Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Model for the Lion on the Four Rivers Fountain (Ca. 1649–50), Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, Rome Photo by Zeno Colantoni, Rome; image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

For admirers of Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), or even of sculpture generally, the collection of fifteen of his terracotta sketches in the Fogg Art Museum has long been a pilgrimage point to glean a deeper insight into his genius, or simply a straightforward Bernini fix. If the essence of his marbles is their jaw-dropping illusionism—their ability to simulate wind-blown hair, soft flesh, even tears—what distinguishes these preparatory works is their immediacy. They convey the quick flash of an idea and even, in their rough tooling or the vestigial impress of a finger, the very presence of the artist. Now the Metropolitan and Kimbell museums have joined forces to present a larger and more representative group of these clay sketches and related drawings.1 It is a stunning show, and without exaggeration, for the way it enlarges and even transforms our understanding of Bernini, one of the most important accorded any artist in our time.

“Bernini: Sculpting in Clay” was organized by a team of four curators: Ian Wardropper, currently director of the Frick Collection and before that chairman of the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts department at the Met; Anthony Sigel, conservator of objects and sculpture at the Harvard Art Museums; C. D. Dickerson III, curator of European art at the Kimbell (where