Detail of Apollo and Daphne (1622–25)

Cardinal Scipione Borghese, a man known for his appetites, used to exclaim in a tone of mock lament that from the day Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s trio of statues entered his home at the Villa Borghese, visitors ceased to be interested in any of the other countless treasures and delights at his sumptuous estate. The works he referred to were Pluto and Proserpina (also called The Rape of Proserpina or Persephone), David, and, above all, Apollo and Daphne. These three marble groups were all created for Scipione and all within just four short years, 1621–25, when Bernini was between the ages of 23 and 27.

Never before was marble so palpably alive. If Bernini had felt himself in competition with Michelangelo, dead some 60 years before these works were commenced—and he most certainly did—he now had proven himself a worthy peer with these statues, which today reside in the Galleria Borghese, Scipione’s villa turned public museum. And had Bernini produced nothing else in his life but these statues they alone would have sufficed to ensure his distinction in the annals of Western sculpture. Bernini was an original artistic genius, and a new age had dawned. The austere, cautious style in ecclesiastical art of the Counter-Reformation over the previous 50 years gave way to a bold, new style containing movement, light, emotion, and playfulness—in other words, the Baroque.

Still, one cannot help noting two disturbing ironies. The first is that some of the amazing virtuoso carving of the Apollo and Daphne was actually done by someone else, not Bernini, who nonetheless and always claimed the work as entirely his own. And second, these sublime works of art owe their existence to one of the sleaziest characters of Baroque Rome, in the figure of Cardinal Scipione, a man whose life was “utterly given over to pleasures,” as the Venetian ambassador at the time reported. (Curiously, the marble in which Bernini first attempted to capture Scipione’s likeness revolted and cracked open to expose a black gash through the cardinal’s skull.) To varying degrees, these ironies held true through the rest of Bernini’s brilliant career: on the one hand, the narcissistic habit of diminishing or denying the contributions of others to the design or execution of his art, and, on the other, the pragmatic willingness to work serenely and amicably with and for any rich, powerful, cash-carrying patron, no matter his character.

It was, at the time, perfectly acceptable for master sculptors to employ other sculptors who specialized in the carving of certain features, just as master painters executing a large, complex canvas would pay specialist painters to fill in, say, the architectural background or the natural landscape. It was also a matter of virtually unanimous opinion that, in the evaluation of a work of art, the master artist’s concetto—his design—counted for far more than the technical execution of it. Patrons knew well that in the case of famous, busy artists—Bernini’s older contemporary, Peter Paul Rubens, is a prominent example—the final product would inevitably represent a fair amount of workshop assistants’ handiwork.

However, when Bernini produced the Apollo and Daphne, he was a young, only locally known sculptor at the beginning of his career. He was still proving himself, which meant he ought to have been doing the work on his own. Furthermore, in the case of the Apollo and Daphne—in which we witness the breathtaking moment of transformation of the beautiful woman into a laurel tree—we are not talking about small, incidental contributions. Instead, the carved portions at issue represent “the most astounding metamorphosis of all, the transformation of the hard and brittle marble into roots, twigs, and windswept hair,” in the words of the art historian Jennifer Montagu. These features are what audiences since 1625 have marveled over and what in 17th-century Rome caused master sculptors and laypeople alike to sing the highest praises of Bernini. In fact, these parts of the statue were executed by Giuliano Finelli, a Tuscan sculptor of enormous creative talent, three years younger than Bernini. Finelli, who helped carve other Bernini statues in the 1620s, is today recognized and praised as a master in his own right. Bernini never acknowledged his contributions.

Charming, paranoid, ingenious—Bernini was a man who guarded his interests. As a master, he paid his assistants fairly, but he hogged the credit. It is therefore not surprising that conflict would regularly inflame relations with his studio collaborators, including, later, Francesco Borromini, recognized as one of the great architects of Baroque Rome.

By 1629, Finelli had had enough. In disgust, he severed relations with Bernini forever.

Franco Mormando is associate professor of Italian at Boston College. His essay is drawn and adapted from his new book, Bernini: His Life and His Rome, published by the University of Chicago Press (copyright © 2011 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved).