instant, and the group does not hold the unresolved ambiguities that keep Apollo and Daphne’s metamorphosis opening on return.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The field is Roman sculpture of the 1620s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: with this group and the two that followed it in the same years, marble was reorganised as a medium for the instant and for the sensation of substance, and the Mannerist group was turned into Baroque narrative sculpture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide, but shared. The redirection of European sculpture toward the Baroque is credited to the Borghese groups together, and within them Apollo and Daphne is the fuller statement of the instant. This group’s own reach is above all the pressing hand, the touchstone for marble rendered as flesh in the teaching and writing on sculpture since, and later works on the subject, such as Girardon’s group for Versailles, though that owes more to Giambologna. The fame of the detail as an image is presence, and is not credited here.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about four centuries. Form: whole. The three figures are the figures Bernini carved, with nothing that carries meaning lost or replaced. Presence: nearly three centuries in the Villa Ludovisi, a private collection though a known one, then since 1908 on view in the Galleria Borghese, continuously before the public; its presence is very wide, which earns at most a tenth. Fabric: surface cleaning is the ordinary history of an exhibited marble, and the base is weighed as survival only. Its setting has changed, and it now stands free in the centre of a room, which alters how it is seen but not what survives. The usual figure for centuries with the form whole, held in the lower part of its row for the long private keeping and for the unsettled history of the base.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Command of carved marble, judged to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing: the meaning is in the cut. The fingers sinking into the thigh, the skin rising between them; the tears on Proserpina’s cheek; her hair lifting free of the block; Pluto’s beard and curls drilled deep; Cerberus’s fur and three distinct heads; the drapery carried as a thin, spinning sheet across both bodies; and surfaces told apart by polish and texture, skin against hair against cloth against fur, so that one white stone yields several substances. The undercutting is extreme and holds. The costs are charged: Pluto’s anatomy is pressed toward display, his face is more formula than person beside hers, and the less favoured views are less resolved than the front. A summit of the medium, below the very top.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Proserpina’s raised hand and loose hair at the top, and Cerberus’s heads at the base. One law holds them. Everything in the group is force and counterforce, the downward and forward stride of the god against the upward and outward thrust of the girl, with the beast pinning the ground. The drapery obeys the same law, whipped by the movement. Every surface obeys a second law, that each substance be told by its own working, and the two laws agree. Nothing in the group contradicts itself. The range is narrow in kind, one instant, one action, three bodies, and wide in substance, god, girl, beast, cloth, hair and tears; narrowness is not coherence, and the axis is held well short of the top for it.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The orders held: the divine, in a god of the dead; the natural order, implicitly, since the myth is of the earth’s fertility and the seasons, though the group does not show it; desire and sexual violence; power, as the asymmetry of a crowned god and a girl; the threshold of death, in Cerberus. The single action integrates them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the family, for Ceres, the mother whose grief is the other half of the myth, is not there; labour, the state and history; and any consciousness beyond the instant of terror and grip. It is a single group of one moment, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.4, The Imperishable at 9.3, The Living Form at 8.6, then The Inner Law at 8.5. One white marble cut as skin, hair, cloth, tears and fur, with undercutting that holds; a group whole for about four centuries and on public view for more than one; a form in which only carved stone could make the hand’s pressure a fact about matter; and one law of force and counterforce from the girl’s raised hand to the hound’s three heads.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: the divine, desire and violence, power and the threshold of death are held in one action, and the mother, labour, the state and history are absent, with consciousness only as terror and grip. Below the rest of the twelve, The Unconcealment at 7.6: force felt by a body is disclosed, but the marvel of the making outweighs the meaning and the violence is aestheticised. Then The Archetypal Deep and The Bottomless Well at 7.9: one instant of a cycle is built and the cycle is not, and return circles one gesture. The four are one fact: the group holds a single moment and makes more of its stone than of its act.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 9.4, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 9.3 clears the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 falls a tenth short, its reach shared with Bernini’s other Borghese groups; The Swerve at 8.3 falls short, the subject, the type and the spiral inherited whole; The Archetypal Deep at 7.9 falls short, one instant of a cycle; and The Unconcealment at 7.6 falls short, the marvel outweighing the meaning. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis it governs falls below The Unconcealment at 7.6, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. The twelve sum to 98.9, an average of 8.24 that displays 8.2, in Tier IV, two tenths above the 8.0 at which it begins and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the group as it stands in the Galleria Borghese, Rome, and of its literature and reception; the group was not measured, and its height is given approximately. No image or written source was consulted, and nothing is quoted. The work scored is the one marble group of Pluto carrying off Proserpina, with Cerberus at his feet, carved by Bernini in 1621 to 1622, as it now stands; the base and the setting are weighed as survival only, on The Imperishable. The other groups made for Scipione Borghese, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women are context and are not scored. That the group first stood against a wall in the Villa Ludovisi, with a principal front view, is the usual account and is given only as the question it raises. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them whether the group is cut from one block, the history of its base and of any inscription on it, whether an assistant worked on Cerberus or the base, and the exact history of where it has stood.