page_title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini
section_title: Later years and death
hierarchical_section_title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini / Life and career / Later years and death
caption_attribution_description: English: Tomb of Gian Lorenzo Bernini in Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore
context_page_description: Gian Lorenzo Bernini was an Italian sculptor and architect. While a major figure in the world of architecture, he was, also and even more prominently, the leading sculptor of his age, credited with creating the Baroque style of sculpture. As one scholar has commented, "What Shakespeare is to drama, Bernini may be to sculpture: the first pan-European sculptor whose name is instantaneously identifiable with a particular manner and vision, and whose influence was inordinately powerful...." In addition, he was a painter and a man of the theater: he wrote, directed and acted in plays, for which he designed stage sets and theatrical machinery. He produced designs as well for a wide variety of decorative art objects including lamps, tables, mirrors, and even coaches.
  As an architect and city planner, he designed secular buildings, churches, chapels, and public squares, as well as massive works combining both architecture and sculpture, especially elaborate public fountains and funerary monuments and a whole series of temporary structures for funerals and festivals.
context_section_description: Bernini remained physically and mentally vigorous and active in his profession until just two weeks before his death that came as a result of a stroke. The pontificate of his old friend, Clement IX, was too short (barely two years) to accomplish more than the dramatic refurbishment by Bernini of the Ponte Sant'Angelo, while the artist's elaborate plan, under Clement, for a new apse for the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore came to an unpleasant end in the midst of public uproar over its cost and the destruction of ancient mosaics that it entailed. The last two popes of Bernini's life, Clement X and Innocent XI, were both not especially close or sympathetic to Bernini and not particularly interested in financing works of art and architecture, especially given the disastrous conditions of the papal treasury. The most important commission by Bernini, executed entirely by him in just six months in 1674, under Clement X was the statue of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni, another nun-mystic. The work, reminiscent of Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, is located in the chapel dedicated to Ludovica remodeled under Bernini's supervision in the Trastevere church of San Francesco in Ripa, whose facade was designed by Bernini's disciple, Mattia de' Rossi. In his last two years, Bernini also carved (supposedly for Queen Christina) the bust of the Savior (Basilica of San Sebastiano fuori le Mura, Rome) and supervised the restoration of the historic Palazzo della Cancelleria as per papal commission under Innocent XI. The latter commission is outstanding confirmation of both Bernini's continuing professional reputation and good health of mind and body even in advanced old age, inasmuch as the pope had chosen him over any number of talented younger architects plentiful in Rome, for this prestigious and most difficult assignment since, as his son Domenico points out, "deterioration of the palace had advanced to such an extent that the threat of its imminent collapse was quite apparent."
  Shortly after the completion of the latter project, Bernini died in his home on 28 November 1680 and was buried, with little public fanfare, in the simple, unadorned Bernini family vault, along with his parents, in the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. Though an elaborate funerary monument had once been planned (documented by a single extant sketch of circa 1670 by disciple Ludovico Gimignani), it was never built and Bernini remained with no permanent public acknowledgement of his life and career in Rome until 1898 when, on the anniversary of his birth, a simple plaque and small bust was affixed to the face of his home on the Via della Mercede, proclaiming "Here lived and died Gianlorenzo Bernini, a sovereign of art, before whom reverently bowed popes, princes, and a multitude of peoples."
caption: Tomb of Gian Lorenzo Bernini in Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore
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