This was carved from a single block of marble by a 23 year old in 1622. Bernini turned stone into flesh... The sculpture is called the Abduction of Proserpina, and it depicts the moment described in Ovid's Metamorphoses, when the goddess Proserpina was gathering flowers in a meadow and the earth opened beneath her. Pluto, king of the underworld, rose from the dark to take her. Out of every instant in that abduction, Bernini chose the one when her feet leave the ground. She is suspended in his arms. She is no longer in the world above, and not yet in the world below. Her left hand pushes desperately against Pluto's face. Her right is thrown back toward a sky she will never see again. And where the god's fingers close around her thigh, the marble surrenders to them, dimpling inward as living flesh would, as though Bernini had reached the deepest secret of stone and discovered that it had always been waiting to give in. He used to boast that in his hands, "marble became as impressionable as wax and as soft as dough." On her right cheek, a single tear has been running for four hundred years... The work was commissioned in 1621 by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, who wanted it as a showpiece for his own villa. He kept it for less than a year. In the summer of 1622, with a new pope newly elected, he gave it away as a political gift to the pope's nephew, Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi. It disappeared into private hands for nearly three centuries. The Italian state bought it back in 1908 and returned it to the room it had been made for. It has been there ever since. I have stood in front of it, and I can tell you that nothing prepares you for the moment you actually see those fingers in her thigh. The marble seems alive and you forget, for a few seconds, that it is stone at all... -- -- -- If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: James-lucas.com/welcome If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.