Bust of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, first version

In 1632 Bernini carved a marble bust of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the patron who had made him. As the work was being finished a fault opened in the stone and ran across the sitter's forehead. Bernini carved the whole thing again from a fresh block. Both busts survive, both are autograph, both are in the Galleria Borghese, and they are within a centimetre of each other in height.

The detail that no summary carries is what the cardinal did next. He put the DAMAGED bust in the Room of the Emperors, among the busts of the Caesars, and the flawless replacement upstairs in the villa gallery. The object with the fault got the better room. Two further facts are almost never printed: the replacement block was flawed as well, and the commission was placed not by Scipione but by the reigning pope, Urban VIII.

Both busts were sold at auction. On 28 March to 9 April 1892 the firm of Giacomini and Capobianchi held the first sale of Borghese works that had been EXCLUDED from the family entail, and the pair went as lot 341 to the Italian state. They then sat in the Accademia in Venice until 1908. This is the sharpest version case in the archive: two objects made by the same hand in the same year of the same man, told apart by a fissure running up a brow and a Roman numeral painted in red on a socle.

Two busts, and the record has to say which one it is describing

The object described here is the marble bust of Cardinal Scipione Borghese carved by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in 1632 and catalogued by the Galleria Borghese as inventory CCLXV, height 77.2 centimetres, Carrara marble. It is the first of the two. It hangs today in Room 14, the Lanfranco Loggia, not in the room the cardinal put it in.

The second, inventory CCLXVI, is also by Bernini, also 1632, and the museum gives it at 78 centimetres. It stands in the same museum. It shows the same man in the same mozzetta and biretta, turned the same way, with the same open mouth. Photographs of the two are routinely captioned interchangeably, including on Wikimedia Commons, where the file description text of one of the two photographs used in this record names the wrong inventory number while the filename names the right one. That is not an unusual error and it is exactly why this publication reads the object rather than the label.

Two features separate them and both are visible in a good photograph. The first bust carries the fault: a fissure that runs across the forehead, which is why the second exists. The second bust carries its own fault in a different place, a slight crack that begins at the lower right of the mozzetta, crosses the centre and reaches the upper left. And each socle is painted with its Borghese inventory number in red, CCLXV and CCLXVI, so that a photograph including the base is self-identifying. Every plate in this record was matched by those two tests, on the object itself, before it was used. Note that the position of the crack alone is not a test unless the position is specified, because both busts have one.

What the object is

A portrait bust in Carrara marble, 77.2 centimetres high, cut to the shoulders and set on a turned marble socle. The cardinal wears the biretta and the buttoned mozzetta of his office over a rochet, and the whole lower two thirds of the sculpture is drapery: heavy cloth thrown into folds that catch light in ridges and go dark in the troughs, so that the fabric reads as moving even though the head is what the eye goes to.

The head is turned somewhat to the observer's left and the mouth is slightly open, in the museum's own description as if someone had interrupted him during a conversation. The Galleria Borghese treats this as the moment Bernini's portrait practice changes: the bust introduces what is now called the talking portrait, an intimate psychological reading of the sitter that does not give up the official dignity of the office. Everything about the object is designed to be caught in the middle of something.

It is worth registering how modest the material claim is. This is not a monument, not a tomb figure, not a papal commission for a basilica. It is a piece of furniture for a room, made for one man to keep among his antiquities, and it is one of the two or three most influential portrait sculptures made in Europe.

The sitter, and how he got the money to pay for it

Scipione Caffarelli was born in 1577, the son of the sister of Camillo Borghese. When his uncle became Pope Paul V in 1605 the nephew was made a cardinal, took the Borghese name and arms, and became the cardinal-nephew: the pope's chief of staff, gatekeeper and beneficiary. He died in 1633, the year after this bust was carved.

The collection he built is the reason his name is known, and the methods are documented. In 1607 Paul V confiscated a collection of paintings from the Cavaliere d'Arpino over an unpaid tax bill and gave it to his nephew; the seizure carried into the Borghese collection two early works now attributed to Caravaggio, the Boy with a Basket of Fruit and the picture usually called the Sick Bacchus. In 1608 Raphael's Deposition was taken from the Baglioni chapel in the convent of San Francesco al Prato in Perugia, lowered over the town walls in the night between 18 and 19 March, and afterwards declared the cardinal's private property by the pope.

These are not colourful anecdotes attached to a patron. They are the acquisition history of the collection this bust belongs to, and a record that describes the sitter as a discerning patron of the arts without them has described half of him. The man Bernini carved with his mouth open, in the act of speaking, had taken an altarpiece off a wall in another city by night with his uncle's authority behind him.

He also made Bernini, and the pope paid for the portrait

Scipione was Bernini's first great patron. Between roughly 1618 and 1625 the sculptor produced for him the four marble groups that are still the reason people queue for the Galleria Borghese: Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius, the Rape of Proserpina, Apollo and Daphne, and the David. Bernini was in his early twenties for most of that run.

The bust of 1632 comes a decade later, when Bernini was the dominant sculptor in Rome, working full time for Urban VIII in St Peter's, and Scipione was in the last year of his life and long out of power, his uncle dead since 1621 and the Barberini in the Vatican.

The commission was not Scipione's. The Galleria Borghese states it plainly: the cardinal waited until 1632, a decade after his uncle's death, to add to his collection a portrait of himself commissioned to Gian Lorenzo Bernini BY POPE URBAN VIII. A report in the Estense archive, cited by Fraschetti, records that Bernini, commissioned by the pope, had made a marble bust of Cardinal Borghese and had been recompensed 500 zecchini and a diamond worth 150 scudi. Separately, the Borghese household accounts show Scipione himself paying 500 scudi in December 1632.

Read together, those two documents describe a reigning pope commissioning and rewarding a portrait of his predecessor's nephew, and the sitter paying the sculptor as well. That is not a private likeness. It is a Barberini courtesy to a Borghese at the end of his life, and the standard account of a patron commissioning his own portrait from his favourite sculptor is, on the museum's own evidence, wrong.

How Bernini built a likeness

One preparatory drawing survives, and it is in New York. The Morgan Library and Museum holds a red chalk study over graphite on laid paper, 253 by 184 millimetres, catalogued as IV, 176 and dated about 1632. The Morgan itself describes it cautiously, as possibly a study for the marble in the Borghese Gallery. It is the Galleria Borghese that calls it the only surviving exemplar of the many drawings the sculptor probably made for this project, and the distinction between those two statements is worth keeping.

The Morgan's own reading of the sheet states the method: the cardinal's animated expression bears witness to Bernini's preference that his sitters move and speak rather than pose stiffly, and the sculptor is particularly interested in the silhouette of the profile, following the outline of the forehead and the nose. That is a working procedure, not a temperament. Bernini did not sit a man down and copy him. He watched a man be himself and then cut the marble from what he had understood.

The drawing has a chain of its own worth setting down, because it is better documented than the bust. It was owned by Jonathan Richardson the elder, who wrote on the back of the lining that the bust is in the Villa Borghese and was made when Bernini was very young, but is nevertheless much esteemed. Richardson was wrong about the age; Bernini was thirty-three. The sheet then passed to Sir Thomas Lawrence, then to Charles Fairfax Murray, and was bought by Pierpont Morgan in 1909.

The fault, and the fortnight

The account comes from Filippo Baldinucci: with the work all but finished, a crack, which he calls a hair, had opened in the marble and showed on the cardinal's forehead, where it is still visible today. Bernini began again on a fresh block.

How long the second bust took is the most repeated fact about this object. Fifteen nights, according to Baldinucci. Three days, according to the sculptor's son Domenico. The Galleria Borghese gives it that way and so does the scholarly summary of the two primary lives, citing Baldinucci's 1682 life at pages 18 to 20 and Domenico's of 1713 at page 11. Some commercial guide sites reverse the attribution; they are wrong, and the reversal is not a scholarly dispute.

The two lives do differ on how the cardinal found out. In Baldinucci's version the second bust was carved in secret and produced as a surprise: the cardinal is shown the flawed bust, is pleased with it, conceals his disappointment at the fault, and Bernini then uncovers the unblemished replacement. In Domenico's the cardinal saw the unfinished bust, was delighted, and asked that it be completed and shown to the pope, and the fault was discovered afterwards.

Both accounts name that pope as Paul V, who died in 1621, eleven years before the bust was carved. The anachronism is in the biographies themselves, not in later retelling, and it is the strongest reason to treat the whole anecdote with suspicion. What is documented is a payment in December 1632, a report of a papal commission, and two finished marbles.

The replacement block was flawed too

This is the detail that almost never appears in print, and it is in the museum's own catalogue. The second bust, inventory CCLXVI, also has a crack. It begins in the lower right portion of the mozzetta, crosses through the centre and reaches the upper left.

So the rescue was not clean. Bernini recarved a portrait in a fortnight, or three days, because the marble had failed him, and the marble failed him again in the replacement, only in a place that did not cross a face. That is what working in a natural material at speed actually looks like, and it puts the famous anecdote in proportion: the second bust is a triumph of nerve and hand speed, and it is also a second flawed block that happened to fault below the collar.

The other differences the museum records are the kind a conservator notices and a visitor does not: the second bust has squarer shoulders and a more uniform polish, and a horizontal fold crossing between the last pair of buttons. None of that is visible in a low-resolution reproduction, which is why the position of the fissure and the socle number remain the only practical identification tests.

The cardinal preferred the damaged one

The Galleria Borghese records where each bust went. Scipione put the first version, the one with the crack across the forehead, in the Room of the Emperors, among the busts of the Caesars. He put the second, the flawless one, in the gallery on the first floor of the villa.

Read the placement. The Room of the Emperors was the room in which a Roman cardinal's own portrait was made to keep company with the rulers of antiquity; it is the most loaded position in the house. He gave it to the object with the fault in its face.

The museum draws the obvious conclusion, that this reveals his preference for the flawed original. It is worth being precise about what that preference implies. Bernini's second bust is the same portrait executed at emergency speed from a standing start. The first is the one made in the ordinary way, over months, with the sitter available. The patron who had watched both being made chose the one that had taken the time, and lived with a line across his own forehead for the rest of his life rather than give it up.

Neither bust is in that room now. The museum's own room history takes this one from the Room of the Moor in the 1762 inventory, to Room 9, the Portrait Room, in the nineteenth century, to Room 14, the Lanfranco Loggia, today.

Both busts were sold at auction, and almost nobody says so

The standard sentence about these objects is that they have been in the Borghese collection since 1632 and are Italian state property. The first half is true. The second half conceals a saleroom.

The Borghese entail, the fideicommissum, protected part of the collection from dispersal. These two busts were NOT inside it. When the Borghese sold off the works excluded from the entail, the busts went with them: Giacomini and Capobianchi, Rome, 28 March to 9 April 1892, lot 341. The buyer was the Italian state.

Two consequences follow. First, the date. The much-repeated 1902 acquisition of the Borghese collection, villa and park for 3.6 million lire is a different transaction ten years later; these busts were bought in 1892 at the earlier sale, which is why the museum's own provenance line says 1892 and why treating that as a typographical error would have been a mistake. Second, the inventory number. The Roman numeral painted on the socle is a Borghese collection number, and this record no longer describes it as a fideicommissary mark, because the objects it is painted on were outside the fideicommissum.

And they left Rome. After the sale the pair was conserved at the Accademia in Venice until 1908, when they returned to the Villa Pinciana. Sixteen years in another city, in another institution, in the middle of a provenance that is usually written as three centuries of stillness.

The other man who carved Scipione, and what he had to prove

Within months of Bernini's two busts, a third marble portrait of the same cardinal was made in Rome by Giuliano Finelli. It is dated 1631 to 1632, it is 81.9 by 78.4 by 40.6 centimetres, and it is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession 53.201, bought in 1953 with the Louisa Eldridge McBurney Gift.

Finelli had been Bernini's assistant. He is widely held to have carved the leaves, the tendrils and the bark of Daphne's transformation in the Apollo and Daphne that Bernini made for this same cardinal, and to have been denied recognition for it; the claim is reported in the literature as an attribution rather than as a documented fact, and this record reports it the same way. What is not in doubt is that he broke with Bernini in 1629 after the commission for the Saint Helena in the crossing of St Peter's went to Andrea Bolgi instead of to him, and set up independently.

So the sequence is this. A sculptor whose most virtuoso passages are believed to be inside somebody else's masterpiece leaves the studio over a commission he did not get, and then carves the patron's head himself. Finelli's bust is habitually described as more meticulous in small detail and less psychologically alive than Bernini's, and that judgement is usually delivered as if it settled something. It is more useful as evidence of what a workshop specialist could do when he was finally allowed to sign the whole object.

The critics have never stopped ranking them

Because both busts survive and both are autograph, the literature has spent a century deciding which is better, which is a question the objects themselves do not raise.

Howard Hibbard praised the first version for a new dimension of reality. Rudolf Wittkower held that the second lacks the animation and vitality of the first. Charles Avery went the other way and called the second one of the greatest portraits of all time in any medium. These are three of the most authoritative Bernini scholars of the twentieth century, reaching flatly opposed conclusions about two objects that a visitor sees in the same afternoon. This record takes no position and does not average them.

What the disagreement demonstrates is worth more than any of the three verdicts. The difference between these busts is small enough that expert judgement inverts on it. That is precisely the condition under which version confusion happens in the market and in publication, and it is why the caption discipline on this page is stricter than on any other record in the archive.

What a Bernini marble does in the market, and what it did to one dealer

The Borghese busts last changed hands in 1892 and have been Italian state property since. The comparandum below is given because it shows what an autograph Bernini portrait bust is worth once it is loose, and because it involves this cardinal's uncle.

Bernini carved a marble Bust of Pope Paul V in 1621, when he was in his early twenties. It was bought by a Viennese collector at auction in 1893, disappeared, and was presumed destroyed across two world wars. It resurfaced in Bratislava, where the heirs of the Slovak painter Ernest Zmetak consigned it, misattributed, to auction in 2013 with an estimate of 47,000 euros. It failed to sell. In September 2014 it was offered again and bought by an unnamed Slovak dealer at its pre-sale estimate of 24,000 euros. In July 2015 it was reported that the J. Paul Getty Museum had paid 33 million dollars for it in a private sale arranged by Sotheby's.

Two details in that chain matter more than the multiple. Johann Kraftner, director of the Liechtenstein collections, was offered the bust and, in his own account, courteously declined because the provenance was inconclusive. An institution with the money and the expertise passed on a genuine Bernini for the reason this publication exists. And the 33 million dollar figure is not a hammer price, because there was no auction; a private sale arranged by an auction house publishes nothing it is not obliged to publish, and the underbidder, if there was one, is unknown.