Here we have the "Rape of Proserpina", one of the sublime masterpieces by Bernini at the Villa Borghese Museum in Rome. For me is always wonderful to explain to my tourists why this work of art is so beautiful and unexpected. Try to understand it with me... 

We see Hades, the God of the Underworld with his crown, in the act of embracing with strength the poor Proserpina, the Demeter's daughter (she was the Goddess of the seasons and of the harvest). The story tells us about Pluto, who fell hopelessly in love with the young woman, so much that he kidnaps her to take her to the Underworld. Demeter, distraught by the pain, drops the whole world under an eternal and hard winter, with much of the famine that the human race cannot bear. She asked to anybody, even nymphs or other strange creatures, what could be the Prosperpina's fate. At the end Demeter understood where she was, but she couldn't do anything to save her. For this reason, again, she denied any harvest or crop from the ground. Demeter wants to have her daughter back, and therefore she appeals to Jupiter, the King of the Gods, to find a compromise. And Jupiter decided: the young Proserpina will be six months with Pluto (Jupiter's brother), and the other six months with her mother. In this period Demeter is happy, so much that she gives to the mankind warm season (summer and spring). When her daughter is with Pluto Demeter is unhappy: and here's the bad season (winter and autumn).

But in addition to the history we can understand all the pathos, the drama, the emotional power of the myth, admiring the shining and worked marble used by Bernini to give life, in all senses, to Pluto, and Proserpina! Bernini was a master at seizing the moment, to stop in time the action and the moment of most drama. The two figures overlap each other coiling in a series of lines, curved lines that give a great sense of movement and dynamism. The extreme naturalism in the rendering of the bodies, from the detail of his muscles to her toes, is not only mere academicism: due to the realism given to the marble bodies, however, the master is able to display all the emotional charge of the story told by the sculpture, all the feelings that the myth and the episode, marble made, are able to inspire. And so the explosive Pluto's strenght, with his muscular body in full view, and its strong grip on the bust of her that reaches its culmination in his right hand. Do you see it?

The Pluto's left hand is strongly taking her thigh. In this way we can feel his strong passion. The fact that Bernini is able to bend the marble at the height of the fingers of him, making that cold material, warm and soft like real skin, makes us understand all the passion of Pluto again. And then let's see the poor Proserpina, so delicate and perfect in her forms, who tries with desperation to wriggle out. Her infinite sadness and fear are masterfully shown by her tear, falling from her left eye. Another detail that is capable of describing the powerful emotions of the moment, stopped by Bernini. Imagine that Bernini was a very young man when he sculpted this wonder (we are between 22 and 25 years). But it was also thanks to it that he became a true master. And try to read about another masterpiece made by him, and always host in the Villa Borghese Museum in Rome, in order to understand why.