Initially published by Penn State Press in 1965, Catherine Enggass’s translation of Filippo Baldinucci’s Life of Bernini was the first English-language edition of this historic biography. Out of print for many years, The Life of Bernini is now available in a new paperback edition with an introduction by Maarten Delbeke, Evonne Levy, and Steven F. Ostrow, the editors of Bernini’s Biographies.

Baldinucci’s unusual stand-alone biography of Bernini, begun while his subject was still alive, offers important insights into contemporary perceptions of the artist, the motivations of its author, and the nature of literary biography in seventeenth-century Italy.

Catherine Enggass's translations from Italian include Eugenio Battisti's Cimabue and a book on the modern Italian painter La Regina.

Fillipo Baldinucci's profile page

Catherine Enggass' profile page

Maarten Delbeke is Assistant Professor of architectural history and theory at the universities of Ghent and Leiden. Formerly the Scott Opler Fellow in Architectural History at Worcester College (Oxford), he is the author of several articles and a forthcoming book on Seicento art and theory.

Maarten Delbeke's profile page

Steven F. Ostrow is Professor and Chair of Art History at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Art and Spirituality in Counter-Reformation Rome: The Sistine and Pauline Chapels in S. Maria Maggiore (1996) and served as contributing editor for Dosso's Fate: Painting and Court Culture in Renaissance Italy (1998).

Steven F. Ostrow's profile page

Evonne Levy is Associate Professor of the History of Art at the University of Toronto. She is also the author of Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (2004).

Evonne Levy's profile page