The image of Aeneas escaping Troy with his father and son takes on a new glow under the lights of the Galleria Borghese. Despite Bernini’s use of an explicitly Virgilian image, his transformations nonetheless a reflect an entirely new Rome. Long lost are the traces of self-consciousness — Creusa’s tragic fate is neatly absent. Anchises’ Phrygian cap is the only trace of Aeneas’ Trojan past, as the very medium of sculpture requires the erasure of the Trojan background. Far from being coated in heavy Trojan armour, Aeneas is almost naked, so as to display Bernini’s masterful sculpture of his musculature; it is important that Aeneas is strong, barely straining under the weight of his father, but he is no longer a warrior.
The Rome of the 17th century was no longer in need of warriors, and did not derive its power from them. This was a Rome ruled by the Catholic Church, the most powerful institution in Europe, and a sculpture made for Bernini’s patron, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, had to reflect this new aristocracy — a new Empire. But why use such a strongly pagan image to appeal to a Christian leadership?
The lares, held up in Anchises’ hands, represent the ruling authority that Aeneas brought to Rome. In the context of Ancient Rome, this imperium refers to the political and military power of Augustus, but in Bernini’s Catholic Rome the symbol blends political with religious power, cementing the authority of the church in ambiguous terms—Rome, Bernini argues, is the inheritor of a cultural and religious tradition of power over Europe. It is no coincidence that Bernini’s Aeneas bears strong similarity to Michelangelo’s sculpture of Christ; Rome is a city in which religion is power, and these two men, in the one face, the foundation of its greatness.
Bernini also, ironically, recalls classical literature in order to achieve the pride and national confidence the ancients themselves were searching for. The sculpture is an amalgamation of Roman achievement: Bernini looks far back to a literary legacy that stretched back centuries and a rich history of political domination and empire, while also blending the contemporary artistic talent — a Renaissance movement founded on Classical sculpture, a willingness to depict pagan scenes, and humanistic themes like the three ages of man (a popular Renaissance depiction of the cycle of life). Reflecting the changing nature of power in the city, Bernini creates an image which appears to be a celebration of past grandeur, but is in fact Rome at its most self-assured.
“Bernini Gian Lorenzo - Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius.” Galleria Borghese, 2017, www.collezionegalleriaborghese.it/en/opere/aeneas-anchises-and-ascanius#:~: