Crackling with energy, this complex sculptural group makes an immediate impression. A faun clambers up a fig tree to pick fruit, acrobatically straddling the trunk while grabbing a high branch. His act is so forceful that the limb snaps. In the tree, two children razz the faun; one pulls his hair, the other sticks out a tongue, and they link arms to obstruct him from reaching his goal. Subsidiary incidents further animate the scene. On the ground a lioness rises, like the faun, to reach some dangling grapes, and in her movement a third child is bucked off. Grapevines cling to the fig tree, making it doubly tempting to the hungry creatures seeking its bounty. Before ascending, the climber must have paused to drape his lion’s-skin cloak on a low branch, and it hangs there in an uncanny juxtaposition to the live lioness on the other side of the tree. Among the roots a lizard scurries to observe the lioness.

Only a carver of great virtuosity could realize such an inventive and complex sculpture. The long and narrow shape of the block of raw material available for this subject constrained the composition, which is best viewed from the front but also rewards observation at the back (see page 115). The narrow ends of the block are less interesting because details are compressed; however, the children’s faces can only be appreciated from a side view. The sculptor pierced openings through the stone so that light would fall on human limbs and tree branches to make dynamic linear patterns. Textures color the sculpture. The faun’s smooth skin stands out against the tree bark, roughened by concentric chisel marks. Whorls of hair, drooping leaves, and bunches of fruit create pockets of shadow across the surface of the marble. Repeated drill marks roughen the lioness’s fur between paw and ground; holes bored between vine and trunk and in　many other passages of the sculpture seem to have been left simply for their pleasing patterns.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Italian patrons admired bacchic subjects in art, and collectors sought out ancient Roman statuary with such themes. Annibale Carracci’s Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne fresco on one of the Palazzo Farnese ceilings elicited admiration from all; scenes of Bacchus’s return from India with a retinue of revelers and wild beasts decorated ancient sarcophagi in Roman collections.[2] Licentious, amusing depictions of ancient deities and woodland spirits were considered appropriate decorations for the gardens that wealthy Romans such as Cardinal Scipione Borghese were creating to surround their villas. For patrons who enjoyed such bacchic subjects, Pietro Bernini, assisted by his son Gianlorenzo, carved several sculptures in the decade 1610 – 20. The Museum owns one pair, Autumn and Spring (1900.53.1 and .2). Another set, a Four Seasons, is in the collection of the Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati, and a third, now-lost group once graced the Palazzo Altemps, Rome. [3] Some of the statues share the motif of fauns (or satyrs) holding bunches of grapes aloft, occasionally accompanied by animals. Of the surviving statues on this theme, the Museum’s Bacchanal is the most complex and refined.

Uncontestably the work of a master, it nevertheless poses a problem of authorship. There is no doubt that it comes from the workshop of Pietro Bernini in the period when Gianlorenzo assisted his father, and it was documented in the house of Gianlorenzo in the inventory taken after his death.[4] But we do not know whether it is primarily the work of Pietro or of Gianlorenzo or a collaborative effort; nor can scholars agree whether it is even possible to distinguish the hand of the father from that of the son during this period.[5] Gianlorenzo worked for his father and collaborated on sculptures for which Pietro, as head of the workshop, received sole payment. There are works made between 1610 and 1620 that are by Pietro alone, such as the relief in the Cappella Paolina in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome. The prodigy Gianlorenzo produced works during that decade that scholars accept to be uniquely his, such as Putto with a Dolphin (1617, Bode Museum, Berlin) and Saint Sebastian (1617, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano). The linear energy of Bacchanal looks back to Mannerism in such a striking fashion that the group was attributed to the preeminent sculptor of that period, Giambologna, when it appeared at auction in 1973.[6] There is a notably Mannerist aspect to Pietro’s aesthetic; the muscular torso of the faun, however, relates most closely to Gianlorenzo’s canon, in works such as the Saint Sebastian, with its solidity and precise definition. The smiling faces of the two children are a motif invented by Pietro for the Cappella Paolina relief, but here they reflect Gianlorenzo’s sharper, more parodic version in the Putto with a Dolphin. The emergence of Gianlorenzo’s style from his father’s is what makes this moment in his career —  and this sculpture —  so intriguing and so problematic. The daring and ambition of the composition and the virtuoso showmanship of its carving, to this author, signal the spirit of the young Gianlorenzo. This attribution follows Olga Raggio, whose greatest acquisition this was and who made a carefully reasoned argument for Gianlorenzo, while observing that the basic composition and spirit owed much to Pietro.[7]

Footnotes:

1. Listed in his 1706 estate inventory; see Raggio 1978, pp.　406, 409.

2. See, for example, a Roman sarcophagus of the second century A.D. in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. For Carracci’s fresco, see Posner 1971, vol.　1, pp.　104 – 8, vol.　2, pl.　111x.

3. I. Lavin 2004, pp.　49 – 50. Lavin (ibid., pp.　49 – 52) dates another sculpture in this group, the Fountain with Satyr and Pantheress (Bode Museum, Berlin), to 1594 – 95, earlier than most scholars do; for this reason, it needs to be considered apart from the others.

4. Raggio 1978, pp.　406, 409.

5. Bacchi 1999. See also Montanari 2005, pp.　276 – 77.

6. For the auction, see the Provenance, above.

7. Raggio 1978.