Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Italian), 1598-1680 - Featured artist works, exhibitions and biography fromGalleria Piltzer S.R.L.

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Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Italian, 1598-1680)

Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Comtesse Mathilde de Toscane

Biography

Only around three hundred drawings by Gianlorenzo Bernini survive today; a remarkably small number given that the artist enjoyed a productive career that spanned nearly seventy years. Furthermore, the majority of Bernini’s known drawings are works of his later years, datable to after 1655, and almost no drawings survive from the first seven or eight years of his career. While most of Bernini’s extant drawings are studies for sculptural or architectural projects, his œuvre also includes a small group of portrait drawings, a number of caricatures, and a handful of male nude academies, of which the present, newly-discovered, sheet is a particularly interesting and early example.