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.