The book is impossibly pricey, even used, so I’d look for it (Marilyn, forgive me) at the library.

Lavin’s wife, Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, is also a distinguished art historian, and for two years now I’ve wanted to alert Art Beat readers to a recent book of hers: “Artists’ Art in the Renaissance” (The Pindar Press), which contains write-ups of great works of art that were kept by their makers: Lorenzo Ghiberti Piero della Francesca: Andrea Mantegna (his famous “Dead Christ” with the feet in your face) Michelangelo Botticelli: Giovanni Bellini Titian and, yes, Bernini. I’m pleased to have this Art Beat opportunity to embed the video from our ’98 story, “The Fury of Creation.” It includes Bernini’s bust of Costanza Piccolomini. The transcript of that story has been online, but the video has not…until now. Soon after, I got to meet Lavin, and in 1998 interviewed him for the NewsHour in conjunction with an exhibit of Bernini terracotta studies at the Art Institute of Chicago. Indeed, when I sat in on Simon Schama‘s “Power and Authority in the Baroque” course at Harvard in the early ’90s, Lavin was the key Bernini reading. Presenting both visual and documentary evidence, Sarah McPhee reconstructs the entire. His passion for this woman was so strong it inspired the sculptor to preserve her beauty in one of his most captivating portrait busts and to commission a violent crime against her. Costanza Piccolomini was Gianlorenzo Bernini’s beloved. But no one has written more about the 17th century Italian master of marble than Irving Lavin, for decades the resident art historian at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. This illustrated volume tells the complete story of the bell towers. Bernini's Beloved Sarah McPhee, Winship Distinguished Research Professor, Emory University. The trigger for this post is the publication of a new book on Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, “Bernini’s Beloved: A Portrait of Costanza Piccolomini.” The author, Emory University art historian Sarah McPhee, is the daughter of New Yorker writer John McPhee and has written on Bernini before.

Bernini's Beloved by Sarah McPhee