Gian Lorenzo Bernini

By his late thirties Gian Lorenzo Bernini was already the most celebrated sculptor in Rome, remaking St Peter's Basilica for a series of popes and carving marble so that fabric seemed to move and flesh seemed to yield under pressure. In 1636 he began an affair with Costanza Bonarelli, the wife of one of his own studio assistants and a woman from the noble Piccolomini family, and in 1637 carved a marble portrait bust of her that broke with two centuries of formal tomb-portrait convention by showing her as if caught mid-glance, lips parted, hair loose.

The affair ended badly. When Bernini learned Costanza had also taken up with his own brother Luigi, he beat Luigi with an iron bar hard enough to break his ribs and sent a servant to slash Costanza's face with a razor. Pope Urban VIII, unwilling to lose his favorite artist over the scandal, ordered Bernini to marry, and within months he wed Caterina Tezio, a marriage that lasted 34 years and produced 11 children.

A decade later, working on the Cornaro Chapel in Rome, Bernini carved the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, showing the 16th-century Spanish nun at the moment she described an angel piercing her heart with a golden arrow. Art historians have long noted that Teresa's face in the marble echoes the features of Costanza's earlier bust, the same parted lips carved a decade apart for two very different kinds of rapture.