Stone into Stone

Research Seminar

  • Public event without registration
  • Date: Oct 22, 2024
  • Time: 11:00 AM - 01:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Carolina Mangone
  • Location: Villino Stroganoff, Via Gregoriana 22, 00187 Rome
Stone into Stone
What does it mean for an artist to transform stone into stone? How do we understand mimesis that eliminates the difference between material and its representation? This lecture examines these questions through the lens of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Four Rivers Fountain (1648-51), focusing on its rocky grotto base hewn from craggy, porous travertine so as to look like the stone itself in its natural state.

Purportedly carved by his own hand, Bernini's travertine rockwork runs against his famed ability to metamorphize marble into everything it was not. The artistic stakes of emulating travertine in its very substance will be explored in relation to early modern natural philosophies about the formation rocks and mountains; imaginaries of the geological origins for building; temporalities of production; and traditions of unfinishedness in art. The interpretation of Bernini’s travertine that emerges dissolves the boundaries of the natural, the sculptural, and the architectural and, in turn, gives new purchase on the non-finito as a category of art.

Carolina Mangone is associate professor of early modern art and architecture in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. She is the author of Bernini’s Michelangelo (Yale, 2020) and is currently writing a study of Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures, from their production to their reception, as they inflect and shape an early modern aesthetics of the imperfect.

Scientific Organization: Ariella Minden






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