Bernini

Episode two of Simon Schama’s Power of Art asks what drove Italian master sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini to combine sex with the sacred to create a masterpiece.

In the 1630s in Rome, young Bernini was a prodigious artist on the ascendant and a personal friend of Pope Urban VIII. There, Schama shows us how his work epitomized the Baroque style and could be seen everywhere. Bernini also painted, wrote plays, and designed theatres.

10 years on, however, cracks were appearing in his bell towers at St. Peter's Basilica, Urban was dead, and his bitter adversary Borromini was usurping him. A miracle was needed to restore Bernini’s fortunes. So he sculpted one in marble, ''The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.''