LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Piazza Navona
built 186 days ago
Incidentally, the Fontana del Tritone isn’t the only Bernini fountain in Piazza Barberini- tucked away in an unobtrusive corner next to Via Veneto is another fountain, the `Fountain of the Bees’ (Fontana delle Api). It’s relatively small and simple, a large open shell on which sit bees, a symbol derived from the Barberini family’s coat of arms.
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[One] of Bernini's sculptures is known affectionately as Bernini's Chick by the Roman people. It is located in the Piazza della Minerva, in front of the church Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Pope Alexander VII decided that he wanted an ancient Egyptian obelisk to be erected in the piazza and commissioned Bernini to create a sculpture to support the obelisk. The sculpture of an elephant was finally created in 1667 by one of Bernini's students, Ercole Ferrata. One of the most interesting features of this elephant is its smile. To find out why it is smiling, the viewer must head around to the rear end of the animal and to see that its muscles are tensed and its tail is shifted to the left.
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In his later years, the growing desire to control the environments of his statuary led Bernini to concentrate more and more on architecture. Of the churches he designed after completing the Cornaro Chapel, the most impressive is that of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale (1658-70) in Rome, with its dramatic high altar, soaring dome, and unconventionally sited oval plan. But Bernini's greatest architectural achievement is the colonnade enclosing the piazza before St Peter's Basilica. The chief function of the large space was to hold the crowd that gathered for the papal benediction on Easter and other special occasions. Bernini planned a huge oval attached to the church by a trapezoidal forecourt - forms that he compared to the encircling arms of the mother church. The freestanding colonnades were a novel solution to the need for a penetrable enclosure.
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Bernini's architectural conceits include the piazza and colonnades of St Peter's. He planned several Roman palaces: Palazzo Barberini (from 1630 on which he worked with Borromini); Palazzo Ludovisi (now Palazzo Montecitorio); and Palazzo Chigi.
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The design of the giant piazza that leads to the Basilica was Bernini's work, and he himself likened it to two arms, reaching out to invite people into St. Peter's. One of his last projects was ... a church, but unusually for him a new design, rather than an evolution of an existing building. Bernini considered the church of S. Andrea del Quirinale his masterpiece, and spent many hours gazing at it in his retirement.
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