The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · a group in white marble of two figures in the round, about life size, on a rock base with a carved laurel trunk, about 2.43 metres high with the base · Apollo running, Daphne turning into laurel under his hand, after the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses · carved for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, begun in 1622, set aside while Bernini carved his David, finished in 1625 · Galleria Borghese, Rome, in the villa that has held it since it was made, state property since 1902 · on the base a cartouche with a Latin couplet by Maffeo Barberini, later Urban VIII · scored as the group with its base as it now stands in the villa, the couplet part of the work
Mode
A free-standing marble group made to be walked round; one material carved as several substances; a story given at its turning point
Mythos
Ovid’s Daphne: the god who pursues and the nymph who escapes; the body that becomes the world; the laurel that will crown the god and the poet
Phase
Begun 1622, set aside for the David, finished 1625; in the Borghese villa since it was made, state property since 1902
Presentation
White marble in the round, two figures about life size on a rock base with a laurel trunk, about 2.43 metres high; a cartouche with a Latin couplet on the base
Register
Wonder: speed in stone, flesh closing into bark, a cry without sound, under the sweetness of the making
Scale
Two figures, one tree, one instant
Governing Proposition
A god in full stride reaches a nymph at the moment she stops being one. Under his hand the flesh at her side is turning to bark, her toes are rooting in the rock and her fingers are breaking into leaves, while her face is still human and his is still calm. Everything is the same white marble, made to read as skin, bark, leaf and hair. The wager of the group is that one stone can show a change of substance as it happens, and that the change, walked round, can be read in order, from the god’s back to the nymph’s open mouth.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Cardinal Scipione Borghese commissioned the group for his villa on the Pincian in Rome. Gian Lorenzo Bernini began it in 1622, set it aside while he carved his David in 1623 and 1624, and finished it in 1625. It belongs with the other groups he made for the same patron, Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius and The Rape of Proserpina, and with the David. They are its company and its context; only this group is scored.
It is one free-standing group of two figures in white marble, about life size, on a rock base with a carved laurel trunk, about 2.43 metres high with the base. The story is Ovid’s, from the first book of the Metamorphoses: Apollo pursues the nymph Daphne, and as he reaches her she becomes a laurel. Bernini takes the turning point and nothing else. Apollo runs; Daphne, under his hand, is already becoming the tree. The god’s figure and head are modelled on the Apollo Belvedere, the antique statue every sculptor in Rome knew.
The work scored is the group with its base as it now stands in the villa, which has held it since it was made and which has been the property of the state since 1902. The couplet carved on the cartouche of the base, an early addition, is part of the one work. The figures are two and the instant is one, and the group was carved to be walked round: from the god’s back, past the bark at the side, to the hands, the hair and the face at the front.
Movement II
Apollo is in full stride, his weight carried on one foot, the other leg trailing, his drapery swirled round his loins and over his shoulder. His left hand has reached Daphne’s side. Under it the abdomen is still flesh, but bark has begun there, rising from her legs, which are sheathed to the thigh, over her hip. The hand arrives on a body that is no longer there for him. That is the hinge of the story and the hinge of what the group knows: the instant of possession is the instant of loss.
The faces do not carry it. Apollo’s is the calm of the Belvedere, barely touched by what is under his hand; Daphne’s mouth is open on a cry that has no sound, terror without inner life. The god’s composure is lawful, since he does not yet know what his hand has found, but the meaning beneath the change is shown at the hand and nowhere in the faces. Pursuit transforms its object; the pursued escapes by ceasing to be what was wanted; desire meets matter, and matter wins. These hold, shown rather than said, and they are carried mostly by the spectacle of the change. Wonder outweighs meaning.
Almost nothing in the group is idle. Daphne cannot lose a part: the roots, the bark, the leafing hands and the human face together are the event. Apollo cannot go, since the pursuit is the cause. The laurel trunk behind her is at once the transformation and the support that lets the marble stand. What yields is what marble demanded: the drapery, a support that signs speed but could take another shape; the quiver strap; the rock. A painting can show Daphne becoming laurel, as Pollaiuolo’s does. Only stone can show it as a change of one substance into another, because here woman and tree are literally the same stone.
Movement III
Read upward, the change is continuous. The toes root into the rock. The legs close in bark to the thigh, and the bark rises over the hip. The abdomen is still flesh under the god’s hand. The arms are raised and the fingers break into leaf. The hair is blown back into leaf. The face is open-mouthed and still human. Walked round, the one change is given as a sequence: from behind Apollo, speed, a body in full stride caught in stone; at the side, the bark climbing her thigh like a sheath; at the front, the hands, the hair and the toes going down as roots; then the face. The height is renewed at each step, in one register, astonishment.
The making is the meaning. Leaves are cut so thin that light passes through them, fingers are carved free of the block with nothing behind them, the hair falls in single locks, and the bark is roughened and grooved against skin polished to the warmth of flesh. The polish against the roughness is the boundary between woman and tree, and it moves up her body as the viewer walks. The whole runs on one diagonal that balances a group in motion on a small base. How much of the leaves, the bark and the hair an assistant of Bernini’s shop carved is argued and not settled; whatever the share, the command is the work’s. Its costs are few: Apollo is a quotation, correct and cool, and his drapery is a support doing the work of a sign.
The free-standing group made to be walked round was the Mannerists’ legacy, Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine above all, and the antique groups stood behind it, the Laocoön and the Belvedere. Bernini turned it three ways: a single instant of change for a stable pose, several materials imitated in one, and the many views given as a sequence in order. In the Proserpina he had made flesh yield under a hand; here one material reads as several, and the viewer’s walk takes the order of an event. The risk was physical, since every undercut leaf could cost the block, and a sculptor in his early twenties took it on his patron’s most visible commission. It was not lost.
Movement IV
The cartouche on the base carries a Latin couplet by Maffeo Barberini, later Pope Urban VIII: “Quisquis amans sequitur fugitivae gaudia formae / fronde manus implet baccas seu carpit amaras.” Whoever, loving, pursues the joys of fleeting forms fills his hands with leaves, or plucks bitter berries. It makes of the group a moral of vanity. That is a churchman’s reading, set under a nude it does not explain, and it is not what the marble finds; the marble finds the hand on the turning flesh.
The group does not allude to Ovid’s story; it enacts the turning point in the material itself, and the archetypes bear load. The god pursues and the nymph escapes. The body becomes the world, as the woman becomes the tree and her toes take root. And an emblem has its origin, since the laurel will be Apollo’s crown and the poet’s, so that the loss of the beloved founds the honour of art; that last is present only to a viewer who knows the story, for the crown is not shown. The figures are less particular than the archetype needs: Apollo is a quotation of an antique god, Daphne an ideal type, and nothing in them is of a person, a place or a day, as the bark and the toes are of a tree.
The orders held are several, and the change binds them in one figure: desire in the pursuit, the divine in a god who cannot have what he wants, the natural order in a woman becoming a tree in the rock, the body as flesh and its loss, art in the laurel, and through the couplet a Christian moral of vanity. What is absent holds the group in. Peneus, the river father who answered Daphne’s prayer, is not there; there is no state, no labour and no history; consciousness appears only as fear and as unknowing. Two bodies, one tree, one moment, one register of marvel: one law holds over all of it completely, and the territory is small.
Movement V
The group has stood for about four centuries in the villa it was made for, through the Borghese line and the state’s purchase in 1902, admired by visitors from the 1620s on and famous without interruption. Everything that carries its meaning stands as carved. Its most fragile passages, the thinnest leaves and the finger tips, are where its virtuosity is most exposed, and breaks and repairs are reported there that could not be confirmed. The marble shows ordinary wear at its surface. The couplet, added early, has become part of the one work.
With the Proserpina and the David the group set the terms of Roman Baroque sculpture: the climax of a story in the instant of change, the illusion of differing matter in one stone, the viewer’s movement made the unfolding of the event. Bernini’s later works and his large shop carried those lessons into Rome’s churches and, through his followers, to Europe; the transformation of matter in marble became a Baroque and Rococo virtuoso tradition; Canova’s mythological groups answer it, and the group has remained the reference for flesh in stone. Much of that reach runs through Bernini’s whole art rather than this group by name, and the classical reaction of Duquesnoy and Algardi, then of the eighteenth century, contested it. The questions stay open, whether it was carved for a first view from behind or for the circuit, whether it is the couplet’s allegory, a nude under the Church’s cover or a manifesto for sculpture against painting, but return yields renewed astonishment more often than new meaning.
The desk sets the group two tenths below Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa at 8.9, the later and fuller work, a whole chapel with its light, and a tenth above his St Peter’s Square at 8.6. Michelangelo’s Pietà at 8.9 and David at 9.2 stand above it, and Donatello’s David at 8.8 for a larger historical turn; the Laocoön, its antique model of a body in extremity, stands a tenth below at 8.6, and Canova’s Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss at 8.1. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, its source, stands at 9.3: the poem holds hundreds of transformations and a world, the group holds one and makes it in stone. Level with it stands Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo of 1607 at 8.7, another mythic loss of the beloved. At the front of the group the god’s hand is still at her side, and under it the flesh is already bark.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the group as it stands. Daphne cannot go, and no part of her can: the roots, the rising bark, the leafing hands and the still human face together are the event, a change that has to be readable from foot to crown. Apollo cannot go: the pursuit is the cause, and his hand at her side, touching flesh already turning to bark, is the hinge of the story. The laurel trunk behind her is the transformation and the support at once, the best kind of necessity a sculptor can find. What yields: Apollo’s drapery, a swirl that is a support and a sign of speed but could take another shape without loss; the quiver strap; the rock and the base, permitted rather than compelled. Almost nothing is idle, and the idle parts are the ones marble demanded.
Score: 8.6 / 10
What can be stated as true: the instant of possession is the instant of loss, for the god’s hand arrives on a body that is no longer there for him; pursuit transforms its object, and the pursued escapes by ceasing to be what was wanted; desire meets matter, and matter wins. The group shows these rather than says them, and that counts in full. But the disclosure is carried mainly by the spectacle of the change, and the human condition under it is thin. Apollo’s face keeps the calm of the Belvedere, barely touched by what is under his hand; Daphne’s open mouth is terror without inner life. The couplet on the base states a moral of vanity the marble does not find. Wonder outweighs meaning: high in its kind, below the gate.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The elevation is wonder, renewed at each step of a circuit. From behind Apollo: speed, a body in full stride caught in a stone that weighs tons. At the side: the bark climbing her thigh, closing over flesh like a sheath. At the front: the fingers splitting into leaves so thin that light passes through them, the hair blown back into foliage, the toes going down into the rock as roots. Then the face, the mouth open on a cry that has no sound. The terror is real but brief, a single instant of horror kept under the sweetness of the making. What holds it below the top is range: one register of astonishment, no grandeur of scale and no sustained dread. It is a marvel more than a transport.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Myth built, not evoked: the group does not allude to Ovid’s story but enacts its turning point in the material itself. The archetypes bear load: the god who pursues and the nymph who escapes; the body that becomes the world, as the woman becomes the tree; the origin of an emblem, since the laurel will be Apollo’s crown and the poet’s, so that the loss of the beloved founds the honour of art. That last is present only to a viewer who knows the story, for the group does not show the crown. The figures are less particular than the archetype needs. Apollo quotes an antique god and Daphne is an ideal type; nothing in them is of a person, a place or a day, as the bark and the toes are of a tree. Built at the centre, generic at the faces.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the free-standing marble group of the Mannerists, Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine above all, its figures spiralled to be walked round, and the antique group, the Laocoön and the Belvedere. The departure is in three things: a single instant of change in place of a stable pose; several materials imitated in one, skin, bark, leaf and hair cut as different substances from the same marble; and the many views reduced to a sequence read in order as one walks. The stake was physical. Leaves and fingers carved free risk the block at every stroke, and a sculptor in his early twenties wagered his patron’s most visible commission on what marble had been thought unable to do. The risk was taken and not lost, and the turn goes past the path he had proved in the Proserpina.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Substitute another form and the work’s knowledge goes. A painting can show Daphne becoming laurel, as Pollaiuolo’s does, but only marble can show it as a change of one substance into another, because here everything is literally the same stone: flesh and bark are one material made to read as two, and the sculptor’s act repeats the myth’s. The polish of the skin against the roughened bark is the boundary between woman and tree, and it moves up her body as one walks. Free-standing, the change becomes a sequence in time, given by the viewer’s steps; the weight of the marble makes the speed impossible, and so marvellous. Held below the top because the form does not deepen the meaning of the change beyond the change: it knows how she turns more than what it means that she does.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidence over promise: about four centuries in the house it was made for, and the work has kept its viewers and its questions. Was it carved for a first view from behind the god, or for the circuit, and what does each make of it? Is it the moral allegory the couplet claims, a celebration of the nude under the Church’s cover, or a manifesto of the sculptor’s art in its contest with painting? How large was the shop’s share in the carving, and does it matter to what the group is? What does Daphne’s escape mean when it is also the loss of herself? These are real and argued. But the debate keeps returning to the virtuosity and the instant, and the yield on return is more often renewed astonishment than new meaning. Deep in its making, shallower in what it knows.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The field is Roman sculpture of the 1620s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what marble could narrate: the climax of a story in the instant of change, the illusion of different matter in one stone, the viewer’s movement made the unfolding of the event. With the Proserpina and the David, it set the terms of the Roman Baroque in sculpture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bernini’s later works and his large shop carried its lessons to Rome’s churches and through his followers to Europe; the transformation of matter in marble became a Baroque and Rococo virtuoso tradition; Canova’s mythological groups answer it. Much of that reach runs through Bernini’s whole art rather than this group by name, and the classical reaction of Duquesnoy and Algardi, then of the eighteenth century, contested it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about four centuries. Form: whole; everything that carries the meaning stands as carved. Presence: continuous, in the villa for which it was made, through the Borghese line and the state’s purchase in 1902, admired by visitors from the 1620s on and famous without interruption. Fabric: marble, with ordinary wear at the surface. The usual figure for centuries with the form whole, held a step below the top of its row for the thinnest leaves and the finger tips, the group’s most fragile passages, where breaks and repairs are reported that could not be confirmed. The couplet, an early addition, is part of the one work and costs nothing here.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Command of marble carving, judged to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing: the work’s meaning is its making. Leaves cut so thin they are translucent; fingers carved free with nothing behind them; hair in single locks; bark roughened and grooved against skin polished to the warmth of flesh; toes going into roots with the growth of a plant. Apollo’s weight is carried by one foot and the drapery, and the whole runs on a diagonal that balances a group in motion on a small base. Every surface is made according to what it is, and the light does the rest. Whatever share the shop had in the carving is credited to the work. The costs: Apollo’s figure is a quotation, correct and cool, and the drapery is a support doing the work of a sign. A summit of the medium, narrowly below the top.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Apollo’s calm antique head and Daphne’s roots sunk in the rock. One law holds them. Everything in the group is one instant of a change in progress, read in the material as a gradient from marble that is flesh to marble that is plant, and the god’s composure belongs to that law, since he does not yet know what his hand has found. Rock, laurel, drapery and bodies obey one rule of surface: the stone is made into whatever it represents, and every surface tells its substance. Nothing contradicts. But the range is narrow: two bodies, one tree, one moment, one register of marvel. The law is held completely over a small territory, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The orders held: desire, in the god’s pursuit; the divine, in a god who cannot have what he wants; the natural order, in a woman becoming a tree and rooting in rock; the body, as flesh and its loss; art and its honour, in the laurel that will be the poet’s crown; and, by the couplet, a Christian moral of vanity. The change integrates them in one figure. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, for Peneus, the river father who answered her prayer, is not there; no state, no labour, no history; consciousness only as fear and as unknowing. A two-figure group can hold no more, and the mark describes the form.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.6, The Imperishable at 9.3, The Living Form at 9.1, then The Swerve at 8.9. Marble carved as skin, bark, leaf and hair, leaves thin enough for light to pass and fingers free of the block; a group whole for about four centuries in the villa it was made for; a form in which one stone made to read as two is the change itself, given in order by the viewer’s steps; and a turn that took the walked-round group to the instant of change at real risk to the block.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.8: desire, the divine, nature, the body and art are held in one change, and the family, the state, labour and history are absent, with consciousness only as fear and as unknowing. Below the rest of the twelve, The Unconcealment at 8.2: possession as loss is shown at the hand and nowhere in the faces, and wonder outweighs meaning. Then The Bottomless Well at 8.5: return yields renewed astonishment more often than new meaning. The three are one fact: the form knows how she turns more than what it means that she does.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 9.6, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.3, The Swerve at 8.9, The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.2 falls three tenths short, its disclosure carried more by the marvel of the change than by what can be stated and held. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Unconcealment at 8.2, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.8. The aggregate stands below 9.0 in any case: the twelve sum to 103.8, an average of 8.65 that displays 8.7, in the Canonical tier.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the group as it stands in the Galleria Borghese, Rome, and of its literature; the group was not measured, and its height is given to within a few centimetres. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the group with its base as it now stands in the villa: the two figures, the rock, the laurel trunk and the cartouche. The couplet on the cartouche, by Maffeo Barberini, is an early addition and part of the one work; its Latin, which is certain, is quoted once, with the desk’s English after it. The other groups made for Scipione Borghese, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Apollo Belvedere are context and are not scored. That an assistant of the shop carved much of the leaves, the bark and the hair is a claim not settled; whatever the share, it is credited to the work. Breaks and repairs at the thinnest leaves and the finger tips are reported and could not be confirmed, and are weighed only on The Imperishable. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the quarry of the marble, where in its room the group first stood and when it was moved, the dates of its cleanings, and whether the order of its views was designed.