Bust of Cardinal Richelieu

Look at how the marble changes texture. The skin of the face is polished smooth, the hair is drilled into deep, springy locks, and the mozzetta has the soft weight of watered silk, while the tiny buttons down the front are carved one by one. Bernini never met his sitter. He worked in Rome from the triple portrait that Philippe de Champaigne painted expressly for the purpose, showing the cardinal from the front and both profiles, and he turned those flat views into a head that seems to breathe. Walk around the bust and notice how the collar and cape were shaped so that the portrait reads well from several angles, not only from the front.

The commission came in 1640, after Mazarin had negotiated with the sculptor and his Barberini patrons on the cardinal's behalf. The bust was finished in Rome in 1641 and shipped to Paris on the twentieth of August that year. It stood in Richelieu's Palais Cardinal, passed to his niece the duchess of Aiguillon, and was later kept by the chapter of Notre-Dame, where it was inventoried in 1790. Seized during the Revolution, it entered the Louvre in 1817. Together with the lost bust of Louis the Fourteenth, it is Bernini's most important portrait of a French sitter, and it shows Roman Baroque sculpture arriving in Paris a quarter of a century before the artist himself.

Did You Know? Bernini never met Richelieu; he carved the bust from a painting by Philippe de Champaigne that showed the cardinal from three angles at once.