Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Disciples, collaborators, and rivals

Among the many sculptors who worked under his supervision (even though most were accomplished masters in their own right) were Luigi Bernini, Stefano Speranza, Giuliano Finelli, Andrea Bolgi, Giacomo Antonio Fancelli, Lazzaro Morelli, Francesco Baratta, Ercole Ferrata, the Frenchman Niccolò Sale, Giovanni Antonio Mari, Antonio Raggi, and François Duquesnoy. But his most trusted right-hand man in sculpture was Giulio Cartari, while in architecture it was Mattia de Rossi, both of whom travelled to Paris with Bernini to assist him in his work there for King Louis XIV. Other architect disciples include Giovanni Battista Contini and Carlo Fontana while Swedish architect, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, who visited Rome twice after Bernini's death, was also much influenced by him.

Among his rivals in architecture were, above all, Francesco Borromini and Pietro da Cortona. Early in their careers, they had all worked at the same time at the Palazzo Barberini, initially under Carlo Maderno and, following his death, under Bernini. Later on, however, they were in competition for commissions, and fierce rivalries developed, particularly between Bernini and Borromini. In sculpture, Bernini competed with Alessandro Algardi and François Duquesnoy, but they both died decades earlier than Bernini (respectively in 1654 and 1643), leaving Bernini effectively with no sculptor of his same exalted status in Rome. Francesco Mochi can also be included among Bernini's significant rivals, though he was not as accomplished in his art as Bernini, Algardi or Duquesnoy.

There was also a succession of painters (the so-called 'pittori berniniani') who, working under the master's close guidance and at times according to his designs, produced canvases and frescos that were integral components of Bernini's larger multi-media works such as churches and chapels: Carlo Pellegrini, Guido Ubaldo Abbatini, Frenchman Guillaume Courtois (Guglielmo Cortese, known as 'Il Borgognone'), Ludovico Gimignani, and Giovanni Battista Gaulli (who, thanks to Bernini, was granted the prized commission to fresco the vault of the Jesuit mother Church of the Gesù by Bernini's friend, Jesuit Superior General, Giovanni Paolo Oliva).

As far as Caravaggio is concerned, in all the voluminous Bernini sources, his name appears only once: this occurs in the Chantelou Diary in which the French diarist claims that Bernini agreed with his disparaging remark about Caravaggio (specifically his Fortune Teller that had just arrived from Italy as a Pamphilj gift to King Louis XIV). Yet, how much Bernini really scorned Caravaggio's art is a matter of debate whereas arguments have been made in favour of a strong influence of Caravaggio on Bernini. Bernini would, of course, have heard much about Caravaggio and seen many of his works not only because in Rome at the time such contact was impossible to avoid, but also because during his own lifetime, Caravaggio had come to the favourable attention of Bernini's own early patrons, both the Borghese and the Barberini. Indeed, much like Caravaggio, Bernini often devised strikingly bold compositions, akin to theatrical tableaux that arrest the scene at its dramatic key moment (such as in his Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in Santa Maria della Vittoria). And again much like Caravaggio, he made full and skillful use of theatrical lighting as an important aesthetic and metaphorical device in his religious settings, often employing hidden light sources that could intensify the focus of religious worship or enhance the dramatic moment of a sculptural narrative.
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