ABSTRACT
Around 1620, Gian Lorenzo Bernini was given an unusual commission by his patron, Scipione Borghese. Bernini made this particular copy extraordinary by sculpting the extravagant matarrazo [mattress], which creates a paradoxically intimate space that is now considered an integral part of the sculpture. This chapter suggests that Bernini’s role in seventeenth-century Rome led him to take on the role of a Hermetic trickster. This role allowed him to apply his mercurial talents toward dissolving the boundaries between matter and imagination to create new spaces of artistic and emotional expression. In the Pont Sant’Angelo, Bernini applied his skill in bel composto to express the coincidentia oppositorum, in which the residuum of complementaries is dissolved as oppositions enfolded in the singular moment of immediate experience. The act of semblance on the Pont uses Hermetic trickery to bring us into an experience of the transcendence.
