The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence

When this marble was carved, around 1617, the man who made it was still a teenager, not yet the sculptor who would remake Rome. Bernini was somewhere between 15 and 19, working for a Florentine nobleman named Leone Strozzi, and he chose the saint whose name he shared, Lawrence, shown at the moment he was burned alive on an iron grill. Look at how the flames are cut from the same block as the body, and how the saint twists to look upward rather than down at the fire. His son later told the story that, to get the face right, the young Bernini held his own bare leg to hot coals and studied his grimace in a mirror while he drew. The piece is less than life-size, and it stayed in Florence, where it now sits in the Uffizi.