AA Gill Quote - 30 June

In this week's Table Talk article, our AA is waxing lyrical about his visit to the Piazza Navona, with its sculptures by Bernini, when he spots a mime statue.

"If Michaelangelo seemed to release figures from inside the stone and Donatello made ones that looked as if they had been turned to stone just the moment before you entered the room, then Bernini conjures figures that could only exist in stone. Flesh and bone couldn't support them. These aren't people realised in marble, they're stone compressed into humans."

"... let me tell you, a mime statue competing with a Bernini plumbs the very depths of human shallowness... There was the Bernini, an image of man's aspiration to achieve and think and feel things that are bigger, more permanent and profound than his own corporeal life, as sculpture that expresses that our reach may yet exceed our grasp. And, in front of it, there was a man whose only aspiration was to imitate a dead thing in nylon, the measure of his talent being the ability to do absolutely nothing for as long as possible. Here, in one frame, was art that transcended nature alongside art that belittled and humiliated both art and itself. One beggared belief, the other just begged."

Posted by Hg on Sunday 30 June 2002 at 14:01.
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