When the exhibition “Bernini—Painter and Sculptor” opens at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum on Dec. 2, a painting newly attributed to the prolific Baroque master will be the star of the show. Until recently, Portrait of an Old Man, previously credited to an unknown artist, sat in a storeroom at the museum.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini is widely known as an architect and sculptor. He designed several large, ornate components of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, including the exterior piazza and colonnade. Some of his best-known works include a marble sculpture of David intended to one-up Michelangelo's (on view at the Galleria Borghese) and the career-defining Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, in Rome's Santa Maria della Vittoria church.
He also made hundreds of paintings, though fewer than 20 known to be by Bernini survive. The Kunsthistorisches Museum has held Portrait of an Old Man since 1920, when a local art collector who had purchased it 20 years earlier gifted it to the museum. At the time, it was thought to be by Philippe de Champaigne, a French artist and contemporary of Bernini. Attribution changed many times over the decades until it was eventually attributed to an anonymous artist. It had been in a museum storeroom since 1989.
Gudrun Swoboda, curator of “Bernini—Painter and Sculptor,” told The Art Newspaper that she zeroed in on the sculptural way in which the previously unidentified artist painted the musculature of the subject’s face and mouth. The paint was applied as if 'building up and modelling a face in clay,' she said. The sitter's mustache is also notably sculptural. Swoboda also pointed to similarities between the corners of the mouth in the painting and those of Bernini’s marble Bust of Louis XIV, and to the angle of the lighting and the gaze found in a self-portrait drawing by Bernini, owned by the Royal Collection Trust.
Portrait of an Old Man will be shown in Vienna alongside 10 international loans; the exhibition closes in April 2027. Swoboda has also edited a book about “the thrilling investigation behind the attribution.”
