Pietro's great sculptural skill was passed down to his son at a very early age. Young Bernini was a child prodigy, perhaps being the youngest to ever work successfully with a chisel and stone. Bernini was eight years old when he carved his first marble head. At only the age of 11 Bernini carved a portrait bust of Monsignor Giovanni Battista Santoni that aroused such acclaim in Rome that the Pope asked to have the boy brought to him. The Pope immediately concluded that Bernini's further education was a "matter of importance to the papacy" (Wallace, 14). Thus Bernini's great career began. .
Throughout Bernini's entire career his skill and mastery of sculpture grew. Bernini, more than any artist before him, brought a new dimension, a sense of time to sculpture. By nature sculptures are frozen in time, but not necessarily at there most dramatic moment in time. Bernini felt that sculpture should be felt as if it were alive. It should be see as if it were about to move or that the action was just about to happen. Bernini felt that if truth about the sculpture was to be revealed, the artist must capture the figure in his the moment of the climax, or the transitory moment. Later in his career Bernini would use this concept of the transitory, climatic moment in his religious imagery to portray to his audience the relations of the figures in his work and to also show the divine messages of the Catholic church (Wallace, 14). He set out to involve the spectator so deeply that the spectator himself felt something akin to what the figure himself had experienced.
Intense physical realism was also an important part of Bernini's conception of sculpture. He portrayed this intense physical naturalism by strongly emphasizing the figure's tactile qualities. Bernini not only achieved physical realism but pushed it to it's extreme. Bernini felt that it was extremely important to portray the both the real physical and emotional feelings and reactions of his figures.
On page 301, plate number 434, is a depiction of Gianlorenzo Bernini's sculpture of David. ... However, unlike Tintoretto's piece, Bernini utilizes a three-dimensional sculpture chizelled from marble using a singular entity to convey this. ...
