title: Virtualization

text: Hardware virtualization is not the same as hardware emulation. In hardware emulation, a piece of hardware imitates another, while in hardware virtualization, a hypervisor (a piece of software) imitates a particular piece of computer hardware or the entire computer. Furthermore, a hypervisor is not the same as an emulator; both are computer programs that imitate hardware, but their domain of use in language differs.


title: Virtualization

text: A "snapshot" is a state of a virtual machine, and generally its storage devices, at an exact point in time. A snapshot enables the virtual machine's state at the time of the snapshot to be restored later, effectively undoing any changes that occurred afterwards. This capability is useful as a backup technique, for example, prior to performing a risky operation.


title: Virtualization

text: Virtual machines frequently use virtual disks for their storage; in a very simple example, a 10-gigabyte hard disk drive is simulated with a 10-gigabyte flat file. Any requests by the VM for a location on its physical disk are transparently translated into an operation on the corresponding file. Once such a translation layer is present, however, it is possible to intercept the operations and send them to different files, depending on various criteria. Every time a snapshot is taken, a new file is created, and used as an overlay for its predecessors. New data is written to the topmost overlay; reading existing data, however, needs the overlay hierarchy to be scanned, resulting in accessing the most recent version. Thus, the entire stack of snapshots is virtually a single coherent disk; in that sense, creating snapshots works similarly to the incremental backup technique.


title: Virtualization

text: Other components of a virtual machine can also be included in a snapshot, such as the contents of its random-access memory (RAM), BIOS settings, or its configuration settings. "Save state" feature in video game console emulators is an example of such snapshots.


title: Virtualization

text: Restoring a snapshot consists of discarding or disregarding all overlay layers that are added after that snapshot, and directing all new changes to a new overlay.


title: Virtualization

text: The snapshots described above can be moved to another host machine with its own hypervisor; when the VM is temporarily stopped, snapshotted, moved, and then resumed on the new host, this is known as migration. If the older snapshots are kept in sync regularly, this operation can be quite fast, and allow the VM to provide uninterrupted service while its prior physical host is, for example, taken down for physical maintenance.


title: Virtualization

text: Similar to the migration mechanism described above, failover allows the VM to continue operations if the host fails. Generally it occurs if the migration has stopped working. However, in this case, the VM continues operation from the "last-known" coherent state, rather than the "current" state, based on whatever materials the backup server was last provided with.


title: Virtualization

text: A video game console emulator is a program that allows a personal computer or video game console to emulate a different video game console's behavior. Video game console emulators and hypervisors both perform hardware virtualization; words like "virtualization", "virtual machine", "host" and "guest" are not used in conjunction with console emulators.


title: Virtualization

text: Nested virtualization refers to the ability of running a virtual machine within another, having this general concept extendable to an arbitrary depth. In other words, nested virtualization refers to running one or more hypervisors inside another hypervisor. Nature of a nested guest virtual machine does not need not be homogeneous with its host virtual machine; for example, application virtualization can be deployed within a virtual machine created by using hardware virtualization.


title: Virtualization

text: Nested virtualization becomes more necessary as widespread operating systems gain built-in hypervisor functionality, which in a virtualized environment can be used only if the surrounding hypervisor supports nested virtualization; for example, Windows 7 is capable of running Windows XP applications inside a built-in virtual machine. Furthermore, moving already existing virtualized environments into a cloud, following the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) approach, is much more complicated if the destination IaaS platform does not support nested virtualization.


title: Virtualization

text: The way nested virtualization can be implemented on a particular computer architecture depends on supported hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities. If a particular architecture does not provide hardware support required for nested virtualization, various software techniques are employed to enable it. Over time, more architectures gain required hardware support; for example, since the Haswell microarchitecture (announced in 2013), Intel started to include VMCS shadowing as a technology that accelerates nested virtualization.


title: Virtualization

text: Virtual machines running proprietary operating systems require licensing, regardless of the host machine's operating system. For example, installing Microsoft Windows into a VM guest requires its licensing requirements to be satisfied.


title: Virtualization

text: One form of desktop virtualization, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), can be thought of as a more advanced form of hardware virtualization. Rather than interacting with a host computer directly via a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, the user interacts with the host computer using another desktop computer or a mobile device by means of a network connection, such as a LAN, Wireless LAN or even the Internet. In addition, the host computer in this scenario becomes a server computer capable of hosting multiple virtual machines at the same time for multiple users.


title: Virtualization

text: As organizations continue to virtualize and converge their data center environment, client architectures also continue to evolve in order to take advantage of the predictability, continuity, and quality of service delivered by their converged infrastructure. For example, companies like HP and IBM provide a hybrid VDI model with a range of virtualization software and delivery models to improve upon the limitations of distributed client computing. Selected client environments move workloads from PCs and other devices to data center servers, creating well-managed virtual clients, with applications and client operating environments hosted on servers and storage in the data center. For users, this means they can access their desktop from any location, without being tied to a single client device. Since the resources are centralized, users moving between work locations can still access the same client environment with their applications and data. For IT administrators, this means a more centralized, efficient client environment that is easier to maintain and able to more quickly respond to the changing needs of the user and business.


title: Virtualization

text: Another form, session virtualization, allows multiple users to connect and log into a shared but powerful computer over the network and use it simultaneously. Each is given a desktop and a personal folder in which they store their files. With multiseat configuration, session virtualization can be accomplished using a single PC with multiple monitors, keyboards, and mice connected.


title: Virtualization

text: Thin clients, which are seen in desktop virtualization, are simple and/or cheap computers that are primarily designed to connect to the network. They may lack significant hard disk storage space, RAM or even processing power, but many organizations are beginning to look at the cost benefits of eliminating “thick client” desktops that are packed with software (and require software licensing fees) and making more strategic investments.


title: Virtualization

text: Desktop virtualization simplifies software versioning and patch management, where the new image is simply updated on the server, and the desktop gets the updated version when it reboots. It also enables centralized control over what applications the user is allowed to have access to on the workstation.


title: Virtualization

text: Moving virtualized desktops into the cloud creates hosted virtual desktops (HVDs), in which the desktop images are centrally managed and maintained by a specialist hosting firm. Benefits include scalability and the reduction of capital expenditure, which is replaced by a monthly operational cost.


title: Virtualization

text: Operating-system-level virtualization, also known as containerization, refers to an operating system feature in which the kernel allows the existence of multiple isolated user-space instances. Such instances, called containers, partitions, virtual environments (VEs) or jails (FreeBSD jail or chroot jail), may look like real computers from the point of view of programs running in them. A computer program running on an ordinary operating system can see all resources (connected devices, files and folders, network shares, CPU power, quantifiable hardware capabilities) of that computer. However, programs running inside a container can only see the container's contents and devices assigned to the container.


title: Nico Ali Walsh

text: Nico Ali Walsh (born July 11, 2000) is an American professional boxer. The grandson of Muhammad Ali, Walsh came into the ring for his pro debut in August 2021 wearing his grandfather’s personal white Everlast shorts, which were passed down to him in 2016 with the death of his grandfather.


title: Nico Ali Walsh

text: Before going pro in 2021, Ali Walsh spent a few months training alongside world-renowned boxing trainer, Abel Sanchez, in Big Bear Lake, California. After having a "limited" amateur boxing career of approximately 30 bouts, Walsh decided to turn pro in early 2021. He began working with Tyson Fury's current trainer, SugarHill Steward, and is promoted by Bob Arum's Top Rank, who also promoted 27 of his grandfather's fights.


title: Nico Ali Walsh

text: Walsh made his professional debut against Jordan Weeks on the Joshua Franco vs. Andrew Moloney III undercard, on August 14, 2021. He won the fight by a first-round technical knockout. Walsh was booked to face James Westley II, in his second professional bout, on October 23, 2021 on the undercard of the WBO super featherweight championship between Shakur Stevenson and Jamel Herring. He won the fight by a third-round technical knockout. Walsh faced Reyes Sanchez on December 11, 2021, on the undercard of Vasyl Lomachenko vs Richard Commey. In his final fight of the year, He won the fight by a majority decision, with scores of 40–36, 38–38 and 39–37.


title: Nico Ali Walsh

text: Walsh faced Jeremiah Yeager on January 29, 2022, on the undercard of the WBC super featherweight title eliminator between Robson Conceicao and Xavier Martinez. He won the fight by a second-round technical knockout.


title: Nico Ali Walsh

text: Walsh faced Alejandro Ibarra on April 30, 2022, on the undercard of the WBC and WBO super featherweight unification between Shakur Stevenson and Oscar Valdez. He won the fight via 1st round knockout. Walsh also said he hoped to stay active and fight again before he hit a year in professional boxing.


title: Nico Ali Walsh

text: Walsh fought again against Reyes Sanchez as Walsh did not like how he performed against him, as he thought the fight was close (one of the judges thought he lost, resulting in a majority decicion). Walsh knocked out Reyes Sanchez in the second round at Pechanga Arena in San Diego, California.


title: Nico Ali Walsh

text: Walsh saw the tough time that both Muhammad and Laila Ali had while boxing and debated whether or not to follow in their footsteps. In the end it was his grandfather that kept him involved with the sport.


title: Aristocracy

text: Aristocracy (, ) is a form of government that places strength in the hands of a small, privileged ruling class, the aristocrats. The term derives from the (), meaning 'rule of the best'.


title: Aristocracy

text: At the time of the word's origins in ancient Greece, the Greeks conceived it as rule by the best-qualified citizens—and often contrasted it favorably with monarchy, rule by an individual. The term was first used by such ancient Greeks as Aristotle and Plato, who used it to describe a system where only the best of the citizens, chosen through a careful process of selection, would become rulers, and hereditary rule would actually have been forbidden, unless the rulers' children performed best and were better endowed with the attributes that make a person fit to rule compared with every other citizen in the polity. Hereditary rule in this understanding is more related to oligarchy, a corrupted form of aristocracy where there is rule by a few, but not by the best. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Xenophon, and the Spartans considered aristocracy (the ideal form of rule by the few) to be inherently better than the ideal form of rule by the many (democracy), but they also considered the corrupted form of aristocracy (oligarchy) to be worse than the corrupted form of democracy (mob rule). This belief was rooted in the assumption that the masses could only produce average policy, while the best of men could produce the best policy, if they were indeed the best of men. Later Polybius in his analysis of the Roman Constitution used the concept of aristocracy to describe his conception of a republic as a mixed form of government, along with democracy and monarchy in their conception from then, as a system of checks and balances, where each element checks the excesses of the other. In practice, aristocracy often leads to hereditary government, after which the hereditary monarch appoints officers as they see fit.


title: Aristocracy

text: In modern times, aristocracy was usually seen as rule by a privileged group, the aristocratic class, and has since been contrasted with democracy.


title: Aristocracy

text: The concept evolved in ancient Greece in which a council of leading citizens was commonly empowered. That was contrasted with representative democracy in which a council of citizens was appointed as the "senate" of a city state or other political unit. The Greeks did not like the concept of monarchy, and as their democratic system fell, aristocracy was upheld.


title: Aristocracy

text: In his 1651 book "Leviathan", Thomas Hobbes describes an aristocracy as a commonwealth in which the representative of the citizens is an assembly by part only. It is a system in which only a small part of the population represents the government; "certain men distinguished from the rest". Modern depictions of aristocracy tend to regard it not as the ancient Greek concept of rule by the best, but more as an oligarchy or plutocracy—rule by the few or the wealthy.


title: Aristocracy

text: The concept of aristocracy according to Plato has an ideal state ruled by the philosopher king. Plato describes "philosopher kings" as "those who love the sight of truth" ("Republic" 475c) and supports the idea with the analogy of a captain and his ship or a doctor and his medicine. According to him, sailing and health are not things that everyone is qualified to practice by nature. A large part of the "Republic" then addresses how the educational system should be set up to produce philosopher kings.


title: Aristocracy

text: In contrast to its original conceptual drawing in classical antiquity, aristocracy has been associated in the modern era with its more general and degenerated form of oligarchy, specifically an aristocracy class based oligarchy, with entitled nobility as in monarchies or aristocratic merchant republics. Its original classical understanding has been taken up by the modern concepts that can be loosely equivalent to meritocracy or technocracy.


title: Aristocracy

text: Aristocracies dominated political and economic power for most of the medieval and modern periods almost everywhere in Europe, using their wealth and land ownership to form a powerful political force. The English Civil War involved the first sustained organised effort to reduce aristocratic power in Europe.


title: Aristocracy

text: In the 18th century, the rising merchant class attempted to use money to buy into the aristocracy, with some success. However, the French Revolution in the 1790s forced many French aristocrats into exile and caused consternation and shock in the aristocratic families of neighbouring countries. After the defeat of Napoleon in 1814, some of the surviving exiles returned, but their position within French society was not recovered.


title: Aristocracy

text: Beginning in Britain, industrialization in the 19th century brought urbanization, with wealth increasingly concentrated in the cities, which absorbed political power. However, as late as 1900, aristocrats maintained political dominance in Britain, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Austria and Russia, but it was an increasingly-precarious dominion. The First World War had the effect of dramatically reducing the power of aristocrats in all major countries. In Russia, aristocrats were imprisoned and murdered by the communists. After 1900, liberal and socialist governments levied heavy taxes on landowners, spelling their loss of economic power.


title: Opinion polling for the 2022 Swedish general election

text: In the run up for the 2022 Swedish general election to the Riksdag, various organisations carry out opinion polling to gauge voting intention in Sweden. Results of such polls are displayed in this article.


text: The date range for these opinion polls are from the 2018 Swedish general election, held on 9 September, to the present day. The next election took place on 11 September 2022.


text: There are 349 seats in total – 175 needed for a majority.Parties are denoted with en dashes (–) if no indication is given of their level in polls.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: Palmer Freeman Luckey (born September 19, 1992) is an American entrepreneur best known as the founder of Oculus VR and designer of the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality head-mounted display that is widely credited with reviving the virtual reality industry. In 2017, Luckey departed Oculus and founded defense contractor Anduril Industries, a defense technology company focused on autonomous drones and sensors for military applications. Luckey ranked number 22 on "Forbes" 2016 List of America's Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: Luckey was born and raised in Long Beach, California, with three younger sisters. His father worked at a car dealership. He also was a huge fan of famous gamers and virtual reality which inspired him to make the Oculus.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: As a child he was homeschooled by his mother, took sailing lessons, and had an intense interest in electronics and engineering. He took community college courses at Golden West College and Long Beach City College beginning at the age of 14 or 15, and started attending courses at California State University, Long Beach in 2010. He wrote and served as Online Editor for the university's student-run newspaper, "Daily 49er".


title: Palmer Luckey

text: During his childhood and teenage years, Luckey experimented with a variety of complex electronics projects including railguns, Tesla coils, and lasers, with some of these projects resulting in serious injuries. He built a PC gaming "rig" worth tens of thousands of U.S. dollars with an elaborate six-monitor setup. His desire to immerse himself in computer-generated worlds led to an obsession with virtual reality (VR).


title: Palmer Luckey

text: In 2009, he founded the ModRetro Forums with a friend, creating an online community for "portabilization", a hobby that revolves around turning old hardware devices such as game consoles and PCs into self-contained portable units mixing new and old technology.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: He later attended California State University, Long Beach, where he majored in journalism and served as Online Editor of the "Daily49er". During his time there, he also worked as a part-time engineer in the Mixed Reality Lab (MxR) at the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) at the University of Southern California as part of a design team for cost-effective virtual reality systems for BRAVEMIND, a U.S. Army Research Laboratory effort to treat veterans suffering from PTSD.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: Beginning in 2009, when he was 16, he began building VR headsets of his own design. Existing head-mounted displays in the market suffered from low contrast, high latency, low field-of-view, high cost, and extreme bulk and weight. He completed his first prototype, called PR1, at age 17 in his parents' garage in 2010, which featured a 90-degree field of view, low latency, and built-in haptic feedback. Ultimately, he built more than 50 head-mounted displays.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: To fund these projects, he earned at least US$36,000 by fixing and reselling damaged iPhones and working part-time as a groundskeeper, youth sailing coach, and computer repair technician.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: Luckey developed a series of prototypes exploring features like 3D stereoscopy, wireless, and extreme 270-degree field-of-view, while also decreasing the size and weight of his systems. He shared regular updates on his progress on MTBS3D, a forum frequented by a small number of virtual reality enthusiasts. He called his 6th-generation unit the "Oculus Rift", which was intended to be sold as a do-it-yourself kit on Kickstarter to fellow enthusiasts. He launched Oculus VR in April 2012 to facilitate the official launch of the Kickstarter campaign.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: John Carmack of id Software, a game developer famous for his work on the Doom and Quake videogame series, requested a prototype headset from Luckey, who lent it to Carmack free of charge. Carmack used it to demonstrate id Software's "" on the device at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2012. With the resulting attention of thousands of people suddenly drawn to the Rift, Luckey dropped out of university to focus on it full-time.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: Luckey also demonstrated the unit to Valve, and received a Kickstarter endorsement from Valve's managing director Gabe Newell, who said, "It looks incredibly exciting. If anybody is going to tackle this set of hard problems, we think that Palmer is going to do it. We strongly encourage you to support this Kickstarter." When Luckey launched his Kickstarter campaign for the Oculus Rift, it also received endorsements from other prominent figures in the game industry, including Cliff Blezinski, David Helgason, and Mark Bolas.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: During the Kickstarter campaign, Luckey demonstrated the Rift to gamers and the press at many gaming conventions, including PAX, Gamescom, and QuakeCon 2012.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: The Kickstarter campaign was successful, raising US$2.4 million, or 974% of its original target. After raising more than $1 million, Luckey hired Brendan Iribe in August 2012 to be CEO of Oculus. Oculus VR expanded, taking on more employees and a larger office space. Luckey described his day-to-day process as not having "changed all that much," remaining a "slow plod towards making this thing a reality." Luckey continued to work on all aspects of the business, saying, "I have my hands in everything, from product engineering to game development to marketing," Later, he shifted his focus towards virtual reality input hardware, calling it a "pet project" that eventually culminated in the Oculus Touch spatial controller.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: Oculus VR was acquired by Facebook in March 2014 for US$3 billion. Although Luckey's share was not made public, "Forbes" magazine estimated the founder's net worth to be $700 million in 2015.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: Shortly after the acquisition, ZeniMax Media filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. The lawsuit contended that Luckey and Oculus used ZeniMax's "trade secrets, copyrighted computer code, and technical know-how relating to virtual reality technology", and sought financial damages for breach of contract, copyright infringement, and unfair competition. ZeniMax claimed it had invested "tens of millions of dollars in research and development" into VR technology, and that "Oculus and Luckey lacked the necessary expertise and technical know-how to create a viable virtual reality headset".


title: Palmer Luckey

text: The jury trial completed on February 2, 2017. The jury found that Luckey had violated a non-disclosure agreement he had with ZeniMax, but awarded zero damages on this charge, judging the harm as de minimis. Though the jury found that Oculus, Facebook, Palmer Luckey, Brendan Iribe, and John Carmack did not misappropriate or steal trade secrets and technology, they awarded a combined total of $500 million in damages for copyright infringement related to the marketing of the Oculus Rift, with Luckey responsible for $50 million of the total.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: In June 2018, the judge overseeing the case dismissed all damages owed by Luckey and reduced the amount owed by other parties to $250 million.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: In September 2016, it was reported that Luckey had donated $10,000 to Nimble America, a pro-Donald Trump group that ran a billboard campaign displaying 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with the caption "Too Big to Jail".


title: Palmer Luckey

text: This caused a small number of developers to temporarily cancel plans to support Oculus, including Scruta Games, which announced it would cancel Oculus's support in their games unless Luckey stepped down. Tomorrow Today Labs said they would not support the Oculus touch as long as Luckey is employed by Oculus. Tomorrow Today Labs later reversed this position, saying they "failed to find any evidence backing up the Daily Beast’s claim that Luckey paid for hate speech. Only a lame billboard."


title: Palmer Luckey

text: In March 2017, Palmer Luckey left Facebook, and stopped his involvement with Oculus VR. No explanation for the departure was given by either party. As part of testimony before the United States Senate in April 2018, Senator Ted Cruz asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg "Why was Palmer Luckey fired?". Zuckerberg refused to get into the "specific personnel matter", saying only that "it was not because of a political view".


title: Palmer Luckey

text: In November 2018, "The Wall Street Journal" obtained access to internal Facebook emails which suggested the matter was discussed at the highest levels of the company. Facebook executives, including Zuckerberg, reportedly pressured Luckey to publicly voice support for libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, despite his support for then Republican nominee Donald Trump.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: After his firing, Luckey hired an employment lawyer, and together negotiated a payout of at least $100 million, arguing that the company had violated California law for allegedly pressuring the executive to voice support for Johnson and for punishing an employee for political activity.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: Facebook's augmented and virtual-reality vice president Andrew Bosworth, who oversees the Oculus division, issued a series of tweets in November 2018 denying that Luckey had been fired for his conservative beliefs. Facebook likewise denied Luckey had been fired for supporting Trump, stating "We can say unequivocally that Palmer's departure was not due to his political views."


title: Palmer Luckey

text: In June 2017, Luckey founded the autonomy-focused defense technology company Anduril Industries, along with former Palantir Technologies executives Matt Grimm, Trae Stephens, and Brian Schimpf, and early Oculus VR Hardware Lead Joe Chen. In March 2018, Anduril began a pilot program for the U.S. government to detect human trafficking and drug smuggling in remote areas of the southern border of the United States; the program led to 55 attempted entrants being caught in its first 12 days in operation. Anduril later won the Autonomous Surveillance Tower Program of Record, resulting in the deployment of hundreds of Anduril Sentry Towers at a cost of "hundreds of millions of dollars".


title: Palmer Luckey

text: In September 2020, Luckey announced through Twitter that Anduril had received a contract worth $967M for the Advanced Battle Management Systems (ABMS), a cutting-edge multi-billion dollar project by the U.S. Air Force.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: In February 2022, Luckey announced that Anduril had won a $1 billion contract to lead counter-unmanned systems work for SOCOM.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: In December 2022, Anduril raised around $1.5bn led by Valor Equity Partners, valuing the company at $8.5bn, including the new cash from the raise.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: In November 2022, it was announced that as a commemoration of the anime "Sword Art Online," Luckey created a VR headset that kills its human user in real life when the user dies digitally in the video game, by means of several explosive charges affixed above the screen, on what appears to be a modified Meta Quest Pro, to aim the blast at the user's forebrain.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: Luckey blogged that, "The idea of tying your real life to your virtual avatar has always fascinated me—you instantly raise the stakes to the maximum level and force people to fundamentally rethink how they interact with the virtual world and the players inside it."


title: Palmer Luckey

text: In 2014, Luckey was described as "the face of virtual reality in gaming" and a celebrity among virtual reality enthusiasts; however, he does not consider himself to be a celebrity. He maintains a casual appearance, is frequently barefoot, and prefers sandals to shoes even at trade shows and events.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: Luckey lives in a shared house with several others where they regularly play multiplayer videogames, and he typically wears casual clothes like shorts, T-shirts, Hawaiian shirts and sandals.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: The character Keenan Feldspar, played by Haley Joel Osment, who appeared on several episodes of the HBO TV show "Silicon Valley" in 2017, was speculated by some to be based on Luckey. Like Luckey, Feldspar is a young entrepreneur who became rich after selling his VR technology, and who tends to wear Hawaiian shirts.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: In September 2016, Luckey stated he is a libertarian who had supported Ron Paul and Gary Johnson in past elections. Since then, he has become a prominent fundraiser for the Republican Party and Donald Trump.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: In September 2016, Luckey donated $10,000 to an organization called "Nimble America" with the stated purpose of "educating the community on our ideals of America First, Smart Trade, Legal Immigration, and Ethical Behavior." Luckey offered to match further contributions from r/The_Donald users for 48 hours after the announcement. Luckey later issued an apology for any negative impact his actions had on public perception of Oculus, and stated that he acted independently, not as a representative of Oculus VR. "The Wall Street Journal" later reported that Luckey had been pressured into making this statement as a condition of employment.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: In October 2020, Luckey hosted a fundraiser for Donald Trump at his home in Lido Isle, Newport Beach, with the president in attendance. The fundraiser had tickets ranging from $2,800 per person to $150,000 per couple, and there were gatherings both for and against President Trump in Newport Beach outside during the event.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: Luckey has donated to the campaigns of dozens of Republican political candidates, mostly candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives but also including Texas Senator Ted Cruz. He has also donated to a large number of Republican- and conservative-affiliated organizations, including the National Republican Congressional Committee, the 2017 Presidential Inaugural Committee, Mike Pence's Great America Committee and many state Republican Party chapters.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: In 2014, Luckey was the recipient of "Smithsonian" magazine's American Ingenuity Award in the Youth category.


title: Palmer Luckey

text: In 2016, Luckey was awarded the Royal Photographic Society Progress medal and Honorary Fellowship, which is awarded in recognition of any invention, research, publication or other contribution which has resulted in an important advance in the scientific or technological development of photography or imaging in the widest sense.


title: Om Raut

text: Om Raut is an Indian filmmaker. Raut has received 68th National Film Awards for Best Popular Film for the film "Tanhaji". He received several accolades for his 2015 film "".


title: Om Raut

text: Raut's upcoming working is the hindu mythological film "Adipurush", an adaptation of "Ramayana", starring Prabhas in the titular role of Lord Rama.


title: Om Raut

text: Raut was born in Mumbai to his mother Neena—a television producer, and father Bharatkumar—a senior journalist, well-known author & successful Rajya Sabha member. Raut's grandfather J. S. Bandekar (1925–2017) was a documentary filmmaker & editor.


title: Om Raut

text: After working as a child artist in several theatre plays and ad films, Raut's feature film acting debut came with a lead role in "Karamati Coat" in 1993. He did a post-graduate degree in films from Syracuse University's College of Visual and Performing Arts in New York State, and also holds a bachelor degree in Electronics Engineering from the Shah & Anchor College of Engineering in Mumbai.


title: Om Raut

text: After completing his education, Raut worked as a writer & director for MTV Network in New York City. He moved back to India and later became the creative head of DAR Motion Pictures, before he produced "City of Gold" and "Haunted – 3D".


title: Om Raut

text: Raut's directorial debut was the Marathi film "" (2015), the first production of Neena Raut Films, which he had co-founded with his mother. It earned him the Filmfare Award for Best Debut Director. The 2020 Hindi period action film "Tanhaji", marked the first Hindi directorial venture of Raut. His next film is "Adipurush" starring Prabhas and Saif Ali Khan which is set to release on January 12, 2023.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Gian Lorenzo (or Gianlorenzo) Bernini (, , ; Giovanni Lorenzo; 7 December 159828 November 1680) was an Italian sculptor and architect. While a major figure in the world of architecture, he was 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 (mostly small canvases in oil) and a man of the theater: he wrote, directed and acted in plays (mostly Carnival satires), 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.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: 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 (in stucco and wood) for funerals and festivals. His broad technical versatility, boundless compositional inventiveness and sheer skill in manipulating marble ensured that he would be considered a worthy successor of Michelangelo, far outshining other sculptors of his generation. His talent extended beyond the confines of sculpture to a consideration of the setting in which it would be situated; his ability to synthesize sculpture, painting, and architecture into a coherent conceptual and visual whole has been termed by the late art historian Irving Lavin the "unity of the visual arts".


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Bernini was born on 7 December 1598 in Naples to Angelica Galante, a Neapolitan, and Mannerist sculptor Pietro Bernini, originally from Florence. He was the sixth of their thirteen children. Gian Lorenzo Bernini was the definition of childhood genius. He was "recognized as a prodigy when he was only eight years old, [and] he was consistently encouraged by his father, Pietro. His precocity earned him the admiration and favor of powerful patrons who hailed him as 'the Michelangelo of his century'”. More specifically, it was Pope Paul V, who after first attesting to the boy Bernini's talent, famously remarked, 'This child will be the Michelangelo of his age,' later repeating that prophecy to Cardinal Maffeo Barberini (the future Pope Urban VIII), as Domenico Bernini reports in his biography of his father. In 1606 his father received a papal commission (to contribute a marble relief in the Cappella Paolina of Santa Maria Maggiore) and so moved from Naples to Rome, taking his entire family with him and continuing in earnest the training of his son Gian Lorenzo.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Several extant works, dating circa 1615–1620, are by general scholarly consensus, collaborative efforts by both father and son: they include the "Faun Teased by Putti" (c. 1615, Metropolitan Museum, NYC), "Boy with a Dragon" (c. 1616–17, Getty Museum, Los Angeles), the Aldobrandini "Four Seasons" (c. 1620, private collection), and the recently discovered "Bust of the Savior" (1615–16, New York, private collection). Sometime after the arrival of the Bernini family in Rome, word about the great talent of the boy Gian Lorenzo got around and he soon caught the attention of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew to the reigning pope, Paul V, who spoke of the boy genius to his uncle. Bernini was therefore presented before Pope Paul V, curious to see if the stories about Gian Lorenzo's talent were true. The boy improvised a sketch of Saint Paul for the marveling pope, and this was the beginning of the pope's attention on this young talent.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Once he was brought to Rome, he rarely left its walls, except (much against his will) for a five-month stay in Paris in the service of King Louis XIV and brief trips to nearby towns (including Civitavecchia, Tivoli and Castelgandolfo), mostly for work-related reasons. Rome was Bernini's city: "You are made for Rome," said Pope Urban VIII to him, "and Rome for you." It was in this world of 17th-century Rome and the international religious-political power which resided there that Bernini created his greatest works. Bernini's works are therefore often characterized as perfect expressions of the spirit of the assertive, triumphal but self-defensive Counter Reformation Roman Catholic Church. Certainly Bernini was a man of his times and deeply religious (at least later in life), but he and his artistic production should not be reduced simply to instruments of the papacy and its political-doctrinal programs, an impression that is at times communicated by the works of the three most eminent Bernini scholars of the previous generation, Rudolf Wittkower, Howard Hibbard, and Irving Lavin. As Tomaso Montanari's recent revisionist monograph, "La libertà di Bernini" (Turin: Einaudi, 2016) argues and Franco Mormando's anti-hagiographic biography, "Bernini: His Life and His Rome" (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), illustrates, Bernini and his artistic vision maintained a certain degree of freedom from the mindset and mores of Counter-Reformation Roman Catholicism.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Under the patronage of the extravagantly wealthy and most powerful Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the young Bernini rapidly rose to prominence as a sculptor. Among his early works for the cardinal were decorative pieces for the garden of the Villa Borghese, such as "The Goat Amalthea with the Infant Jupiter and a Faun". This marble sculpture (executed sometime before 1615) is generally considered by scholars to be the earliest work executed entirely by Bernini himself. Among Bernini's earliest documented work is his collaboration on his father's commission of February 1618 from Cardinal Maffeo Barberini to create four marble "putti" for the Barberini family chapel in the church of Sant'Andrea della Valle, the contract stipulating that his son Gian Lorenzo would assist in the execution of the statues. Also dating to 1618 is a letter by Maffeo Barberini in Rome to his brother Carlo in Florence, which mentions that he (Maffeo) was thinking of asking the young Gian Lorenzo to finish one of the statues left incomplete by Michelangelo, then in possession of Michelangelo's grandnephew which Maffeo was hoping to purchase, a remarkable attestation of the great skill that the young Bernini was already believed to possess.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Although the Michelangelo statue-completion commission came to naught, the young Bernini was shortly thereafter (in 1619) commissioned to repair and complete a famous work of antiquity, the sleeping "Hermaphrodite" owned by Cardinal Scipione Borghese (Galleria Borghese, Rome) and later (circa 1622) restored the so-called "Ludovisi Ares" (Palazzo Altemps, Rome).


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Also dating to this early period are the so-called "Damned Soul" and "Blessed Soul" of circa 1619, two small marble busts which may have been influenced by a set of prints by Pieter de Jode I or Karel van Mallery, but which were in fact unambiguously cataloged in the inventory of their first documented owner, Fernando de Botinete y Acevedo, as depicting a nymph and a satyr, a commonly paired duo in ancient sculpture (they were not commissioned by nor ever belonged to either Scipione Borghese or, as most scholarship erroneously claims, the Spanish cleric, Pedro Foix Montoya). By the time he was twenty-two, Bernini was considered talented enough to have been given a commission for a papal portrait, the "Bust of Pope Paul V", now in the J. Paul Getty Museum.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Bernini's reputation, however, was definitively established by four masterpieces, executed between 1619 and 1625, all now displayed in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. To the art historian Rudolf Wittkower these four works—"Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius" (1619), "The Rape of Proserpina" (1621–22), "Apollo and Daphne" (1622–1625), and "David" (1623–24)—"inaugurated a new era in the history of European sculpture." It is a view repeated by other scholars, such as Howard Hibbard who proclaimed that, in all of the seventeenth century, "there were no sculptors or architects comparable to Bernini." Adapting the classical grandeur of Renaissance sculpture and the dynamic energy of the Mannerist period, Bernini forged a new, distinctly Baroque conception for religious and historical sculpture, powerfully imbued with dramatic realism, stirring emotion and dynamic, theatrical compositions. Bernini's early sculpture groups and portraits manifest "a command of the human form in motion and a technical sophistication rivaled only by the greatest sculptors of classical antiquity." Moreover, Bernini possessed the ability to depict highly dramatic narratives with characters showing intense psychological states, but also to organize large-scale sculptural works that convey a magnificent grandeur.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Unlike sculptures done by his predecessors, these focus on specific points of narrative tension in the stories they are trying to tell: Aeneas and his family fleeing the burning Troy; the instant that Pluto finally grasps the hunted Persephone; the precise moment that Apollo sees his beloved Daphne begin her transformation into a tree. They are transitory but dramatic powerful moments in each story. Bernini's "David" is another stirring example of this. Michelangelo's motionless, idealized "David" shows the subject holding a rock in one hand and a sling in the other, contemplating the battle; similarly immobile versions by other Renaissance artists, including Donatello's, show the subject in his triumph after the battle with Goliath. Bernini illustrates David during his active combat with the giant, as he twists his body to catapult toward Goliath. To emphasize these moments and to ensure that they were appreciated by the viewer, Bernini designed the sculptures with a specific viewpoint in mind, though he sculpted them fully in the round. Their original placements within the Villa Borghese were against walls so that the viewers' first view was the dramatic moment of the narrative.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: The result of such an approach is to invest the sculptures with greater psychological energy. The viewer finds it easier to gauge the state of mind of the characters and therefore understands the larger story at work: Daphne's wide open mouth in fear and astonishment, David biting his lip in determined concentration, or Proserpina desperately struggling to free herself. In addition to portraying psychological realism, they show a greater concern for representing physical details. The tousled hair of Pluto, the pliant flesh of Proserpina, or the forest of leaves beginning to envelop Daphne all demonstrate Bernini's exactitude and delight for representing complex real world textures in marble form.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: In 1621 Pope Paul V Borghese was succeeded on the throne of St. Peter by another admiring friend of Bernini's, Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi, who became Pope Gregory XV: although his reign was very short (he died in 1623), Pope Gregory commissioned portraits of himself (both in marble and bronze) by Bernini. The pontiff also bestowed upon Bernini the honorific rank of 'Cavaliere,' the title with which for the rest of his life the artist was habitually referred. In 1623 came the ascent to the papal throne of his aforementioned friend and former tutor, Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, as Pope Urban VIII, and henceforth (until Urban's death in 1644) Bernini enjoyed near monopolistic patronage from the Barberini pope and family. The new Pope Urban is reported to have remarked, "It is a great fortune for you, O Cavaliere, to see Cardinal Maffeo Barberini made pope, but our fortune is even greater to have Cavalier Bernini alive in our pontificate." Although he did not fare as well during the reign (1644–55) of Innocent X, under Innocent's successor, Alexander VII (reigned 1655–67), Bernini once again gained pre-eminent artistic domination and continued in the successive pontificate to be held in high regard by Clement IX during his short reign (1667–69).


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Under Urban VIII's patronage, Bernini's horizons rapidly and widely broadened: he was not just producing sculpture for private residences, but playing the most significant artistic (and engineering) role on the city stage, as sculptor, architect, and urban planner. His official appointments also testify to this—"curator of the papal art collection, director of the papal foundry at Castel Sant'Angelo, commissioner of the fountains of Piazza Navona". Such positions gave Bernini the opportunity to demonstrate his versatile skills throughout the city. To great protest from older, experienced master architects, he, with virtually no architectural training to his name, was appointed Chief Architect of St Peter's in 1629, upon the death of Carlo Maderno. From then on, Bernini's work and artistic vision would be placed at the symbolic heart of Rome.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Bernini's artistic pre-eminence under Urban VIII and Alexander VII meant he was able to secure the most important commissions in the Rome of his day, namely, the various massive embellishment projects of the newly finished St. Peter's Basilica, completed under Pope Paul V with the addition of Maderno's nave and facade and finally re-consecrated by Pope Urban VIII on 18 November 1626, after 100 years of planning and building. Within the basilica he was responsible for the Baldacchino, the decoration of the four piers under the cupola, the Cathedra Petri or Chair of St. Peter in the apse, the tomb monument of Matilda of Tuscany, the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in the right nave, and the decoration (floor, walls and arches) of the new nave. The St Peter's Baldacchino immediately became the visual centerpiece of the new St. Peter's. Designed as a massive spiraling gilded bronze canopy over the tomb of St Peter, Bernini's four-pillared creation reached nearly from the ground and cost around 200,000 Roman "scudi" (about 8 million US dollars in the currency of the early 21st century). "Quite simply", writes one art historian, "nothing like it had ever been seen before". Soon after the St Peter's Baldacchino, Bernini undertook the whole-scale embellishment of the four massive piers at crossing of the basilica (i.e., the structures supporting the cupola) including, most notably, four colossal, theatrically dramatic statues, among them, the majestic St. Longinus executed by Bernini himself (the other three are by other contemporary sculptors François Duquesnoy, Francesco Mochi, and Bernini's disciple, Andrea Bolgi).


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: In the basilica, Bernini also began work on the tomb for Urban VIII, completed only after Urban's death in 1644, one in a long, distinguished series of tombs and funerary monuments for which Bernini is famous and a traditional genre upon which his influence left an enduring mark, often copied by subsequent artists. Indeed, Bernini's final and most original tomb monument, the Tomb of Pope Alexander VII, in St. Peter's Basilica, represents, according to Erwin Panofsky, the very pinnacle of European funerary art, whose creative inventiveness subsequent artists could not hope to surpass. Begun and largely completed during Alexander VII's reign, Bernini's design of the Piazza San Pietro in front of the Basilica is one of his most innovative and successful architectural designs, which transformed a formerly irregular, inchoate open space into an aesthetically unified, emotionally thrilling, and logistically efficient (for carriages and crowds), completely in harmony with the pre-existing buildings and adding to the majesty of the basilica.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Despite this busy engagement with large works of public architecture, Bernini was still able to devote himself to his sculpture, especially portraits in marble, but also large statues such as the life-size "Saint Bibiana" (1624, Church of Santa Bibiana, Rome). Bernini's portraits show his ever increasing ability to capture the utterly distinctive personal characteristics of his sitters, as well as his ability to achieve in cold white marble almost painterly-like effects that render with convincing realism the various surfaces involved: human flesh, hair, fabric of varying type, metal, etc. These portraits included a number of busts of Urban VIII himself, the family bust of Francesco Barberini and most notably, the Two Busts of Scipione Borghese—the second of which had been rapidly created by Bernini once a flaw had been found in the marble of the first. The transitory nature of the expression on Scipione's face is often noted by art historians, iconic of the Baroque concern for representing fleeting movement in static artworks. To Rudolf Wittkower the "beholder feels that in the twinkle of an eye not only might the expression and attitude change but also the folds of the casually arranged mantle".


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Other marble portraits in this period include that of Costanza Bonarelli (executed around 1637), unusual in its more personal, intimate nature. (At the time of the sculpting of the portrait, Bernini was having an affair with Costanza, wife of one of his assistants, sculptor, Matteo.) Indeed, it would appear to be the first marble portrait of a non-aristocratic woman by a major artist in European history.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Beginning in the late 1630s, now known in Europe as one of the most accomplished portraitists in marble, Bernini also began to receive royal commissions from outside Rome, for subjects such as Cardinal Richelieu of France, Francesco I d'Este the powerful Duke of Modena, Charles I of England and his wife, Queen Henrietta Maria. The sculpture of Charles I was produced in Rome from a triple portrait (oil on canvas) executed by Van Dyck, that survives today in the British Royal Collection. The bust of Charles was lost in the Whitehall Palace fire of 1698 (though its design is known through contemporary copies and drawings) and that of Henrietta Maria was not undertaken due to the outbreak of the English Civil War.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: In 1644, with the death of Pope Urban with whom Bernini had been so intimately connected and the ascent to power of the fierce Barberini-enemy Pope Innocent X Pamphilj, Bernini's career suffered a major, unprecedented eclipse, which was to last four years. This had not only to do with Innocent's anti-Barberini politics but also to Bernini's role in the disastrous project of the new bell towers for St. Peter's basilica, designed and supervised entirely by Bernini. The infamous bell tower affair was to be the biggest failure of his career, both professionally and financially. In 1636, eager to finally finish the exterior of St. Peter's, Pope Urban had ordered Bernini to design and build the two, long-intended bell towers for its facade: the foundations of the two towers had already been designed and constructed (namely, the last bays at either extremity of the facade) by Carlo Maderno (architect of the nave and the facade) decades earlier. Once the first tower was finished in 1641, cracks began to appear in the facade but, curiously enough, work nonetheless continued on the second tower and the first storey was completed. Despite the presence of the cracks, work only stopped in July 1642 once the papal treasury had been exhausted by the disastrous War of Castro. Knowing that Bernini could no longer depend on the protection of a favorable pope, his enemies (especially Francesco Borromini) raised a great alarm over the cracks, predicting a disaster for the whole basilica and placing the blame entirely on Bernini. The subsequent investigations, in fact, revealed the cause of the cracks as Maderno's defective foundations and not Bernini's elaborate design, an exoneration later confirmed by the meticulous investigation conducted in 1680 under Pope Innocent XI.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Nonetheless, Bernini's opponents in Rome succeeded in seriously damaging the reputation of Urban's artist and in persuading Pope Innocent to order (in February 1646) the complete demolition of both towers, to Bernini's great humiliation and indeed financial detriment (in the form of a substantial fine for the failure of the work). After this, one of the rare failures of his career, Bernini retreated into himself: according to his son, Domenico. his subsequent unfinished statue of 1647, "Truth Unveiled by Time", was intended to be his self-consoling commentary on this affair, expressing his faith that eventually Time would reveal the actual Truth behind the story and exonerate him fully, as indeed did occur.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Although he received no personal commissions from Innocent or the Pamphilj family in the early years of the new papacy, Bernini did not lose his former positions granted to him by previous popes. Innocent X maintained Bernini in all of the official roles given to him by Urban, including that of chief Architect of St. Peter's. Under Bernini's design and direction, work continued on decorating the massive, recently completed but still entirely unadorned nave of St. Peter's, with the addition of an elaborate multi-colored marble flooring, marble facing on the walls and pilasters, and scores of stuccoed statues and reliefs. It is not without reason that Pope Alexander VII once quipped, 'If one were to remove from Saint Peter's everything that had been made by the Cavalier Bernini, that temple would be stripped bare.' Indeed, given all of his many and various works within the basilica over several decades, it is to Bernini that is due the lion's share of responsibility for the final and enduring aesthetic appearance and emotional impact of St. Peter's. He was also allowed to continue to work on Urban VIII's tomb, despite Innocent's antipathy for the Barberini. A few months after completing Urban's tomb, in 1648 Bernini won, in controversial circumstances, the Pamphilj commission for the prestigious Four Rivers Fountain on Piazza Navona, marking the end of his disgrace and the beginning a yet another glorious chapter in his life.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: If there had been doubts over Bernini's position as Rome's preeminent artist, they were definitively removed by the unqualified success of the marvelously delightful and technically ingenious Four Rivers Fountain, featuring a heavy ancient obelisk placed over a void created by a cavelike rock formation placed in the center of an ocean of exotic sea creatures. Bernini continued to receive commissions from Pope Innocent X and other senior members of Rome's clergy and aristocracy, as well as from exalted patrons outside of Rome, such as Francesco d'Este. Recovering quickly form the humiliation of the bell tower, Bernini's boundless creativity continued as before. New types of funerary monument were designed, such as, in the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the seemingly floating medallion, hovering in the air as it were, for the deceased nun Maria Raggi, while chapels he designed, such as the Raimondi Chapel in the church of San Pietro in Montorio, illustrated how Bernini could use hidden lighting to help suggest divine intervention within the narratives he was depicting.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: One of the most accomplished and celebrated works to come from Bernini's hand in this period was the Cornaro Family Chapel in the small Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. The Cornaro Chapel (inaugurated in 1651) showcased Bernini's ability to integrate sculpture, architecture, fresco, stucco, and lighting into "a marvelous whole" ("bel composto", to use early biographer Filippo Baldinucci's term to describe his approach to architecture) and thus create what scholar Irving Lavin has called the "unified work of art". The central focus of the Cornaro Chapel is the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, depicting the so-called "transverberation" of Spanish nun and saint-mystic, Teresa of Avila. Bernini presents the spectator with a theatrically vivid portrait, in gleaming white marble, of the swooning Teresa and the quietly smiling angel, who delicately grips the arrow piercing the saint's heart. On either side of the chapel the artist places (in what can only strike the viewer as theater boxes), portraits in relief of various members of the Cornaro family – the Venetian family memorialized in the chapel, including Cardinal Federico Cornaro who commissioned the chapel from Bernini – who are in animated conversation among themselves, presumably about the event taking place before them. The result is a complex but subtly orchestrated architectural environment providing the spiritual context (a heavenly setting with a hidden source of light) that suggests to viewers the ultimate nature of this miraculous event.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Nonetheless, during Bernini's lifetime and in the centuries following till this very day, Bernini's "Saint Teresa" has been accused of crossing a line of decency by sexualizing the visual depiction of the saint's experience, to a degree that no artist, before or after Bernini, dared to do: in depicting her at an impossibly young chronological age, as an idealized delicate beauty, in a semi-prostrate position with her mouth open and her legs splayed-apart, her wimple coming undone, with prominently displayed bare feet (Discalced Carmelites, for modesty, always wore sandals with heavy stockings) and with the seraph "undressing" her by (unnecessarily) parting her mantle to penetrate her heart with his arrow.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Matters of decorum aside, Bernini's "Teresa" was still an artistic tour de force that incorporates all of the multiple forms of visual art and technique that Bernini had at his disposal, including hidden lighting, thin gilded beams, recessive architectural space, secret lens, and over twenty diverse types of colored marble: these all combine to create the final artwork—"a perfected, highly dramatic and deeply satisfying seamless ensemble".


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Upon his accession to the Chair of St Peter, Pope Alexander VII Chigi (1655–1667) began to implement his extremely ambitious plan to transform Rome into a magnificent world capital by means of systematic, bold (and costly) urban planning. In so doing, he brought to fruition the long, slow recreation of the urban glory of Rome—the "renovatio Romae"—that had begun in the fifteenth century under the Renaissance popes. Over the course of his pontificate Alexander commissioned many large-scale architectural changes in the city—indeed, some of the most significant ones in the city's recent history and for years to come—choosing Bernini as his principal collaborator (though other architects, especially Pietro da Cortona, were also involved). Thus did commence another extraordinarily prolific and successful chapter in Bernini's career.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Bernini's major commissions during this period include the piazza in front of St Peter's basilica. In a previously broad, irregular, and completely unstructured space, he created two massive semi-circular colonnades, each row of which was formed of four white columns. This resulted in an oval shape that formed an inclusive arena within which any gathering of citizens, pilgrims and visitors could witness the appearance of the pope—either as he appeared on the loggia on the facade of St Peter's or on balconies on the neighboring Vatican palaces. Often likened to two arms reaching out from the church to embrace the waiting crowd, Bernini's creation extended the symbolic greatness of the Vatican area, creating an "exhilarating expanse" that was, architecturally, an "unequivocal success".


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Elsewhere within the Vatican, Bernini created systematic rearrangements and majestic embellishment of either empty or aesthetically undistinguished space that exist as he designed them to the present day and have become indelible icons of the splendor of the papal precincts. Within the hitherto unadorned apse of the basilica, the Cathedra Petri, the symbolic throne of St Peter, was rearranged as a monumental gilded bronze extravagance that matched the Baldacchino created earlier in the century. Bernini's complete reconstruction of the Scala Regia, the stately papal stairway between St. Peters's and the Vatican Palace, was slightly less ostentatious in appearance but still taxed Bernini's creative powers (employing, for example, clever tricks of optical illusion) to create a seemingly uniform, totally functional, but nonetheless regally impressive stairway to connect two irregular buildings within an even more irregular space.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Not all works during this era were on such a large scale. Indeed, the commission Bernini received to build the church of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale for the Jesuits was relatively modest in physical size (though great in its interior chromatic splendor), which Bernini executed completely free of charge. Sant'Andrea shared with the St. Peter's piazza—unlike the complex geometries of his rival Francesco Borromini—a focus on basic geometric shapes, circles and ovals to create spiritually intense buildings. Equally, Bernini moderated the presence of colour and decoration within these buildings, focussing visitors' attention on these simple forms that underpinned the building. He also designed the church of Santa Maria dell'Assunzione in the town of Ariccia with its circular outline, rounded dome and three-arched portico.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: At the end of April 1665, and still considered the most important artist in Rome, if indeed not in all of Europe, Bernini was forced by political pressure (from both the French court and Pope Alexander VII) to travel to Paris to work for King Louis XIV, who required an architect to complete work on the royal palace of the Louvre. Bernini would remain in Paris until mid-October. Louis XIV assigned a member of his court to serve as Bernini's translator, tourist guide, and overall companion, Paul Fréart de Chantelou, who kept a "Journal" of Bernini's visit that records much of Bernini's behaviour and utterances in Paris. The writer Charles Perrault, who was serving at this time as an assistant to the French Finance Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, also provided a first-hand account of Bernini's visit.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Bernini's popularity was such that on his walks in Paris the streets were lined with admiring crowds. But things soon turned sour. Bernini presented finished designs for the east front (i.e., the all-important principal facade of the entire palace) of the Louvre, which were ultimately rejected, albeit formally not until 1667, well after his departure from Paris (indeed, the already constructed foundations for Bernini's Louvre addition were inaugurated in October 1665 in an elaborate ceremony, with both Bernini and King Louis in attendance). It is often stated in the scholarship on Bernini that his Louvre designs were turned down because Louis and his financial advisor Jean-Baptiste Colbert considered them too Italianate or too Baroque in style. In fact, as Franco Mormando points out, "aesthetics are "never" mentioned in any of [the] ... surviving memos" by Colbert or any of the artistic advisors at the French court. The explicit reasons for the rejections were utilitarian, namely, on the level of physical security and comfort (e.g., location of the latrines). It is also indisputable that there was an interpersonal conflict between Bernini and the young French king, each one feeling insufficiently respected by the other. Though his design for the Louvre went unbuilt, it circulated widely throughout Europe by means of engravings and its direct influence can be seen in subsequent stately residences such as Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England, seat of the Dukes of Devonshire.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Other projects in Paris suffered a similar fate. With the exception of Chantelou, Bernini failed to forge significant friendships at the French court. His frequent negative comments on various aspects of French culture, especially its art and architecture, did not go down well, particularly in juxtaposition to his praise for the art and architecture of Italy (especially Rome); he said that a painting by Guido Reni, the Annunciation altarpiece (then in the Carmelite convent, now the Louvre Museum), was "alone worth half of Paris." The sole work remaining from his time in Paris is the "Bust of Louis XIV" although he also contributed a great deal to the execution of the Christ Child Playing with a Nail marble relief (now in the Louvre) by his son Paolo as a gift to the Queen of France. Back in Rome, Bernini created a monumental equestrian statue of Louis XIV; when it finally reached Paris (in 1685, five years after the artist's death), the French king found it extremely repugnant and wanted it destroyed; it was instead re-carved into a representation of the ancient Roman hero Marcus Curtius.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: 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.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: 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, a direct commission from Pope 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."


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: 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."


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: In the 1630s, Bernini had an affair with a married woman named Costanza (wife of his workshop assistant, Matteo Bonucelli, also called Bonarelli) and sculpted a bust of her (now in the Bargello, Florence) during the height of their romance. Costanza later had an affair with Bernini's younger brother, Luigi, who was Bernini's right-hand man in his studio. When Bernini found out about Costanza and his brother, in a fit of mad fury, he chased Luigi through the streets of Rome and into the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, threatening his life. To punish his unfaithful mistress, Bernini had a servant go to the house of Costanza, where the servant slashed her face several times with a razor. The servant was later jailed, while Costanza herself was jailed for adultery. Bernini himself, instead, was exonerated by the pope, even though he had committed a crime in ordering the face-slashing. Soon after, in May 1639, at age forty-one, Bernini wed a twenty-two-year-old Roman woman, Caterina Tezio, in an arranged marriage, under orders from Pope Urban. She bore him eleven children, including youngest son Domenico Bernini, who would later be his first biographer. After his never-repeated fit of passion and bloody rage and his subsequent marriage, Bernini turned more sincerely to the practice of his faith, according to his early official biographers, whereas brother Luigi was to once again, in 1670, bring great grief and scandal to his family by his sodomitic rape of a young Bernini workshop assistant at the construction site of the 'Constantine' memorial in St. Peter's Basilica.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Bernini's architectural works include sacred and secular buildings and sometimes their urban settings and interiors. He made adjustments to existing buildings and designed new constructions. Among his most well known works are the Piazza San Pietro (1656–67), the piazza and colonnades in front of St. Peter's Basilica and the interior decoration of the Basilica. Among his secular works are a number of Roman palaces: following the death of Carlo Maderno, he took over the supervision of the building works at the Palazzo Barberini from 1630 on which he worked with Borromini; the Palazzo Ludovisi (now Palazzo Montecitorio, started 1650); and the Palazzo Chigi (now Palazzo Chigi-Odescalchi, started 1664).


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: His first architectural projects were the façade and refurbishment of the church of Santa Bibiana (1624–26) and the St. Peter's baldachin (1624–33), the bronze columned canopy over the high altar of St. Peter's Basilica. In 1629, and before "St. Peter's Baldachin" was complete, Urban VIII put him in charge of all the ongoing architectural works at St Peter's. However, Bernini fell out of favor during the papacy of Innocent X Pamphili: one reason was the pope's animosity towards the Barberini and hence towards their clients including Bernini. Another reason was the failure of the belltowers designed and built by Bernini for St. Peter's Basilica, commencing during the reign of Urban VIII. The completed north tower and the only partially completed south tower were ordered demolished by Innocent in 1646 because their excessive weight had caused cracks in the basilica's facade and threatened to do more calamitous damage. Professional opinion at the time was in fact divided over the true gravity of the situation (with Bernini's rival Borromini spreading an extreme, anti-Bernini catastrophic view of the problem) and over the question of responsibility for the damage: Who was to blame? Bernini? Pope Urban VIII who forced Bernini to design over-elaborate towers? Deceased Architect of St. Peter's, Carlo Maderno who built the weak foundations for the towers? Official papal investigations in 1680 in fact completely exonerated Bernini, while inculpating Maderno. Never wholly without patronage during the Pamphili years, after Innocent's death in 1655 Bernini regained a major role in the decoration of St. Peter's with the Pope Alexander VII Chigi, leading to his design of the piazza and colonnade in front of St. Peter's. Further significant works by Bernini at the Vatican include the "Scala Regia" (1663–66), the monumental grand stairway entrance to the Vatican Palace, and the "Cathedra Petri", the Chair of Saint Peter, in the apse of St. Peter's, in addition to the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in the nave.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Bernini did not build many churches from scratch; rather, his efforts were concentrated on pre-existing structures, such as the restored church of Santa Bibiana and in particular St. Peter's. He fulfilled three commissions for new churches in Rome and nearby small towns. Best known is the small but richly ornamented oval church of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale, done (beginning in 1658) for the Jesuit novitiate, representing one of the rare works of his hand with which Bernini's son, Domenico, reports that his father was truly and very pleased. Bernini also designed churches in Castelgandolfo (San Tommaso da Villanova, 1658–1661) and Ariccia (Santa Maria Assunta, 1662–1664), and was responsible for the re-modeling of the Santuario della Madonna di Galloro (just outside of Ariccia), endowing it with a majestic new facade.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: When Bernini was invited to Paris in 1665 to prepare works for Louis XIV, he presented designs for the east facade of the Louvre Palace, but his projects were ultimately turned down in favor of the more sober and classic proposals of a committee consisting of three Frenchmen: Louis Le Vau, Charles Le Brun, and the doctor and amateur architect Claude Perrault, signaling the waning influence of Italian artistic hegemony in France. Bernini's projects were essentially rooted in the Italian Baroque urbanist tradition of relating public buildings to their settings, often leading to innovative architectural expression in urban spaces like "piazze" or squares. However, by this time, the French absolutist monarchy now preferred the classicizing monumental severity of the Louvre's facade, no doubt with the added political bonus that it had been designed by a Frenchmen. The final version did, however, include Bernini's feature of a flat roof behind a Palladian balustrade.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: During his lifetime Bernini lived in various residences throughout the city: principal among them, a palazzo right across from Santa Maria Maggiore and still extant at Via Liberiana 24, while his father was still alive; after his father's death in 1629, Bernini moved the clan to the long-ago-demolished Santa Marta neighborhood behind the apse of St. Peter's Basilica, which afforded him more convenient access to the Vatican Foundry and to his working studio also on the Vatican premises. In 1639, Bernini bought property on the corner of the via della Mercede and the via del Collegio di Propaganda Fide in Rome. This gave him the distinction of being the only one of two artists (the other is Pietro da Cortona) to be proprietor of his own large palatial (though not sumptuous) residence, furnished as well with its own water supply. Bernini refurbished and expanded the existing palazzo on the Via della Mercede site, at what are now Nos. 11 and 12. (The building is sometimes referred to as "Palazzo Bernini," but that title more properly pertains to the Bernini family's later and larger home on Via del Corso, to which they moved in the early nineteenth century, now known as the Palazzo Manfroni-Bernini.) Bernini lived at No. 11 (extensively remodeled in the 19th century), where his working studio was located, as well as a large collection of works of art, his own and those of other artists. It is imagined that it must have been galling for Bernini to witness through the windows of his dwelling, the construction of the tower and dome of Sant'Andrea delle Fratte by his rival, Borromini, and also the demolition of the chapel that he, Bernini, had designed at the Collegio di Propaganda Fide to see it replaced by Borromini's chapel. The construction of Sant'Andrea, however, was completed by Bernini's close disciple, Mattia de' Rossi, and it contains (to this day) the marble originals of two of Bernini's own angels executed by the master for the Ponte Sant'Angelo.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: True to the decorative dynamism of Baroque which loved the aesthetic pleasure and emotional delight afforded by the sight and sound of water in motion, among Bernini's most gifted and applauded creations were his Roman fountains, which were both utilitarian public works and personal monuments to their patrons, papal or otherwise. His first fountain, the 'Barcaccia' (commissioned in 1627, finished 1629) at the foot of the Spanish Steps, cleverly surmounted a challenge that Bernini was to face in several other fountain commissions, the low water pressure in many parts of Rome (Roman fountains were all driven by gravity alone), creating a low-lying flat boat that was able to take greatest advantage of the small amount of water available. Another example is the long-ago dismantled "Woman Drying Her Hair" fountain that Bernini created for the no-longer-extant Villa Barberini ai Bastioni on the edge of the Janiculum Hill overlooking St. Peter's Basilica. His other fountains include the "Fountain of the Triton", or "Fontana del Tritone", and the Barberini Fountain of the Bees, the "Fontana delle Api". The Fountain of the Four Rivers, or "Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi", in the Piazza Navona is an exhilarating masterpiece of spectacle and political allegory in which Bernini again brilliantly overcame the problem of the piazza's low water pressure creating the illusion of an abundance of water that in reality did not exist. An oft-repeated, but false, anecdote tells that one of the Bernini's river gods defers his gaze in disapproval of the facade of Sant'Agnese in Agone (designed by the talented, but less politically successful, rival Francesco Borromini), impossible because the fountain was built several years before the façade of the church was completed. Bernini was also the artist of the statue of the Moor in "La Fontana del Moro" in Piazza Navona (1653).


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Bernini's "Triton Fountain" is depicted musically in the second section of Ottorino Respighi's "Fountains of Rome."


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Another major category of Bernini's activity was that of the tomb monument, a genre on which his distinctive new style exercised a decisive and long-enduring influence; included in this category are his tombs for Popes Urban VIII and Alexander VII (both in St. Peter's Basilica), Cardinal Domenico Pimental (Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome, design only), and Matilda of Canossa (St. Peter's Basilica). Related to the tomb monument is the funerary memorial, of which Bernini executed several (including that, most notably, of Maria Raggi [Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome] also of greatly innovative style and long enduring influence. Among his smaller commissions, although not mentioned by either of his earliest biographers, Baldinucci or Domenico Bernini, the Elephant and Obelisk is a sculpture located near the Pantheon, in the Piazza della Minerva, in front of the Dominican church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Pope Alexander VII decided that he wanted a small ancient Egyptian obelisk (that was discovered beneath the piazza) to be erected on the same site, and in 1665 he commissioned Bernini to create a sculpture to support the obelisk. The sculpture of an elephant bearing the obelisk on its back was executed by one of Bernini's students, Ercole Ferrata, upon a design by his master, and finished in 1667. An inscription on the base relates the Egyptian goddess Isis and the Roman goddess Minerva to the Virgin Mary, who supposedly supplanted those pagan goddesses and to whom the church is dedicated. A popular anecdote concerns the elephant's smile. To find out why it is smiling, legend has it, the viewer must examine the rear end of the animal and notice that its muscles are tensed and its tail is shifted to the left as if it were defecating. The animal's rear is pointed directly at one of the headquarters of the Dominican Order, housing the offices of its Inquisitors as well as the office of Father Giuseppe Paglia, a Dominican friar who was one of the main antagonists of Bernini, as a final salute and last word.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Among his minor commissions for non-Roman patrons or venues, in 1677 Bernini worked along with Ercole Ferrata to create a fountain for the Lisbon palace of the Portuguese nobleman, the Count of Ericeira: copying his earlier fountains, Bernini supplied the design of the fountain sculpted by Ferrata, featuring Neptune with four tritons around a basin. The fountain has survived and since 1945 has been outside the precincts of the gardens of the Palacio Nacional de Queluz, several miles outside of Lisbon.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Bernini would have studied painting as a normal part of his artistic training begun in early adolescence under the guidance of his father, Pietro, in addition to some further training in the studio of the Florentine painter, Cigoli. His earliest activity as a painter was probably no more than a sporadic diversion practiced mainly in his youth, until the mid-1620s, that is, the beginning of the pontificate of Pope Urban VIII (reigned 1623–1644) who ordered Bernini to study painting in greater earnest because the pontiff wanted him to decorate the Benediction Loggia of St. Peter's. The latter commission was never executed most likely because the required large-scale narrative compositions were simply beyond Bernini's ability as a painter. According to his early biographers, Baldinucci and Domenico Bernini, Bernini completed at least 150 canvases, mostly in the decades of the 1620s and 30s, but currently there are no more than 35–40 surviving paintings that can be confidently attributed to his hand. The extant, securely attributed works are mostly portraits, seen close up and set against an empty background, employing a confident, indeed brilliant, painterly brushstroke (similar to that of his Spanish contemporary Velasquez), free from any trace of pedantry, and a very limited palette of mostly warm, subdued colors with deep chiaroscuro. His work was immediately sought after by major collectors. Most noteworthy among these extant works are several, vividly penetrating self portraits (all dating to the mid 1620s – early 1630s), especially that in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, purchased during Bernini's lifetime by Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici. Bernini's "Apostles Andrew and Thomas" in London's National Gallery is the sole canvas by the artist whose attribution, approximate date of execution (circa 1625) and provenance (the Barberini Collection, Rome) are securely known.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: As for Bernini's drawings, about 350 still exist; but this represents a minuscule percentage of the drawings he would have created in his lifetime; these include rapid sketches relating to major sculptural or architectural commissions, presentation drawings given as gifts to his patrons and aristocratic friends, and exquisite, fully finished portraits, such as those of Agostino Mascardi (Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris) and Scipione Borghese and Sisinio Poli (both in New York's Morgan Library).


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Among the many sculptors who worked under his supervision (even though most were accomplished masters in their own right) were Luigi Bernini, Stefano Speranza, Giuliano Finelli, Andrea Bolgi, Giacomo Antonio Fancelli, Lazzaro Morelli, Francesco Baratta, Ercole Ferrata, the Frenchman Niccolò Sale, Giovanni Antonio Mari, Antonio Raggi, and François Duquesnoy. But his most trusted right-hand man in sculpture was Giulio Cartari, while in architecture it was Mattia de Rossi, both of whom traveled to Paris with Bernini to assist him in his work there for King Louis XIV. Other architect disciples include Giovanni Battista Contini and Carlo Fontana while Swedish architect, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, who visited Rome twice after Bernini's death, was also much influenced by him.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Among his rivals in architecture were, above all, Francesco Borromini and Pietro da Cortona. Early in their careers they had all worked at the same time at the Palazzo Barberini, initially under Carlo Maderno and, following his death, under Bernini. Later on, however, they were in competition for commissions, and fierce rivalries developed, particularly between Bernini and Borromini. In sculpture, Bernini competed with Alessandro Algardi and Francois Duquesnoy, but they both died decades earlier than Bernini (respectively in 1654 and 1643), leaving Bernini effectively with no sculptor of his same exalted status in Rome. Francesco Mochi can also be included among Bernini's significant rivals, though he was not as accomplished in his art as Bernini, Algardi or Duquesnoy.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: There was also a succession of painters (the so-called 'pittori berniniani') who, working under the master's close guidance and at times according to his designs, produced canvases and frescos that were integral components of Bernini's larger multi-media works such as churches and chapels: Carlo Pellegrini, Guido Ubaldo Abbatini, Frenchman Guillaume Courtois (Guglielmo Cortese, known as 'Il Borgognone'), Ludovico Gimignani, and Giovanni Battista Gaulli (who, thanks to Bernini, was granted the prized commission to fresco the vault of the Jesuit mother church of the Gesù by Bernini's friend, Jesuit Superior General, Gian Paolo Oliva). As far as Caravaggio is concerned, in all the voluminous Bernini sources, his name appears only once, in the Chantelou Diary which records Bernini's disparaging remark about him (specifically his "Fortune Teller" that had just arrived from Italy as a Pamphilj gift to King Louis XIV). However, how much Bernini really scorned Caravaggio's art is a matter of debate whereas arguments have been made in favor of a strong influence of Caravaggio on Bernini. Bernini would of course have heard much about Caravaggio and seen many of his works not only because in Rome at the time such contact was impossible to avoid, but also because during his own lifetime Caravaggio had come to the favorable attention of Bernini's own early patrons, both the Borghese and the Barberini. Indeed, much like Caravaggio, Bernini used a theatrical light as an important aesthetic and metaphorical device in his religious settings, often using hidden light sources that could intensify the focus of religious worship or enhance the dramatic moment of a sculptural narrative.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: The most important primary source for the life of Bernini is the biography written by his youngest son, Domenico, entitled "Vita del Cavalier Gio. Lorenzo Bernino," published in 1713 though first compiled in the last years of his father's life (c. 1675–80). Filippo Baldinucci's "Life of Bernini" was published in 1682, and a meticulous private journal, the "Diary of the Cavaliere Bernini's Visit to France," was kept by the Frenchman Paul Fréart de Chantelou during the artist's four-month stay from June through October 1665 at the court of King Louis XIV. Also, there is a short biographical narrative, "The Vita Brevis of Gian Lorenzo Bernini", written by his eldest son, Monsignor Pietro Filippo Bernini, in the mid-1670s.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Until the late 20th century, it was generally believed that two years after Bernini's death, Queen Christina of Sweden, then living in Rome, commissioned Filippo Baldinucci to write his biography, which was published in Florence in 1682. However, recent research now strongly suggests that it was in fact Bernini's sons (and specifically the eldest son, Mons. Pietro Filippo) who commissioned the biography from Baldinucci sometime in the late 1670s, with the intent of publishing it while their father was still alive. This would mean that first, the commission did not at all originate in Queen Christina who would have merely lent her name as patron (in order to hide the fact that the biography was coming directly from the family) and secondly, that Baldinucci's narrative was largely derived from some pre-publication version of Domenico Bernini's much longer biography of his father, as evidenced by the extremely large amount of text repeated verbatim (there is no other explanation, otherwise, for the massive amount of verbatim repetition, and it is known that Baldinucci routinely copied verbatim material for his artists' biographies supplied by family and friends of his subjects). As the most detailed account and the only one coming directly from a member of the artist's immediate family, Domenico's biography, despite having been published later than Baldinucci's, therefore represents the earliest and more important full-length biographical source of Bernini's life, even though it idealizes its subject and whitewashes a number of less-than-flattering facts about his life and personality.


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: As one Bernini scholar has summarized, "Perhaps the most important result of all of the [Bernini] studies and research of these past few decades has been to restore to Bernini his status as the great, principal protagonist of Baroque art, the one who was able to create undisputed masterpieces, to interpret in an original and genial fashion the new spiritual sensibilities of the age, to give the city of Rome an entirely new face, and to unify the [artistic] language of the times." Few artists have had as decisive an influence on the physical appearance and emotional tenor of a city as Bernini had on Rome. Maintaining a controlling influence over all aspects of his many and large commissions and over those who aided him in executing them, he was able to carry out his unique and harmoniously uniform vision over decades of work with his long and productive life Although by the end of Bernini's life there was in motion a decided reaction against his brand of flamboyant Baroque, the fact is that sculptors and architects continued to study his works and be influenced by them for several more decades (Nicola Salvi's later Trevi Fountain [inaugurated in 1735] is a prime example of the enduring post-mortem influence of Bernini on the city's landscape).


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: In the eighteenth century Bernini and virtually all Baroque artists fell from favor in the neoclassical criticism of the Baroque, that criticism aimed above all at the latter's supposedly extravagant (and thus illegitimate) departures from the pristine, sober models of Greek and Roman antiquity. It is only from the late nineteenth century that art historical scholarship, in seeking a more objective understanding of artistic output within the specific cultural context in which it was produced, without the a priori prejudices of neoclassicism, began to recognize Bernini's achievements and slowly began restore his artistic reputation. However, the reaction against Bernini and the too-sensual (and therefore "decadent"), too emotionally charged Baroque in the larger culture (especially in non-Catholic countries of northern Europe, and particularly in Victorian England) remained in effect until well into the twentieth century (most notable are the public disparagement of Bernini by Francesco Milizia, Joshua Reynolds, and Jacob Burkhardt).


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: Among the influential 18th- and 19th-century figures who despised Bernini's art was also and most prominently Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68), considered by many the father of the modern discipline of art history. For the neo-classicist Winkelmann, the one true, laudable "high style" of art was characterized by noble simplicity joined with quiet grandeur that eschewed any exuberance of emotion, whether positive or negative, as exemplified by ancient Greek sculpture. The Baroque Bernini, instead, represented the opposite of this ideal and, moreover, according to Winkelmann, had been “utterly corrupted...by a vulgar flattery of the coarse and uncultivated, in attempting to render everything more intelligible to them.” Another major condemning voice is that of Colen Campbell (1676-1729), who on the very first page of his monumental and influential "Vitruvius Britannicus" (London, 1715, Introduction, vol. 1, p. 1) singles out Bernini and Borromini as examples of the utter degradation of post-Palladian architecture in Italy: "With [the great Palladio] the great Manner and exquisite Taste of Building is lost; for the Italians can no more now relish the Antique Simplicity, but are entirely employed in capricious Ornaments, which must at last end in the Gothick. For Proof of this Assertion, I appeal to the Productions of the last Century: How affected and licentious are the Works of Bernini and Fontana? How wildly Extravagant are the Designs of Boromini, who has endeavoured to debauch Mankind with his odd and chimerical Beauties…?" Accordingly, most of the popular eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tourist's guides to Rome all but ignore Bernini and his work, or treat it with disdain, as in the case of the best-selling "Walks in Rome" (22 editions between 1871 and 1925) by Augustus J.C. Hare, who describes the angels on the Ponte Sant'Angelo as 'Bernini's Breezy Maniacs.'


title: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

text: But now in the twenty-first century, Bernini and his Baroque have now been enthusiastically restored to favor, both critical and popular. Since the anniversary year of his birth in 1998, there have been numerous Bernini exhibitions throughout the world, especially Europe and North America, on all aspects of his work, expanding our knowledge of his work and its influence. In the late twentieth century, Bernini was commemorated on the front of the Banca d'Italia 50,000 lire banknote in the 1980s and 90s (before Italy switched to the euro) with the back showing his equestrian statue of Constantine. Another outstanding sign of Bernini's enduring reputation came in the decision by architect I.M. Pei to insert a faithful copy in lead of his King Louis XIV Equestrian statue as the sole ornamental element in his massive modernist redesign of the entrance plaza to the Louvre Museum, completed to great acclaim in 1989, and featuring the giant Louvre Pyramid in glass. In 2000 best-selling novelist, Dan Brown, made Bernini and several of his Roman works, the centerpiece of his political thriller, "Angels & Demons", while British novelist Iain Pears made a missing Bernini bust the centerpiece of his best-selling murder mystery, "The Bernini Bust" (2003).


title: Hysteria (Def Leppard album)

text: Hysteria is the fourth studio album by English rock band Def Leppard, released on 3 August 1987 through Mercury Records. It is Def Leppard's best-selling album to date, selling over 20 million copies worldwide, including 12 million in the US, and spawning seven hit singles. The album charted at number one on both the "Billboard" 200 and the UK Albums Chart.


title: Hysteria (Def Leppard album)

text: "Hysteria" was produced by Robert John "Mutt" Lange. The title of the album was thought up by drummer Rick Allen, referring to his 1984 car accident, the amputation of his arm, and the ensuing worldwide media coverage surrounding it. It is the last album to feature guitarist Steve Clark before his death, although songs co-written by him would appear on the band's next album, "Adrenalize".


title: Hysteria (Def Leppard album)

text: The album is the follow-up to the band's 1983 breakthrough "Pyromania". "Hysteria"s creation took over three years and was plagued by delays, including the aftermath of drummer Rick Allen's accident that cost him his left arm on 31 December 1984. Subsequent to the album's release, Def Leppard published a book titled "Animal Instinct: The Def Leppard Story", written by "Rolling Stone" magazine senior editor David Fricke, on the three-year recording process of "Hysteria" and the tough times the band endured through the mid-1980s.