Two years ago, I wrote a piece in these pages about my multi-year struggle to see Gianolorenzo Bernini’s greatest bust—possibly his greatest sculpture—his Constanza, which lives on the top floor of the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, the national sculpture museum. The Bargello, whose collection is better than any five museums in the Western Hemisphere, is only a second-tier museum in Florence, and the Constanza room is almost always closed.
Thanks to several strokes of improbable timing and good luck, I’ve been in Florence five times in the last decade. During my first trip, which was my first trip to Florence, Constanza’s room was open. During every subsequent trip I’ve made in the last nine years, her room has been closed—aside from ten minutes in 2014 where a guard saw me incredulously rattling the locked door to her room, and let me inside. Normally when I ask the guards at the Bargello when the room will be open, they shrug, say they don’t know, and gradually lose the ability to speak English.
At the end of the my last Bargello piece, I said that I would try to get in touch with Florence’s mayor, to lodge a formal protest. Instead, I was able—through a friend of a friend of a friend—to get in touch with the Bargello’s new director.
I liked the new director a lot, and I think she’s doing a very good job; for discretion’s sake, though I don’t think I should use her name. She’s Italian, but years of working in the U.S. has changed her natural rhythm: She said that after six months into her new job running the Bargello, people are still telling her that she’s just settling in, and that there’s no need to rush reforms. At the moment, she’s trying to tighten up the Bargello’s operation; put it more on Florence’s beaten path. This shouldn’t be hard for a museum with four Michelangelo’s, and Donatello’s most famous sculpture, in its permanent collection—but when you consider it has to compete with the Uffizi and the Duomo and the New Sacristy and so on, it’s a herculean task.
She seems to have it well in hand, though. Exhibits have already been rearranged in a less haphazard way, and various statues have been given new pedestals to better match the ways in which they were originally displayed. The whole place has a new, more professional air to it. She’s also a Bernini expert, and when I arrived at her office, she summoned a set of keys and personally showed me to the Constanza room.
The Constanza is one of the most extraordinary statues in the world—the most naturalistic, lifelike, animated, energetic portrait that’s ever been chiseled from marble. Constanza’s lips hang open as if she’s been captured not just mid-sentence, but in the middle of a word. Her nostrils flare slightly, as if she’s just stated to take a breath. Her eyes look like they’ve just alighted on something off to her left, something that’s caught her off guard. The leftward turn of her head gives her a somewhat unflattering double chin and creased neck. Her hair, carved roughly and left unpolished, is a mess, as if it has been pushed back, up and off her forehead, casually, with one hand. Her blouse hangs low on her shoulders, and hangs partly unbuttoned in front, exposing her bust. She was too racy for public display in mid-17th century Italy (which was itself pretty racy), but that didn’t matter—she wasn’t a normal commission; she was sculpted by Bernini for his own personal collection, a bust of his lover Constanza Bonarelli, who was also the wife of one of his assistants, Matteo Bonarelli.
Unfortunately, Constanza was not a two-man woman. Bernini started to suspect her of having a third lover, so he hid outside her house to see if he was right. A third lover did in fact appear—it was Gianlorenzo Bernini’s younger brother, Luigi. Gianlorenzo chased Luigi through the streets of Rome, into St. Peters, where he tried to beat Luigi to death with an iron bar. (He didn’t succeed.) Then Gianlorenzo sent a servant to Constanza’s house, with a razor, to slice up her face.
Broken hearted, Bernini couldn’t stand to look at his Constanza bust anymore, and came close to smashing it. Instead he sold it, which is how it ended up in Florence. Few first-rank Bernini’s have ever left Rome; he is one of those unusual artists who was not only a celebrity in his lifetime, but who has never been unpopular since.
I was thrilled to have a chance to see the Constanza again, under the director’s aegis—she told me that Constanza’s room had been closed because the museum lacked the manpower to keep it open; there wasn’t enough security. But, she said, she was trying to arrange things to have the room open more, and more regularly—part of the museum’s way forward. After all, it is one of the Bargello’s two most famous pieces, along with Donatello’s David. She told me that, though she wouldn’t be at the Bargello for the next few days, while I was in town—she handles other museums too—she had talked to the guards, and Constanza would certainly be on display.
I went back every day I was there, and the room was locked every time. The first day, there were three guards in the vicinity of the locked room—two chatting with each other, one doing a crossword puzzle. They told me a guard hadn’t shown up for work, which was why they couldn’t spare a guard to supervise the Constanza room. No explanations were provided on subsequent days.
The new director is very smart, imaginative and energetic. At the moment it looks like she’s standing on the barricade all by herself. She’s fighting an uphill battle. I hope she wins. At the risk of philosophizing, Italy is fighting the same uphill battle. So are Greece, Spain and Portugal. This particular battle is why the EU is collapsing. We’ll see what happens. In the meantime, if any wealthy WEEKLY STANDARD reader would like his or her name on a museum whose cornerstone was laid in 1255, that houses Michelangelos, Donatellos, Ghibertis, Brunelleschis, Giambologanas and Cellinis, he should offer to buy them some security cameras. (Really.)
