Gian Lorenzo BERNINI , Quattro teste grottesche urlanti Four Screaming Grotesque Heads

Описание: Gian Lorenzo Bernini
(Napoli, 1598 – Roma, 1680)
Quattro teste grottesche urlanti, 1650 e il 1655.
bronzo dorato su marmo nero Marquina, altezza 15,5 cm
al momento, in Mostra a Palazzo Chigi di Ariccia (Lazio)
gilded bronze on black Marquina marble, 15,5 cm (24,5 cm including the base)
The Four Screaming Grotesque Heads that Bernini had made for his carriage - Private collection
Provenance
Roma, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680)
Roma, Paolo Valentino Bernini (1648-1728)
Roma, Prospero Bernini (1694-1771)
Roma, Mariano Bernini (1734-1789)
Roma, Francesco Bernini (1769-1841)
Roma, Prospero Bernini (1780-1858)
Roma, Vincenzo Galletti (1810-1893)
Roma, Augusto Giocondi and his heirs


Violent and incisive, in a way that had never been experienced in the art world before Bernini, these four heads in gilded bronze have always been considered an example of expression of the excesses of the Baroque. Dating between 1650 and 1655, they were initially created for his own carriage and casted from the same model, and their wide open and almost protruding eyes, strongly arched eyebrows, mouth open in a cry, hair and beard divided into edgy locks are an admirable example of representation of the desperation’s motion. Their atrocious scream seems so real that it can be heard by the spectator, denoting a strong horror on the face which is at the same time amazement and surprise.
It will be Bernini himself, at an unspecified time, who will remove them from the carriage to include them in his personal collection and place, as the first inventory recalls, in the saloon of the noble apartment of his palace in via della Mercede together with a “portrait of Pope Urban VIII made of terracotta” and a “portrait of Cardinal Borghese in baked clay”.

Our grotesque heads can therefore boast an uninterrupted provenance, having remained in the ownership of Bernini's heirs to this day.
In fact, upon his death in November 1680, Gian Lorenzo Bernini left his personal collection to his son Paolo Valentino. This was kept in the residence in Via della Mercede 11, in the rione III Colonna of Rome.
In the inventory of 1681, the first redacted after the artist's death, the sculptures are reported as "four bronze heads with their stone feet. A piece of metal throws the Sun all gilded into it”.
Upon Prospero's death, his son Mariano succeeded and on 12 August 1771 he had drafted a new inventory. Thanks to the latter we know the layout of the rooms and the collocation of the works in the palace in via della Mercede, where our heads were placed in the antechamber and described, as "four heads of golden metal cast on the original model of Bernino with the feet of White and black”.
After Mariano's death (1789) the inheritance passed to his son by his first marriage Francesco, who upon his death in 1841 left it, as documented, to his brother Prospero Junior, son of Mariano by his second marriage.
On 19 May 1858, upon the death of Prospero Bernini, a new inventory was drawn up this time at Via del Corso 151, where in the bedroom, on "a carved and gilded wooden table in stone covered with ponsella green" our bronzes described as "four small busts of good gilded metal".
Upon Prospero's death, having no male heirs, the hereditary axis passed to Vincenzo Galletti, husband of his daughter Concetta Caterina, last of the Berninis, who died in 1866.
Of their children, only Teresa Galletti survives who married Augusto Giocondi, from whom Caterina Giocondi was born who in turn married Francesco Forti in 1890. Carlo, father of the current owners, was born from these.
Finally, on 20 February 1964, the last Catalogue and estimate of the paintings and sculptures owned by the Forti family and coming from the succession of Casa Giocondi, heir of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, was drawn up by Giuliano Briganti.
The first scientific attribution of the bronzes is due to Fraschetti, in his fundamental monograph on Bernini, the first ever dedicated to our artist.
In 1961, the works are visible to the general public, as Bernini's autographs, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, on the occasion of the Italian Bronze Statuettes exhibition which was followed in the same year, by the exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the following year by that of Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Bronzetti italiani del Rinascimento.
In more recent times the four works were exhibited, again as works by Gian Lorenzo, at the exhibition Caravaggio and Bernini: Early Baroque in Rome at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (2019) and the Rijksmuseum (2020) together with around seventy masterpieces by Caravaggio, Bernini and his contemporaries.

The artworks are declared of exceptional historical and artistic interest and are not available for export outside of Italy.
https://www.flaviogianassi.com/bernini

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