ABSTRACT
Stefano Maderno's St. Cecilia in the basilica of S. Cecilia in Rome, completed in 1600, is often identified as the first "Baroque" sculpture, primarily due to what is seen as a new naturalism that broke with the artificiality of late Mannerism. But the solution that emerged from the crossing and that definitively led sculpture into what we call the "Baroque" was certainly not envisioned at the outset of the project by either Urban or Bernini. The chapter examines two of these pier sculptures, Francesco Mochi's St. Veronica and Bernini's St. Longinus, in order to demonstrate the rupture in the history of sculpture that occurred in the crossing, a rupture that the term "Baroque," however problematic, seeks to acknowledge. Between the Renaissance and the Baroque, everything about sculpture had changed, but ultimately so that everything could remain the same: within seventeenth-century Catholicism, sculpture—in a radically new form—would flourish and proliferate.
