Portrait of Gianlorenzo Bernini

Castiglione painted this portrait of Gianlorenzo Bernini in 1634, likely during the period when both men were active in Rome — Castiglione having arrived in Rome in the late 1620s, Bernini already established as the dominant sculptor and architect of the Baroque city. The portrait, now in the Musei di Strada Nuova in Genoa, depicts the greatest Italian sculptor of the seventeenth century at age thirty-six, seven years after completing his famous baldachin over Saint Peter's tomb. That a painter should portray a sculptor reflects the lively cross-media exchange of the Roman artistic community. Bernini's own interest in portraiture — he produced celebrated marble busts — makes this double-direction artistic attention between the two men resonant. The Genoese museum preserves this as one of the most significant portraits of a seventeenth-century artist by another.

Castiglione's portrait handling is less formally constrained than his Lombard contemporaries, bringing a looser, more expressive brushwork to the genre. Bernini's face — intelligent, alert, with the sculptor's habit of reading three-dimensional form even in a flat encounter — required Castiglione to capture both physical likeness and professional identity. The warm tonality of his pastoral subjects carries into this more formal context, softening the official portrait convention.