Coastline with Sunrise

Bernini himself wrote and directed La Marina, a comedy first performed in 1638. The production served as the occasion for a brand new technical innovation, considered at the time something of a sensation, which used a complex stage mechanism to create an artificial sunrise. In their studies of Bernini’s work, Brauer and Wittkower have suggested that this drawing originally served as a design for the scenery featured in this play. The broadly applied wash, the finely nuanced rendering of the clouds, the rich contrasts formed by the recesses of the rocks and the ripples of the water, produce a spectacular fan-like array of sunbeams, the fall of their light creating spots of shade and dancing reflections. Over the line of the horizon, the artist applied highly diluted inks to create a luminous zone, which evokes both the dawn light and a sense of boundless space. Thus formal boundaries become blurred, with the work functioning both as a self-contained landscape and as a stage design created for a specific practical purpose.