Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Gian Lorenzo Bernini was the dominant artist of the Roman Baroque and effectively designed the public face of the Catholic Church. Born in Naples in 1598 to a Florentine sculptor, he moved to Rome as a boy and was a prodigy; Cardinal Scipione Borghese commissioned major marbles from him in his early twenties. The Borghese group — Pluto and Proserpina, Apollo and Daphne, and David — transformed sculpture. Where Michelangelo's David waits, Bernini's is mid-throw with his face contorted; where earlier sculptors chose a stable moment, Bernini chose the instant of transformation, and Daphne's fingers are becoming leaves as Apollo touches her. He cut marble into forms nobody had attempted, making it read as flesh yielding under pressure and as bark, cloth and hair. Urban VIII made him architect of St Peter's, and he spent five decades on it: the bronze baldachin over the tomb, cast from metal stripped from the Pantheon; the Cathedra Petri; the sculpted piers; and the colonnade enclosing the piazza, two curved arms which he described as the church embracing the world. He designed the Four Rivers fountain in the Piazza Navona, the Ecstasy of St Teresa in the Cornaro Chapel — where a concealed window lights the marble figure and the patron's family watch from theatre boxes — and the church of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale. His career survived one disaster: the bell towers he added to St Peter's façade cracked its foundations and had to be demolished, which cost him years of favour. He was invited to Paris by Louis XIV in 1665; his Louvre designs were rejected. He wrote plays and stage machinery, and died in 1680.

• Lived: 1598 CE – 1680 CE
• Nationality: Italian
• Roles: architect, sculptor