He seems to have had a sound understanding of structures, which perhaps Bernini and Cortona, who were principally trained in other areas of the visual arts, lacked.

The international collection includes works by Bernini, Bordone, Canaletto, Cézanne, Constable, Correggio, van Dyck, Gainsborough, El Greco, Manet, Modigliani, Monet, Memling, Poussin, Rembrandt, Ribera, Rodin, Rothko, Rubens, Picasso, Pissarro, Tiepolo, Tintoretto, Turner, Uccello, Veronese, and other masters.

Above them an elephant with long flamingo legs, found in other compositions of the period such as Dalí's The Temptations of St. Anthony, carries on its back an obelisk — like Bernini ’ s Elephant and Obelisk in the Piazza Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome.

The obelisk marked a center, and a granite fountain by Carlo Maderno stood to one side: Bernini made the fountain appear to be one of the foci of the ovato tondo embraced by his colonnades and eventually matched it on the other side, in 1675, just five years before his death.

In two niches across from each other, interactive sculptures by Bernini, of Habakkuk and the Angel that took him by the hair and transported him to Babylon to succour Daniel, who is represented in the corresponding niche on the opposite wall.

It can be seen directly or indirectly in the work of Rubens, Jusepe de Ribera, Bernini, and Rembrandt, and artists in the following generation heavily under his influence were called the " Caravaggisti " or " Caravagesques ", as well as Tenebrists or " Tenebrosi " (" shadowists ").

Famous artists and architects, such as Bramante, Bernini and Raphael resided for some time in Rome, contributing to its Renaissance and Baroque architecture.

It was a cultural powerhouse during the Baroque era as home to artists including Caravaggio, Rosa and Bernini, philosophers such as Telesio, Bruno, Campanella and Vico, and writers such as Battista Marino.

Designers and artists whose work is on display in the galleries include Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Grinling Gibbons, Daniel Marot, Louis Laguerre, Antonio Verrio, Sir James Thornhill, William Kent, Robert Adam, Josiah Wedgwood, Matthew Boulton, Canova, Thomas Chippendale, Pugin, William Morris.

It is a measure of his achievement that artists as diverse as Bernini, Poussin, and Rubens praised his work.

The confraternity continued to draw members from the elite of Rome's artists and architects, and among later members we find Bernini, Cortona, Algardi, and many others.

While his plays were successful, this also gained him powerful enemies among patrons and artists, including Bernini himself, in Rome.

He was the father of one the most famous artists of Baroque, Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

With the death of the Barberini Pope Urban VIII in 1644 and the accession of the Pamphilj Pope Innocent X, the Barberini family and their favorite artist, Bernini, fell into disrepute.

Francesco Borromini, byname of Francesco Castelli ( 25 September 1599 – 3 August 1667 ), was an architect from Ticino who, with his contemporaries Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Pietro da Cortona, was a leading figure in the emergence of Roman Baroque architecture.

Unlike Bernini who easily adopted the mantle of the charming courtier in his pursuit of important commissions, Borromini was both melancholic and quick in temper which resulted in him withdrawing from certain jobs, and his death was by suicide.

Bernini was born in Naples to a Mannerist sculptor, Pietro Bernini, originally from Florence, and Angelica Galante, a Neapolitan, the sixth of their thirteen children.

Although generally credited to Bartolomeo Avanzini, it has been suggested that advice and guidance in the design process had been sought from the contemporary luminaries, Cortona, Bernini, and Borromini.

* In 1625, sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini finished his piece entitled Apollo and Daphne, taken from the episode in Book 1 in which Apollo, pierced by a love-inducing arrow from Cupid, pursues the fleeing nymph Daphne.

In the following century, it was not the admirers of Caravaggio who would have dismissed Carracci, but to a lesser extent than Bernini and Cortona, baroque art in general came under criticism from neoclassic critics such as Winckelmann and even later from the prudish John Ruskin.

The latter has a major historic value, because it was one of the quarries that Gian Lorenzo Bernini selected material from to build the famous ( colonnato di Piazza S. Pietro ) The Colonnade of St. Peter's Square in Rome in 1656-1667.

It is also said that the bronze was used by Bernini in creating his famous baldachin above the high altar of St. Peter's Basilica, but, according to at least one expert, the Pope's accounts state that about 90 % of the bronze was used for the cannon, and that the bronze for the baldachin came from Venice.

In the competition for the new range of building for the Louvre he was successful over all rivals, even Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who had traveled from Italy expressly for the purpose.

In 1642, Father Valerio, with Bernini, redesigned the façade to the Piazza di Spagna, and the development was continued along the Via Due Macelli by Gaspare de ’ Vecchio from 1639-1645.

In 1648, Borromini took over and made various proposals that included demolishing Bernini ’ s chapel which must have been particularly galling for the latter as he could see the building from his house on Via Mercede.

Symmetrical double flights of stairs flanking the central axis lead to the next garden terrace, with the Grotto of Diana, richly decorated with frescoes and pebble mosaic to one side and the central Fontana del Bicchierone (" Fountain of the Great Cup ") loosely attributed to Bernini, where water issues from a seemingly natural rock into a scrolling shell-like cup.

At the Triton Fountain, Urban and Bernini brought the idea of a sculptural fountain, familiar from villa gardens, decisively to a public urban setting for the first time ; previous public fountains in the city of Rome had been passive basins for the reception of public water.

Bernini has represented the triton to illustrate the triumphant passage from Ovid's Metamorphoses book I, evoking godlike control over the waters and describing the draining away of the Universal Deluge.

It features important sculptural and architectural creations: in the center stands the famous Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi or Fountain of the Four Rivers ( 1651 ) by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, topped by the Obelisk of Domitian, brought here in pieces from the Circus of Maxentius the church of Sant ' Agnese in Agone by Francesco Borromini, Girolamo Rainaldi, Carlo Rainaldi and others ; and the aforementioned Pamphili palace, also by Girolamo Rainaldi, that accommodates the long gallery designed by Borromini and frescoed by Pietro da Cortona.

The garden Casino Borghese, built on a rise above the Villa by the architect Giovanni Vasanzio, was set up by Camillo Borghese to contain sculptures by Bernini from the Borghese collection, including his David and his Daphne, and by Antonio Canova ( Paolina Borghese ), with paintings by Titian, Raphael and Caravaggio.

The open space which lies before the basilica was redesigned by Gian Lorenzo Bernini from 1656 to 1667, under the direction of Pope Alexander VII, as an appropriate forecourt, designed " so that the greatest number of people could see the Pope give his blessing, either from the middle of the façade of the church or from a window in the Vatican Palace " ( Norwich 1975 p 175 ).

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, a sculptor from the Baroque period, made his bozzetti from wax or baked terracotta to show his patrons how the final piece was intended to look.

Giambologna was an important influence on later sculptors through his pupils Adriaen de Vries and Pietro Francavilla who left his atelier for Paris in 1601, as well as Pierre Puget who spread Giambologna's influence throughout Northern Europe, and in Italy on Pietro Tacca, who assumed Giambologna's workshop in Florence, and in Rome on Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Alessandro Algardi.

Some decades later, when Bernini restored the Scala Regia, he placed a sculpture of his own making there, an equestrian statue of Emperor Constantine, and re-designed the stairway such that light shines down through a window above, with the ( inter alia ) O ' Donnell motto In Hoc Signo Vinces, reminiscent of Constantine's vision, overhead.

Bernini considered the church one of his most perfect works ; his son, Domenico, recalled that in his later years, Bernini spent hours sitting inside it, appreciating what he had achieved.

During this time, Bernini supposedly espoused some quietist teachings of the Spanish priest Miguel de Molinos, who was later condemned as heretical in no small part due to Jesuit efforts.

When contrasted with the serene single-viewpoint pose of the nearby Michelangelo's David, finished nearly 80 years before, this statue is infused with the dynamics that lead towards Baroque, but the tight, uncomfortable, verticality — self-imposed by the author's virtuosic restriction to a composition that could be carved from a single block of marble — lacks the diagonal thrusts that Bernini would achieve forty years later with his Rape of Proserpina and Apollo and Daphne, both at the Galleria Borghese, Rome.

One of the great periods of art history, Baroque Art was developed by Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, and Gianlorenzo Bernini, among others.

The style was used in bronze by Bernini for his spectacular St. Peter's baldachin, actually a ciborium ( which displaced Constantine's columns ), and thereafter became very popular with Baroque and Rococo church architects, above all in Latin America, where they were very often used, especially on a small scale, as they are easy to produce in wood by turning on a lathe ( hence also the style's popularity for spindles on furniture and stairs ).

Probably because his work was idiosyncratic, his subsequent influence was not widespread but is apparent in the Piedmontese works of Camillo-Guarino Guarini and, as a fusion with the architectural modes of Bernini and Cortona, in the late Baroque architecture of Northern Europe.

Bernini was also a leading figure in the emergence of Roman Baroque architecture along with his contemporaries, the architect, Francesco Borromini and the painter and architect, Pietro da Cortona.

The church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome contains a Baroque sculpture of Habakkuk by the 17th-century artist Bernini.

Although oval domes have been dated at least as far back as the Middle Ages, many Renaissance and Baroque domes are of this type, notably those of Bernini and Borromini.

* December 7 – Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Italian Baroque sculptor and architect of 17th century Rome ( died 1680 )

He employed Carlo Fontana, pupil of Gian Lorenzo Bernini to transform the villa and dramatic gardens in a Roman Baroque style by 1680.

A synthesis of Bernini, Borromini and Cortona ’ s architecture can be seen in the late Baroque architecture of northern Europe which paved the way for the more decorative Rococo style.

In the Piazza di Spagna at the base is the Early Baroque fountain called Fontana della Barcaccia (" Fountain of the Old Boat "), built in 1627-29 and often credited to Pietro Bernini, father of a more famous son, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who is recently said to have collaborated on the decoration.

Two of the foremost artistic figures of Baroque Rome were involved in the development of the architectural complex ; the sculptor and architect Gianlorenzo Bernini and the architect Francesco Borromini.

* Gianlorenzo Bernini ( Italian, 1598 – 1680 ) The dominant sculptor and architect of Counter Reformation Baroque

Pietro da Cortona, also called Pietro Berrettini, born Pietro Berrettini da Cortona, ( 1 November 1596 / 716 May 1669 ) was the leading Italian Baroque painter of his time and, along with his contemporaries and rivals Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini, was one of the key figures in the emergence of Roman Baroque architecture.

The Triton Fountain ( Italian Fontana del Tritone ) is a seventeenth century fountain in Rome, by the well-known Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

It is a statue designed by the Baroque era sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini ( and carried out by his pupil Ercole Ferrata in 1667 ) of an elephant as the supporting base for the Egyptian obelisk found in the Dominicans ' garden.

The church of Sant ' Andrea, an important example of Roman Baroque architecture, was designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini with Giovanni de ' Rossi.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini ’ s 29-metre-high Baroque baldacchino over the main altar in today ’ s Saint Peter ’ s Basilica is at present the best-known such structure.