Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Pluto's fingertips sink visibly into Proserpina's thigh — marble impersonating flesh. Bernini was twenty-three; the group stunned Rome into realizing that Baroque sculpture had outrun the limits of Hellenistic virtuosity.

Bernini caught the instant Daphne's fingers sprout leaves and her feet root into bark, her scream frozen just as Apollo's hand grazes her ribcage. He was twenty-six when he finished it and already the most technically audacious sculptor in Rome.

Allegories of the Nile, Ganges, Danube, and Río de la Plata lounge around a hollowed travertine crag supporting an Egyptian obelisk. The Nile covers his face because, according to legend, the source of the river was still unknown — or because he can't bear to look at Borromini's church opposite.

The Carmelite mystic swoons in midair as a smiling angel lifts a gold-tipped arrow above her heart. Bernini turned the entire chapel into a theater: the Cornaro patrons watch from opera-box side panels, a hidden window rains gilded light down on the marble.