AN ELEPHANT IN ROME BERNINI, THE POPE AND THE MAKING OF THE ETERNAL CITY
LOYD GROSSMAN Pallas Athene, 214pp, £19.99
Is there no end to the talents of Loyd Grossman, former Masterchef presenter, pasta-sauce tycoon, cultural campaigner, broadcaster and scholar? His most recent book, highly praised (‘elegant, lively and informative’) by Michael Prodger in the Sunday Times, is about Gian Lorenzo Bernini, genius of the high Baroque, and how his partnership with his patron Pope Alexander VII transformed Rome. The ancient Egyptian obelisk, discovered in 1665, is situated in front of the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, and perches on the back of a whimsical and glorious marble elephant created by Bernini. Grossman recalled in the Daily Telegraph his first encounter with it: ‘That was the moment – a dreamlike convergence of Egyptian, Baroque, Gothic, pagan and Christian – that Rome had me.’
His book is full of intriguing detail: 17th-century Romans were mad for ancient obelisks but why the elephant? Prodger filled us in: ‘Bernini may have come across the pairing in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an erudite and influential book of 1499 that contained a woodcut of an elephant supporting an obelisk, and he had toyed with the idea in the 1630s when designing a garden ornament for the Barberini family. He might also have heard of the sensation caused a century earlier when the king of Portugal gave Pope Leo X an elephant; the poor animal died from constipation exacerbated by the half kilo of gold given as a laxative.’
Oldie editor Harry Mount, writing in the Catholic Herald, enjoyed ‘a scholarly yet thoroughly jolly book’. The way Bernini’s elephant ‘sweeps aside its tail, about to defecate’ is an example of the sculptor’s ‘shocking audacity’. Throughout Rome, wrote Mount, ‘you will find Bernini’s angelic touch’. The sumptuously produced and lavishly illustrated An Elephant
in Rome is a highly readable tribute to the artist who could turn ‘stone into flesh’.