Bust of Cardinal Scipione Borghese (second version)

By 1632 Cardinal Scipione Borghese was a man from a Rome that had moved on. His uncle, Pope Paul V, had made him one of the richest and most powerful men in the city, but the uncle had died 11 years earlier, and the Barberini family now ran things under Urban VIII. Scipione still had his villa and his collection, and he still had Bernini, the sculptor he had backed since the 1610s. This is the replacement portrait, carved in a hurry after a crack ruined the first one. Just how fast is disputed. Bernini's son said three days, and the biographer Filippo Baldinucci said 15. Critics have never agreed on it either. Rudolf Wittkower found it stiffer than the first, while the sculpture historian Charles Avery called it one of the greatest portraits in any medium. A household receipt shows Bernini paid 500 scudi in December 1632. Scipione did not have long to enjoy it. He died on 2 October 1633, aged 56.