The Blessed Ludovica Albertoni

With the passing of the years the theatrical impetus that had guided the staging of so many of Bernini's works, and had reached its peak in the St. Teresa and the Chair of St. Peter, slowly diminished, and the artist, still at the height of his fame but by now detached from the pomp of the court, found again, almost unexpectedly, the passionate and mobile sensibility of the stonecarver that had guided his hand when he was roughing out the Ovidian fables. Already in the angel holding the scroll of the Passion, on Ponte Sant'Angelo, the purely sculptural element had clearly regained the upper hand over scenographic motifs, and now, setting out at almost eighty to evoke the death of a young girl, Bernini rediscovers the pathos of the Metamorphoses and the delicate sweetness of the Daphne.