Truth Unveiled

The figure is a fragment of a composition that envisaged a setting similar to that of the Ecstasy of St. Teresa: “a naked woman placed upon a rock, laughing... above her in the air Time will be seen holding up a cloth, showing that he has uncovered her”. With this work Bernini intended to respond to the defamatory campaign of which he was the victim in the first months of the pontificate of Innocent X. This sinuous, fleshy nude, comparable only to Rubens's florid bourgeois Venuses, is one of the greatest artistic achievements of the entire Baroque, fusing in a highly personal synthesis the dictates of a pungent and sensual realism and an exceptional luminous quality, which culminates in the abstract mask of the face.