any way for the sins against rules of which he was guilty.
Westmacott, in his writing upon sculpture, says it would have been
better for art if Bernini had never lived; and it is true that in his
struggle for effect he was an injury rather than a benefit to the art of
his own day and the succeeding years.

The worst defect in the sculpture of Bernini is his treatment of the
human body. At times he exaggerates the muscular power beyond all
resemblance to nature, and again he seems to leave out all anatomy and
soften the body to a point that far exceeds possibility. This softness
is seen in his Apollo and Daphne, which shows the moment when she is
suddenly changed into a laurel-tree in order to escape the pursuit of
the young god. This group is in the Villa Borghese, at Rome; it was
executed when Bernini was but eighteen years old, and near the close of
his life he declared that he had made little progress after its
production.

But he reached the height of this objectionable manner in his
representation of the Rape of Proserpine, which is in the Villa
Ludovisi. The Pluto is a rough, repulsive man, with whom no association
of a god can be made, and the Proserpine is made a soulless, sensual
figure, so far from attractive in a pure sense that we are almost
willing that Pluto should carry her to some region from which she is not
likely to come back. At the same time we are sorry not to provide her
with an ointment for the blue marks which the big hands of Pluto are
making on her soft flesh. The plain truth is, that this work makes a low
and common thing of a subject which could be so treated as to be a
"thing of beauty" in a charming sense. (Fig. 111.)

[Illustration: FIG. 111.--RAPE OF PROSERPINE. _By Bernini._]

Bernini executed a statue of St. Bibiana for the church of that saint at
Rome, and one of St. Longinus in one of the niches to the dome of St.
Peter's; he also made the designs for the one hundred and sixty-two
statues in the colonnades of St. Peter's, and for the decorations of the
bridge of St. Angelo; in such works, almost without exception, he chose
some moment in the lives of the persons represented that called for a
striking attitude and gave an opportunity for an effect that is often
theatrical. As a mere decoration such statues have a certain value of an
inferior sort; but as works of art, as intellectual efforts, they are
worthless. However, this decorative effect, as it is seen on the facade
of the