This was carved from a single block of marble by a 23 year old in 1622.
Bernini turned stone into flesh...
The sculpture is called the Abduction of Proserpina, and it depicts the moment described in Ovid's Metamorphoses, when the goddess Proserpina was gathering flowers in a meadow and the earth opened beneath her. Pluto, king of the underworld, rose from the dark to take her.
Out of every instant in that abduction, Bernini chose the one when her feet leave the ground.
She is suspended in his arms. She is no longer in the world above, and not yet in the world below. Her left hand pushes desperately against Pluto's face. Her right is thrown back toward a sky she will never see again.
And where the god's fingers close around her thigh, the marble surrenders to them, dimpling inward as living flesh would, as though Bernini had reached the deepest secret of stone and discovered that it had always been waiting to give in.
He used to boast that in his hands, "marble became as impressionable as wax and as soft as dough."
On her right cheek, a single tear has been running for four hundred years...
The work was commissioned in 1621 by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, who wanted it as a showpiece for his own villa. He kept it for less than a year. In the summer of 1622, with a new pope newly elected, he gave it away as a political gift to the pope's nephew, Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi. It disappeared into private hands for nearly three centuries.
The Italian state bought it back in 1908 and returned it to the room it had been made for. It has been there ever since.
I have stood in front of it, and I can tell you that nothing prepares you for the moment you actually see those fingers in her thigh. The marble seems alive and you forget, for a few seconds, that it is stone at all...
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Angelfish 🐠 was anchored near SV Soulmate the night Lynette Hooker was lost off Elbow Cay. As a sailor and documentary editor who has worked on wrongful conviction films, I wanted to put down what I know — what five years of cruising tells me about a cascade of failures on the water, and why the verdict social media has already rendered should give us all pause. #LynetteHooker #Abacos #Bahamas #Sailing #TrueCrime #Cruising
Cascade of Errors https://t.co/LO0ZK4VKep
@QuintusCurtius Did you see this interview? I love this story so much; I’ll watch any interpretation. I enjoyed the French series recently done very much.
But the fact that a grown man has never read the book gave me pause. https://t.co/JOSa7rBzTn