The Infant Jesus Playing with a Nail
Paolo Bernini (1648-after 1672) · 1665
A chubby child lies on a cushion and turns a large nail between his fingers as if it were a toy. He is the infant Jesus, and the nail is one of the nails of the Crucifixion, so this playful relief carries a quiet warning of the Passion to come. The soft flesh, the folds of the cushion and the loose curls are handled with the ease of the Roman Baroque, and the relief is set in its original gilded wooden frame, whose scrolling design was drawn by Gian Lorenzo Bernini himself.
The carving is the work of Bernini's son Paolo, then seventeen, who came with his father to Paris in 1665 when Louis the Fourteenth summoned the great sculptor to design the Louvre. Paolo made the relief during that stay as a gift for the queen, Marie-Thérèse, and the frame by his father turned a young man's exercise into a royal present. The piece appears in the 1684 inventory of the crown furniture, sat in the storerooms of Versailles from the 1690s until the 1820s, and entered the Louvre after 1857, when the curator Louis Courajod recorded it in the sculpture galleries.
Did You Know? The sculptor was a seventeen-year-old on a working trip with his famous father, and the father designed the frame.
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