ABSTRACT
To speak of a material Bernini is contrary to much that has been said in both praise and blame of Bernini since the beginnings of art history in the nineteenth century. Rudolf Wittkower recognized the difficulty that Bernini’s use of materials posed to his modern reception when he opened his still unsurpassed 1955 monograph on Bernini’s sculpture by calling attention to the fact that his work had not satisfied the modernist barometer of “truth to material.” He did so in an epigraph to the volume, quoting a statement made by the British sculptor Henry Moore in 1951: “Truth to material should not be a criterion of the value of a work-otherwise a snowman made by a child would have to be praised at the expense of a Rodin or a Bernini.”1 Wittkower was personally acquainted with Henry Moore, a proponent of the truth to material and direct carving ethos that dominated British sculpture after World War I, and learned from him about the techniques of the sculptor.2 Wittkower extracted this quote because he was aware that Moore’s statement announced a recent volte-face. In 1934, the year after Wittkower arrived in London from the University of Cologne (where A.E. Brinckmann had published the first corpus of early modern clay sketches), Moore had issued a bold materialist statement:
Every material has its own individual qualities. It is only when the sculptor works direct, when there is an active relationship with his material, that the material can take its part in the shaping of an idea. Stone, for example, is hard and concentrated and should not be falsified to look like flesh-it should not be forced beyond its constructive build to a point of weakness. It should keep its hard tense stoniness.3
