Bernini’s descendant sells his bizarre screaming carriage

Centuries before carmaker Ettore Bugatti adopted his brother Rembrandt’s rampant elephant sculpture as a hood ornament on his luxury flagship Bugatti Royale, Baroque master sculpture The artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini decorated his carriage with four of his own works: a set of grotesque screaming heads in gilded bronze. Each of the four heads is cast from the same mould, with a wide open mouth, arched brows, bulging upward-turned eyes, spiky windswept hair and matching beards. They all have a hole in the nape of their neck into which tall feathers are inserted, adding even more drama to the movement of the carriage.

From his early days as a professional sculptor, Bernini favored grotesque works with exaggerated open mouths. his first, cursed soul (1619), which he composed when he was only 20 years old, while still collaborating with his father, and a year later under the patronage of the wealthy and powerful Cardinal Scipione Borghese Then he started his own creation. When he was commissioned to restore the Ludovisi Ares (a copy of the 4th-century BC statue of the young Greek god of war unearthed in Rome in 1622), he added a completely incongruous hilt with a screamingly grotesque pattern. Pommel.

Bernini cast four screaming heads between 1650 and 1655 and placed them in his personal carriage. His designs for the King of Spain’s carriage have similarly grotesque patterns on the corners of the hood, but these are reliefs rather than free-standing sculptures. At some point, Bernini removed his screaming heads from the carriage and mounted them on black and white Marquina marble bases. They decorated the piano patrician salon (formal reception room) of his palace at Via della Mercede 11 in Rome.

After Gian Lorenzo’s death in 1680, his grandson Prospero Bernini inherited the palace and much of the collection. These four bronze heads are noted in the 1681 inventory. Incredibly, this set of heads has always been in the hands of the Bernini family. The last direct male heir, another Prospero Bernini, died in 1858, but the bronzes were passed to his daughter and passed on, eventually ending up in the hands of the current owner, Now they have decided to sell the bronzes.

The screaming heads have been consigned for sale to art dealer Flavio Gianassi, but they have been declared an object of special historical and artistic value and are therefore not allowed to leave Italy. The set is priced at 1.6 million euros ($1,771,000), a high price for a buyer with deep pockets unable to export to international markets.